Carmen Smith, Creative Executive Inclusive Strategies – Walt Disney Imagineering, recently sat down to talk about the upcoming changes to Disney attractions.
As you might know, Disney has announced changes to two of its attractions as the company looks to provide more inclusive experiences.
Back in June 2020, Disney announced that Splash Mountain would be rethemed to a Princess and the Frog attraction. The attraction will take place after the timeline set in the movie and join Princess Tiana and Louis on a musical adventure – featuring some of the powerful music from the film – as they prepare for their first-ever Mardi Gras performance.
Then, in January of this year, Disney announced that there would be a rewrite of the Jungle Cruise story and that some of the scenes in the attraction would be changed out. As part of the story update, we’ll get to follow a skipper and his passengers as their journey goes awry. Disney released some concept art that showed a reimagined show scene where the rhino chases some people up a tree, and a new show scene with monkeys taking over an abandoned boat.
The new show scene will remove negative depictions found within the attraction. Disney would later confirm that the changes were directly related to an inclusion initiative and not related to the upcoming Jungle Cruise movie.
Now, in a newly released video highlighting Carmen Smith for Black History Month, Smith talks a little bit more about her role and the initiative within the company to make experiences more inclusive:
My work is really about collaboration and teamwork. You create experiences that will make people feel welcomed, seen, and heard – to let them know that there stories are just as important.
My responsibility is to look at what do we have now and does it resonate with our guests and making them more reflective of the world we live in.
When we looked at Splash Mountain, it gives our company an opportunity to showcase our first African-American princess, and we need to be able to tell stories that are inspiring and enlightening but also speak to a community that has not been well-represented in our parks and resorts.
Plussing and re-imagining the experience in Jungle Cruise was, to us, a unique opportunity to basically tell a story that does not perpetuate any stereotypes and to make sure that it’s reflective of our guests in a very positive way, but it also gave us an opportunity to salute the skippers that are critical to the experience that guests have
As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!