Disney’s newest attraction, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, replaces the controversial Splash Mountain — but Disney doesn’t want fans comparing the old ride to the new one. These days, Disney doesn’t acknowledge Song of the South, the movie Splash Mountain was built around. The film has never gotten a digital release and isn’t officially available for streaming. But until 2020, Splash Mountain was a huge, unignorable, concrete reminder of the movie, a surprisingly big tear in Disney’s usually thorough wallpapering over questionable moments in its history.

Now it’s gone, and we don’t have to wonder what it means to have a Song of the South ride at Disney parks anymore. But since Disney won’t explicitly say why it replaced Splash Mountain, we have to discuss a different question: what it means to have a Princess and the Frog attraction in 2024.

Amid the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement, multiple petitions circulated online demanding that Disney retheme Splash Mountain. Variations of the log-flume ride appeared in Walt Disney World, Disneyland in California, and Tokyo Disneyland, and it periodically ranked high on informal polls of Disney parks’ most-loved attractions. But some Disney fans bridled against its connection to Song of the South, the 1946 Disney live-action/animation hybrid movie best known for its racist caricatures and rosy glorification of life in the Reconstruction-era South.

Pushback against the movie didn’t start in 2020: The film was derided all the way back to its original 1940s release, with protesters gathering at its downtown Oakland premiere. By the time Disney announced the Song of the South-themed attraction in 1987, the movie’s reputation as a racist vestige of an earlier time had already been cemented.

Michael Eisner, Disney’s CEO at the time, was concerned about that legacy, and allegedly insisted the ride be named “Splash Mountain,” rather than something tied directly to Song of the South. (According to Imagineer Tom Baxter, who came up with the ride, that was to cross-promote Splash, the Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah mermaid flick.) Yet according to an LA Times article published around the ride’s release, Disney officials were fairly confident that guests wouldn’t oppose the ride, because the attraction only used animal characters from the film’s animated segments, and none of the movie’s Black human characters.

When the petitions to dismantle or replace Splash Mountain came to a head in the summer of 2020, Disney announced it was overhauling the ride, and had been planning to for a while, thank you very much. The 2020 press release hinted at the attraction’s contentious past, but didn’t actually........

© Polygon