The Splash Mountain Problem

Ultimately, it would take more than 30 years for Disney to address the attraction. It’s hard to ignore the timing of the announcement. The June 25, 2020 announcement was made during a summer of civil unrest. Disney has said that a rework of the attraction was planned for more than a year, and one lead Imagineer, Carmen Smith, eventually said that the idea for a Princess and the Frog-themed attraction to replace Splash Mountain began in 2018.

In the June 2020 announcement, Disney took on the topic of inclusion straight on. They said that the reimagining of Splash Mountain “is of particular importance today”. Disney said that “the new concept is inclusive – one that all of our guests can connect with and be inspired by, and it speaks to the diversity of the millions of people who visit our parks each year”. Imagineer Carmen Smith continued to drive home the point in that initial announcement, saying “it is important that guests be able to see themselves in the experiences we create”, and noted that Disney worked with cultural advisors and other experts to guide them during the development of a Princess and the Frog ride.

During the development of the ride, Disney had two CEO’s. In a March 2020 shareholder meeting, Disney CEO Bob Iger talked about Song of the South when a shareholder asked if it would be included in the Disney+ catalog. Iger said, “I’ve felt as long as I’ve been CEO that Song of the South — even with a disclaimer — was just not appropriate in today’s world…It’s just hard, given the depictions in some of those films, to bring them out today without in some form or another offending people, so we’ve decided not to do that.” Just a few months later, Disney announced that Splash Mountain would be closed permanently.

In a March 2021 interview, then-Disney CEO Bob Chapek noted that Splash Mountain was based on the problematic Song of the South movie and that the movie depicted “happy slaves”. Chapek said that Disney had to have the courage to change the attraction, and they did.

When thinking about this review article of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, it was impossible to imagine writing an article that doesn’t mention Splash Mountain – and in a significant way. Yes, we hope that Tiana’s Bayou Adventure can stand on its own eventually, but a review of the attraction without acknowledging Splash Mountain before it would be incomplete.

That said, we aren’t going to rehash arguments about whether or not Splash Mountain was racist. Disney determined that Splash Mountain was problematic and that change needed to happen. It doesn’t matter how many Save Splash petitions are signed or, frankly, what those on social media have say. It hasn’t mattered since the day that Disney announced the retheme (and probably before that). Disney is going to do what it thinks is in its best interest.

As you may be able to guess from the title, it’s not all positive. Again, Splash Mountain was problematic and it needed to be replaced, but the choice to reuse the ride layout doesn’t do Tiana’s Bayou Adventure many favors. Before we get to our comparisons of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure to Splash Mountain, we can’t help but think of another comparison: Frozen Ever After.

As you may know, Frozen Ever After was a retheme of a pre-existing attraction known as Maelstrom. Maelstrom was a boat ride based on Nordic themes and lore. Disney announced the Maelstrom retheme back in September 2014. Frozen Ever After opened in June 2016 and it has been so well received that it has been built at Hong Kong Disneyland, and is under construction at the Disney Adventure World park in Disneyland Paris.

We bring up Frozen Ever After because it’s a wonderful example of Walt Disney Imagineering creating such a compelling story and ride on an existing ride system that they have decided to rebuild the same ride system and attraction, from scratch, at all-new destinations. If we were to use that metric to determine whether or not an attraction retheme is a success, we’d have to call Tiana’s Bayou Adventure a failure. If Disney wasn’t forced to retheme Splash Mountain due to the problematic nature of the attraction, I don’t think that they’d choose to build the same ride, from scratch, to tell the story of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.

A log ride through the bayou, at its core, sounds perfect for a Princess and the Frog ride, but the excitation and story leave much to be desired. That said, it’s not all bad! There are many things that we liked about Tiana’s Bayou Adventure and things that it certainly does better than Splash Mountain. We’ve laid out a lot of preamble to get to this point, but let’s jump into our Tiana’s Bayou Adventure review!

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure Review

Ok, like other ride reviews, we’re going to try and keep this as organized as possible. We’ll start with some details about how to experience the attraction, followed by a look at the backstory for the ride, the queue experience, and the ride experience. As we’ve already noted, this review will contain comparisons to Splash Mountain – it’s unavoidable – but we’ll also try to give Tiana’s Bayou Adventure some room to breathe on its own. For a scene-by-scene comparison of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, check out our article below.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure vs Splash Mountain: Scene-by-Scene Comparison of What Changed

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is about to open and we have a scene-by-scene comparison vs Splash Mountain and a look at what’s changed

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Tiana’s Bayou Adventure: How to Ride

Walt Disney World has announced that guests will need to join a Virtual Queue to experience Tiana’s Bayou Adventure for free during the opening period. The Virtual Queue will allow you access to the standby queue. As with many of Disney’s newest rides and experiences, the Virtual Queue acts as a gate or funnel to allow Disney to only allow so many guests to join the standby queue at any given time.

Unlike some of the biggest attractions that Walt Disney World has debuted in the past few years, you can’t buy guaranteed access to the attraction. Rides like Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind and TRON Lightcycle Run allow you to purchase Individual Lightning Lane skip-the-line access to “guarantee” a ride. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure will be part of Genie+, which means that you buy access to the skip-the-line buffet, but there’s no guarantee that there will be availability for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. We imagine that Tiana’s Bayou Adventure will be rather competitive, like Slinky Dog Dash or Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure. We’ll keep an eye on it during the opening days and weeks.

As a child, Tiana enjoyed cooking with her father. Together, they even won some competitions such as the 23rd Annual Gumbo Cook-Off. Tiana’s love of cooking instilled by her father combined wonderfully with her mother’s influence to create her entrepreneurial spirit.

Following the events of the Princess and the Frog movie, Tiana’s Palace quickly became a treasured meeting place in New Orleans thanks to the mouthwatering menu, exceptional entertainment, and warmhearted hospitality. Princess Tiana used her newfound success to support surrounding neighborhoods, which led to her role as a community leader.

From the success of her restaurant, Tiana expanded her business into an empire when she opened Tiana’s Foods – an employee-owned cooperative. The endeavor began when Tiana purchased a salt mine and the area surrounding the large salt dome it operated from. With the help of her mother Eudora, Naveen, Louis, and fellow owners of the cooperative, Tiana revived the old salt mine and the surrounding land, growing a wide array of vegetables, herbs, and spices for her recipes.

This multi-faceted enterprise has turned the aging salt mine into a space that has come alive. Complete with a boutique farm and both a working and teaching kitchen, Tiana’s Foods is where Tiana and her colleagues create all sorts of new products that they are bringing to the world, including a line of original hot sauces. Side note: why is Disney selling “Mama Odie’s” hot sauce and not Tiana’s hot sauce? Make it make sense.

In short, there is a lot of backstory put into the queue, but the ride basically breaks down into trying to find musicians for Tiana’s Mardi Gras party.

In my opinion, there could’ve been more story development for the ride. Going back to the ride system, there is a real lack of tension to “earn” the thrilling drop. With Splash Mountain, there was a significant amount of tension not only in the lift hill up to the final drop, but also throughout the attraction as we saw Brer Bear and Brer Fox get closer and closer to catching Brer Rabbit before capturing him. In Splash Mountain, the escape down the 52.5′ drop was earned thanks to 8 minutes of storytelling and tension. That simply doesn’t exist in Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.

Going back to Frozen Ever After, Disney even “earns” the much smaller drop at the end of the ride as you escape through the frozen foggy breath of Marshmallow the oversized monstrous snowman. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, and return to where we left off from our Tiana’s Bayou Adventure review: the queue.

I’ll be honest, the yellow barn doesn’t look great, and the murals seem to be out of place for the time period. I would’ve loved to see a more obviously repurposed space to match the storyline for Tiana’s Foods, but perhaps we’re joining the story down the line a bit further and Tiana has enlisted the help of local artists to create the murals. It’s authentic to New Orleans in 2024, which is excellent (Disney always benefits from using authentic artists), but it doesn’t really match our preconceived expectations based on the backstory in news releases.

One thing I can’t get over is just how bad the majority of the signage is for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. This is probably something that a lot of people won’t care too much about, but it’s an attention to detail that is a huge step back when compared to Splash Mountain. Before we get too deep into the weeds showcasing some of the terrible signage, we want to highlight some of the excellent signage.

The attraction’s main signage at the front of the ride is pretty great. It’s dimensional and features wonderful colors. Disney deserves praise for the signage – especially when considering how terrible most of the signage is.

Other signage that I love is the Critter Co-Op signage. Again, it’s dimensional and filled with character (literally). It is actually reminiscent of what Splash Mountain had, and I think Disney would’ve been wise to lean into that style of signage. Instead, the majority of what they produced is not just bad, but terrible.

Here’s a look at some comparisons of the Tiana’s Bayou Adventure signage and the signage that it “replaced”. I’m spending a lot of time on signage, I understand, but it speaks to a lack of attention to small details, or lack of budget, that is visible throughout the ride.

There are a number of other examples, but I’ll leave it here, and move on to other portions of the queue.

Going back to the changes in the barn, I was very hesitant at first when Disney said that it would be turned into an office space, but it works well. There are a ton of details to soak in, and we can’t wait to return to be able to take a look at everything that the Imagineers have created.

Upstairs, a previously unremarkable stretch of the queue has been plussed immensely, with tons of details located in and around the second-floor test kitchen. Dozens of framed photos and letters are hung on the walls, giving guests lots to look at and take in. This is something that we’ll talk about once we get to the ride portion of our review, but I really love it when Imagineers create something that feels lived in. Even better is when they create a scene that feels like you just missed seeing something or someone. I love a good staircase that lets the mind wonder what’s at the top, or a door that invites you to imagine what’s waiting on the other side.

In the case of the test kitchen, it looks like Tiana just stepped out during the middle of preparations for the big Mardi Gras party. Surely she’ll be back in a few minutes, but we’ll be further along in the queue by then, we just missed seeing her.

Other portions of the queue aren’t as strong as the test kitchen, and we’re immediately thrown into the salt mines in a very lightly repainted stretch of the queue that reminds us that while there were some portions of the experience that were built from scratch, this is still a Splash Mountain retheme.

Even the load area has the Splash Mountain feel – just with some new paint and a few new props. Beyond using the same yellow on the buildings here as the barn that we entered through, this is another example where Imagineers clearly wouldn’t build this from scratch at a new theme park, but had to make it work here.

200+ PHOTOS: Scene-by-Scene Breakdown of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure Ride & Tour of Queue

Going down the bayou! Come along as we take a photo tour of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure at Magic Kingdom, including a scene-by-scene breakdown

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Tiana’s Bayou Adventure vs Splash Mountain: Scene-by-Scene Comparison of What Changed

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is about to open and we have a scene-by-scene comparison vs Splash Mountain and a look at what’s changed

blogmickey.com

To that end, I’m not sure how much the show lighting can be “fixed”. Unlike Splash Mountain, where there were little critter homes along the indoor portions of the ride, even if there weren’t figures or Audio-Animatronics, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is empty.

When Disney World released its “Full Ride POV”, my initial thought was that it was just another example of Disney filming at incorrect exposure levels. We’ve seen some pretty poor video efforts from Disney in the past, and I assumed that was the case again. As it turns out, the video released is pretty accurate to what you’ll be able to see, if not actually a bit brighter. When you combine under-illuminated indoor show scenes with a ride that spends a significant amount of time in the bright Florida sun, the end result is a ride experience during the indoor portions where you feel like you’re going from one spotlight scene to the next.

Going back to the concept of Imagineering creating spaces that feel “lived in”, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure could’ve greatly benefitted from that. Again, not every single scene needs to have cutting-edge animatronics, but fireflies dancing on the wall similarly shouldn’t be the solution. The biggest offender here is the scene pictured below. It’s a dark stretch of hallway that used to be filled with critter homes but now is mostly nothing.

Here’s a look at what a portion of the area looked like when the ride was Splash Mountain. No Audio-Animatronics, no animated figures, just critter homes, but these types of scenes do a lot to give life to the attraction. Again, this isn’t the type of thing that necessarily makes an attraction bad, but when put up against a classic, it’s a really unfavorable comparison.

While we have problems with the choices made during the indoor portions of the ride, the outdoor portions of the ride are good to great. Some of my favorite portions of the ride are right at the start when you first drop into the bayou pool. I was struck by how immersed in the cypress trees you are during that initial outdoor portion of the ride and thought it was not only really well done but a clear upgrade from the days of Splash Mountain.

Audio-Animatronics & Screenz™

Next up, let’s talk Audio-Animatronics. There are dozens of Audio-Animatronics and they are pretty impressive. We’re not talking Na’vi River Journey Shaman of Song-levels of impressive, but the A-1000 figures are fluid and have a really natural range of motion. In particular, the finale scene is truly a “joyful celebration” of Disney’s latest and greatest tech.

Beyond the technically advanced A-1000 Audio-Animatronics, there are also simple motion figures. You won’t see the detailed movement with these figures that you would with the A-1000 figures, but the scene really doesn’t call for much beyond the ability to repeatedly strum an instrument or rock back and forth to the beat of the music. I’m ok with that, but I do wish there were a few more of these simple motion figures in some of the empty portions of the ride.

We’ll also talk about the use of screens in the ride. There are a few times where it feels unnatural, but there are other times when the ride is better for it. One of the spots where it feels like a natural extension of the ride is any time we see fireflies dancing along to the music. They flow through the attraction and add some life to otherwise empty scenes. Honestly, the dancing fireflies was one of my favorite secondary effects for the ride.

There are two parts in the ride where Mama Odie shows up on a screen above your boat. Both of these screen segments are sort of take-it-or-leave-it for me. Sure, they would’ve been better as physical sets, but they work fine and don’t feel too out of place (if you hit the timing right).

The only part where the screens felt really off was the use of Tiana and Louis in the Lemoine Club. The CGI animation, presumably meant to resemble the Audio-Animatronics seen earlier in the ride, feels quite off. It would’ve been really cool to see Disney execute some oversized Audio-Animatronics here, but space constraints were likely an issue (as with just about everywhere in the ride).

A final note on the Audio-Animatronics. There are timing issues right now that cause the figures to be in a static or near-static pose as the boats approach. Suddenly, the A-1000 figures will spring to life and go through the motions for each scene. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is a timed attraction in the sense that figures have to hit their mark for the scene. That leads to awkward show scenes when logs are approaching the scene, or when the timing is off.

We’d love to see more animation from the figures outside of just when they are hitting their mark. Some natural motion in between the 10-second animation sequence would go a long way.

Music

When talking about New Orleans, and a ride that has been described as a love letter to the city, you can’t leave out music. We recently visited New Orleans and the city is alive with music. Sometimes you can see the street performers, and sometimes the music is just floating through the air, but it’s always present. Thankfully, Disney doesn’t miss when it comes to the music of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.

From original arrangements of songs from the Princess and the Frog film to an original song for the attraction, one thing you’ll be doing throughout the ride is singing and dancing along! Honestly, the music alone will draw us in for more rides on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.

In the finale, there is an original song called “Special Spice” that has grown on us and is truly a joooooyful celebration! The song talks about how everyone comes together to make the community complete by bringing their own special spice as an ingredient to the metaphorical social pot of gumbo. On its own, it’s catchy, but didn’t feel like an attraction song. That said, once you’re in the finale scene with everyone dancing around you, it works well.

Disney made a choice with Tiana’s Bayou Adventure to set the events of the attraction after the events of the movie. That means no Dr. Facilier. Now, there has been a lot of talk about why Disney made this choice, and I’m not going to presume to know the answer. What I do know is that the ride is missing something significant without him. If Tiana’s Bayou Adventure was a slow boat ride through the bayou like Na’vi River Journey, the plot would match the ride system nicely. Once you introduce an element of thrill, the story should match that thrill level.

When it comes to “explaining” the thrilling moments in the ride, the first few drops are somewhat adequately explained by the act of Mama Odie shrinking us down to the size of a frog. However, the main drop is simply explained as “we need to make you big again and get you to the party”. That falls flat. Again, it’s not an earned moment.

Thinking about other boat rides like Frozen Ever After or even Pirates of the Caribbean – thrill is generally met with either tension or anticipation from the storyline or set design. That simply isn’t the case with Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, and the ride system mismatch with the story is what sticks out most in my mind after riding. It goes back to what I said earlier, the Frozen Ever After retheme of Maelstrom was so well done that Disney actually cloned the ride and ride system at other parks when they were building from scratch. That’s high praise! My assumption is that we will not see Disney do the same thing for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure anywhere else in the world.

The plot fails when matched with the ride system, but I do like all of the wonderful music that we get because of the plot, so I’ve got mixed emotions on it.

Therefore, change was coming. The question then became: will Splash Mountain be demolished or rethemed. I’m not completely convinced that Tiana’s Bayou Adventure was the right solution, but I’m not completely convinced that it needed to be demolished either. The ride system itself is very thrilling and lends itself really well to storytelling. However, the story that Disney choose to tell with Tiana’s Bayou Adventure doesn’t really take advantage of any of the thrilling ride system elements in a convincing way.

The set design is great in some places and underwhelming in others, but the wonderful music carries you through the ride almost to the point where empty spaces and poor lighting don’t matter. It’s clear that Disney invested some money into the ride thanks to numerous A-1000 Audio-Animatronics figures (their latest and greatest), but the animation of the figures themselves is underwhelming.

Overall, while we can write a 4,000+ word review about the merits of a new ride at Magic Kingdom, all that matters is that there’s a new ride at Magic Kingdom. It will be popular regardless of the discourse. Yes, I wanted more from the plot and think that there is evidence of cutting corners, but it’s still going to be a thrilling and enjoyable ride for the family from Denver (the general public), and that’s what Disney is in the business of doing: entertaining tourists.

In total, I gave Tiana’s Bayou Adventure a 6/10, gaining points for wonderful music, investment in cutting-edge Audio-Animatronics, and significant queue upgrades, but losing points for some underwhelming indoor set design and plot mismatch with the ride style. It’s a downgrade from Splash Mountain, but a necessary downgrade.

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!