The park attraction "Splash Mountain" is a classic ride at the Disney Land/World theme parks, but I heard a few days ago that it is to be renamed and changed soon, which piqued my interest in the history of the attraction. The attraction is based off of an old and relatively obscure Disney movie named "Song of the South. The movie is widely considered one of the most racist films Disney has ever released, which is exactly why they are changing Splash Mountain's name to "Tiana's Bayou Adventure" in 2024 within the theme parks. However, one is to ask why Splash Mountain was even made in the first place. Ever since the Civil Rights Era, Disney has tried to erase the movie from its history entirely, which is why the movie has no VHS version and hasn't been released in theaters since 1986, which predated Splash Mountain by 3 years. With this in mind, it is puzzling to me as to why Disney has decided to make an attraction in their theme parks based off of this movie in the first place.
With this in mind. why did Disney make a theme park attraction based off of a highly controversial movie that they've been trying to remove all traces of for the past 60 years?
The concept of the original Splash Mountain was not developed in a way we might think of it today (prioritizing the most popular and profitable IPs and building attractions around them to ensure a steady revenue stream) but was ultimately a product of convenience and necessity at the time.
In the early 1980s, a particular section of Disneyland known as Bear Country was struggling to draw visitors, as its only attraction at the time was Country Bear Jamboree; a dated animatronic song-and-dance show that was often utilized as a cool dark place to grab a quick nap, and hardly something the kids would line up for.
It was also at this time that Disney made the decision to close their America Sings attraction after a 7 year run. As an audioanimatronic revue that was developed specifically for the bicentennial, America Sings had been suffering from poor attendance for quite a while at this point, but the company didn’t want to go through the work of disassembling the attraction and leaving an empty theater without first finding a way to repurpose the dozens of expensive animatronic characters from the show.
Disney imagineers looked at the situation resourcefully in trying to determine the best way to get crowds into Bear Country without having to develop and build an entire attraction from the ground up. They eventually decided on a log flume ride as something that would be family-friendly, yet thrilling enough to bring in guests of all ages. And, in considering the theme of the space, it was decided that repurposing the animatronics from America Sings into Song of the South characters would make the most sense.
(Also, imagineer Marc Davis did animation work for the original Song of the South film AND worked on building/programming the America Sings animatronics, so it was a natural transition for him to bring them back to life in this new story).
As to the obvious controversies surrounding the film, there are a few reasons it was decided to be an appropriate fit at the time. For one, the bulk of the controversy focused on the Uncle Remus character from the film- a former slave who spends the movie telling stories about animals to a young boy while reminiscing about the good old days on the plantation (oof). Disney thought if they could just remove this character from the attraction it would solve their whole “romanticizing slavery” problem, subtext be damned. So for them, it was no Remus = no problem. Now it’s just a ride about cute animals singin songs down on the bayou.
Also, although the original film itself was rather obscure, Disneyland had already incorporated several of the animals from Song of the South as walkaround characters in their park. Many guests who never saw the movie were at least familiar with these characters, and as such, had some sort of reference point or baseline for when Splash Mountain opened.
But ultimately, the decision was made by the rare opportunity to reappropriate expensive animatronics and create a new ride which fit the existing theme of the land in order to drive crowds into a forgotten area of the park. This kept the turnstiles moving at a low cost, and the cultural issues at the time were, um, “solved” by the disappearing of Uncle Remus.
Pretty amazing that it took them 30+ years to address this.
Edit: Here is a gallery showing the Marc Davis animatronic characters side by side in their old and new attractions.