Okay, y’all, I understand and fully appreciate the reasons why DL decided to retheme the ride into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. Even setting aside the problematic aspects of the film on which Splash Mountain was based — don’t @ me, I’m not interested in a debate over that issue — the animatronics of Splash Mountain were in pretty rough shape. I could still name the America Sings segments that used the specific sets of animatronic figures that they’d moved over to SM in the 80’s, so we were talking about nearly 50-year-old mechanical robots.
Anyhoo, I miss Splash Mountain and think it deserves some love. The set pieces and songs chosen for the ride were uncontroversial, and they struck very playful chords — even the buzzards and the musical lead-up to the big drop were a dose of dark humor, culminating in an exhilaration and exuberance as one floated into the final cave with its Zip a Dee Doo Dah grand finale. I was never a kid when I rode Splash Mountain — it opened when I was in my twenties — but I sure felt like one every time I rode it. And isn’t that what Disneyland is all about?
It was sad but necessary to reckon with the outdated and unacceptable views about post-Civil War plantation life, and I don’t at all fault Disney for making the decision it did to retheme the ride. I’m just missing the experience of the music and animatronics that we may never see again in any format.
