A Friday Visit with Jim Korkis: Splash Mountain

By Dave Shute

Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

SPLASH MOUNTAIN AND THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG

By Jim Korkis

Many Disney fans, myself included, were taken completely by surprise when the Walt Disney Company announced in June that it would be re-theming Splash Mountain to the animated feature film The Princess and the Frog (2009).

Splash Mountain opened at Disneyland on July 17, 1989 and three years later on July 17, 1992 at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom. It opened at Tokyo Disneyland that same year.

There are some differences among the three in terms of duration, length of flume, and number of drops, although all three tell the same story in a fairly identical layout.

Splash Mountain was created at Disneyland for three business reasons. First, Executive Vice President (basically head of Disney Parks and Resorts) Dick Nunis wanted a water flume ride at the park. Second, a big attraction was needed to draw more attendance to the dead end cul-de-sac known as Bear Country. Third, the America Sings attraction was closing, and this was an opportunity to re-use the audio-animatronics.

It was Imagineer Tony Baxter who found the solution to all three challenges and came up with the idea that it could all be themed to the Disney feature film Song of the South (1946), especially since the audio-animatronics characters had been designed by Marc Davis who had animated similar characters for the problematic film.

Several names were suggested for the attraction including “Song of the South Log Flume Ride”, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”, and “Zip-a-Dee River Run.” At one point, CEO Michael Eisner looked at the model and said, “It’s a mountain… you have a big splash at the end… it’s Splash Mountain.”

At Eisner’s insistence, Uncle Remus would not be shown or mentioned in the attraction, for fear of possible controversy. In fact, the ride would just reflect the three animated segments in the film and ignore the live action story and characters.

The attraction loosely follows some of the incidents in the animated sections of the Song of the South film. Brer Rabbit runs away from home and finds himself in more adventures than he intended. He continually outwits Brer Fox and Brer Bear until he is trapped in honey (rather than the politically incorrect Tar Baby in the movie) and taken to Brer Fox’s lair to be eaten.

As in the movie, he convinces Brer Fox to toss him into the spiky Briar Patch, where the plucky rabbit survives because he was born and bred in it and thus is intimately familiar with it. The grand finale has the Oscar-winning “Zip a Dee Doo Dah” song being sung by critters on a massive rocking showboat–one of the show elements not sculpted out of cement to prevent water damage.

At Walt Disney World, the project was turned over to an entirely different team of Imagineers led by Eric Jacobson. There had to be some significant exterior color changes to blend into the Frontierland color scheme (rather than the Georgia-looking red coloring at Disneyland). The ride and the queue are both longer at Magic Kingdom than at Disneyland.

At Walt Disney World, there is a stronger presence of Brer Frog (Uncle Remus’ fishing buddy in the original movie) as a storyteller. The ride vehicles were designed so that guests could ride side-by-side rather than Disneyland’s sitting in a single file like the original Matterhorn bobsleds.

There are significantly more audio-animatronics characters in the Disneyland version because they were rescued from America Sings. In Florida, there are fewer such figures because they were expensive to build.

My favorite Florida addition is the weasel located in the cavern scene, the last scene before the water log reaches the incline for the big drop. He pops out of the ceiling when the water log is approaching Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit,

He shouts “FSU” (Florida State University), although is sounds somewhat like a sneeze, because one of the Imagineers was a graduate of that school. Interestingly, this character was also included in the Tokyo Disneyland version.

For now, the attraction remains open and will probably continue to operate for awhile because of the pandemic.

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Thanks, Jim!  Find more from Jim on the history of this in his Who’s Afraid of The Song of the South?.

And come back next Friday for more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his other books, including his latest, Disney Never Lands, and about planned but unbuilt concepts, and Secret Stories of Walt Disney World: Things You Never You Never Knew, which reprints much material first written for this site, all published by Theme Park Press.

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