Tiana’s Bayou Journey has lastly changed Splash Mountain at Disney World. The Disney Parks YouTube account is celebrating the completion of this unprecedented transformation with a virtually 10-minute, 4K ride-through.
Our first impression? Holy moly, they really pulled this off!
The experience’s designers needed to stroll a tightrope whereas reimagining — when it comes to scale and recognition — one of many greatest rides at Disney’s theme parks. They would want to keep up (or enhance upon) Splash Mountain’s abundance of animatronic characters, representing the basic method to Disney’s most iconic rides. However they’d even have to include fashionable know-how (extremely high-resolution screens, customized 3D animation) for Bayou Journey to suit alongside the parks’ different new “E-ticket sights,” like Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance and Mickey’s Runaway Railroad.
In a call that may please probably the most nostalgic amongst us, the design staff favored the old-school method, stuffing the experience with an astonishing variety of animatronic characters. They used screens to complement the expertise, just like the powdered sugar on a scrumptious beignet.
Picture: Disney
As with Splash Mountain, the experience has a relaxed begin. On a log flume, the friends take a leisurely tour of Tiana’s backyard and the close by bayou, earlier than accumulating animal instrumentalists to play a tune on the Disney Princess’s restaurant. First, the riders meet a zydeco band that includes possums, beavers, bears, and wolves. Then, the voodoo priestess Mama Odie shrinks the riders to the dimensions of a frog to allow them to tour a mini-version of the bayou and befriend some musically gifted bugs and amphibian associates.
The experience culminates, as promised by its premise, with a efficiency by Tiana at her restaurant, accompanied by her animal orchestra. By our rely, this humongous area options no fewer than 15 animatronics, a recreation of Tiana’s restaurant, and a wealth of high-res screens that includes further characters from the movie, reimagined from 2D into 3D.
Picture: Walt Disney Animation Studios
Splash Mountain, based mostly on the 1946 movie Music of the South, opened in 1992, regardless of Disney having by no means launched the movie in the US on dwelling video attributable to its racist portrayal of life on a plantation within the Southern United States. In 2023, Scout Tafoya wrote about Disney’s lengthy historical past of trying to change or erase the historical past of Music of the South, treating the movie like a cultural artifact that has turn out to be poisonous with altering sensibilities. “However even in its day,” Tafoya writes, “Music of the South was derided as racist pandering, and it confronted a nationwide try at a boycott.
In 2020, Disney Parks introduced Splash Mountain would get replaced by a experience impressed by 2009’s Princess and the Frog.
Tiana’s Bayou Journey opens at Walt Disney World on June 28 and later this 12 months at Disneyland. Polygon might be touring the experience forward of its opening, so go to later this month for first-hand impressions and interviews!