How Disney Is Using Music to Reimagine an Iconic Ride — And Make It Relevant for Today
It ended with a song.
On May 30, the animatronic critters aboard the Zip-A-Dee Lady riverboat launched into one last rendition of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.” Disneyland parkgoers were wished one final “zip-a-dee-doo-dah ride” before cruising towards the infamous fifty-foot flume drop. And after almost 35 years, Splash Mountain closed.
A week earlier, a group of executives from Walt Disney Imagineering (a division of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products) gathered in New Orleans. But they weren’t mourning the impending end of a chapter of Disney Parks history. “Let’s talk about Tiana,” said Charita Carter, executive creative producer at Imagineering, beaming. “She’s an entrepreneur at heart. She loves family. She loves her community.”
Carter was speaking about a woman best known as an animated character, but who to the Imagineers, and to millions of people the world over, is very much real. Tiana is Disney’s first African-American princess (and first explicitly American princess), who debuted in 2009’s The Princess and the Frog. The New Orleans-set animated musical told the story of a waitress who dreams of opening her own restaurant, who is turned into a frog by an evil voodoo doctor and must figure out how to become human again. A host of comical animal friends — including an alligator with dreams of playing jazz trumpet, and a Cajun firefly partial to zydeco — of course aid Tiana on her journey.
Next year, the movie will get a major reintroduction when Tiana’s Bayou Adventure — an entirely new attraction replacing Splash Mountain and picking up where the Princess and the Frog story left off — opens at the Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resorts. Like Splash Mountain, it’ll be a flume ride with that beloved stomach-turning drop. “The twists and turns and the big drop — people love that,” says Ted Robledo, executive creative director at Imagineering. “But it’s like moving into an old house, right? You don’t want to totally tear down this house because there’s a lot of great things about this house. But the plumbing’s old, the electrical’s old, you don’t want that old furniture. So you start to bring it up to date, to inject your own character, your own personal story into it. And that’s exactly what we’re doing with Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. We want to bring new life [to it] and make it even better.”
That old house was one that, on the surface, might not have looked particularly problematic — but it didn’t take much digging to find it wasn’t built on the most solid ground. Splash Mountain’s Oscar-winning earworm of a theme song and its main characters (Br’er Fox, Br’er Bear, and their nemesis Br’er Rabbit) hailed from Disney’s 1946 film Song of the South — which Disney CEO Bob Iger announced in 2020 would not be available on Disney+ because it was “just not appropriate in today’s world.”
Upon its release, the NAACP vocally criticized Song of the South for “help[ing] to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery,” and diverse groups across the country picketed theaters, protesting its use of outdated, offensive stereotypes and dialect — most notably in the character of Uncle Remus (played by James Baskett, who would later earn an honorary Oscar for the role). It was never released on home video in the U.S.; nonetheless, in the 1980s Disney gave it a theatrical re-release, and some of its characters and music became the base for Splash Mountain when it opened in the park’s Frontierland in 1989.
Imagineering senior vp creative development & inclusive strategies Carmen Smith says that in recent year, the Imagineering team has — as it often does — walked the parks, looking at rides that could benefit from, well, an update or two. “Our parks are ever-evolving, telling new stories,” says Smith, noting that attractions like Jungle Cruise and It’s a Small World have undergone intentional changes. “When we look at an experience like Splash Mountain, and the history around it — it’s always about making sure that the stories we’re telling are relevant, and not perpetuating any misconceptions or stereotypes. And it was time for us to see what next story we could tell in this space.” (Splash Mountain’s Disney World iteration closed back in January).
Around 2018, the idea that Tiana’s story could be the successor became “front burner for me and many of us,” Smith says. “We’d been mulling different ideas and concepts, and it took a while.” Chipping away at Splash Mountain’s façade and finding the flimsy caricatures beneath didn’t take much effort. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure would need to be the total opposite: a ride authentic to its core. So to create it, Smith and her Imagineering colleagues would “arm ourselves with knowledge.”
“Authenticity” is a word that Smith, Robledo and their colleagues use repeatedly when talking about Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. For more than two years, the WDI team dove into deep research in New Orleans, consulting with experts about every last detail informing the ride’s creation. The bayou’s foliage and wildlife, the actual critters who’d comprise an animatronic band of new characters. The real salt mine that once interrupted the flat Louisiana landscape and will be the new “mountain” guests enter on their logs. The 1920s hairdo Tiana would sport, showcasing “the versatility of African-American women’s hair.” And above all, the new song that would make them want to return to the ride over and over and follow them home.
“Some places are oil towns. Some places are movie towns,” says Robledo. “New Orleans is a music town.”
“If you know people who grew up with me, they’ll tell you, ‘P.J.’s always wanted to write songs for Disney,’” says P.J. Morton. The singer, songwriter, producer and Maroon 5 keyboard player is sitting in a back room at Preservation Hall, the New Orleans jazz landmark. “It’s a very specific skill set,” he explains. “I don’t think just any songwriter can do it. But that’s the part I’ve been unconsciously preparing for my whole life.”
Morton, 42, is a New Orleans native — the son of a gospel singer and a preacher, who attended the storied St. Augustine High School (Jon Batiste and Jay Electronica are among its alums). He remembers how when The Princess and the Frog first came out, “a lot of us as New Orleanians, and Louisianans in general, we were just happy we were part of the conversation.” The Randy Newman-composed soundtrack featured the late local legend Dr. John, beloved zydeco accordionist Terence Simien, and composer and trumpet virtuoso Terence Blanchard (the real horn player behind alligator Louis). “The music and storytelling [from Disney] are always top-notch, but I was elated to see that perspective.”
When it came to creating Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, “music became a hub early on for the experience,” says John Dennis, executive creative director, music at Walt Disney Imagineering. “I’m an expert in the music of Imagineering; I’m not an expert in the music of New Orleans. So I had to reach out and find partners and get myself an education on the music of New Orleans — which can take a lifetime,” he adds with a laugh. To get that intensive education, the Imagineering team spent much of the past couple years working with cultural consultants from the National Jazz Museum in Harlem and the New Orleans Jazz Museum, as well as individual artists from the city — including Blanchard and, ultimately, Morton, for the ride’s calling card: its original song.
“One of the wishes I had for the project was to create something original for the ride, as well as pay homage to, and take advantage of, the musical equity we have from Randy Newman,” says Robledo. “We knew we needed something iconic by way of a song — that level of music that people will take home with them and think about the day after and the week after that.”
As usual, the team used story as a starting point. The narrative grounding Tiana’s Bayou Adventure takes place firmly post-Princess and the Frog: after opening her own successful restaurant, Tiana has transformed an old salt mine into a co-op, Tiana’s Foods, where she now makes her own products, including a line of hot sauces. On the eve of a Mardi Gras party she’s throwing for the community, she’s in search of a missing ingredient.
“When we talked to P.J., the first thing we talked about was story,” says Dennis. “We said, ‘We’re only starting with a song: don’t worry about the attraction yet. We will set you up for what the story is and what part of the story we need help telling.’ Once we have that storytelling piece in the form of the song, we can step back with him and say, ‘Well, now we have to adapt this in a way that’s going to work repeatedly on a ride 18 hours a day, with every 15 seconds a new vehicle and set of guests coming through.’”
Morton knew early on that he wanted to write in a style complementary to Newman’s existent music, “but doing it my way also.” He quickly discovered that writing for a ride — and specifically for the voice of Princess Tiana, sung (as in the movie) by Anika Noni Rose — was a new kind of challenge. “Writing songs in general can be very self-serving: ‘I want to say what I want to say,’” he explains. “This is a very different process. You’re speaking for and through this whole other thing. And Disney is a huge company! It’s very ping-pong — we had to go back and forth a lot.”
That kind of collaboration was necessary because music for a Disney Parks attraction serves a very different purpose than music in a Disney movie. It emanates from speakers, luring guests wandering the park to the ride as if to a particularly hot club, Robledo points out. “You’ll hear it in the queue, but you may not get through all the music in the queue, and you may pick up a different experience that second or third time through — and we do expect this to be a high-repeat experience,” Dennis adds. For the duration of the ride itself, Dennis’ team had to figure out “how to take a musical culture so diverse and deep, distill it down and present it in a way that’s easy to digest” over ten minutes tops — and played to guests who are distracted and may not hear it the same way from one ride-through to the next.
All told, Morton estimates he spent a year working on his song, which will feature other yet-to-be-announced New Orleans musicians he hand-picked, and which he’s now in the process of recording (for the moment, further details about the song itself are totally under wraps). That may sound like a long time to spend on one track — but it’s a drop in the bucket for the linchpin of an attraction that, the team hopes, will join the enduring canon that songs like “It’s a Small World” and “A Pirate’s Life for Me” are part of. “It’s a very different mindset from the music industry, where people are chasing hit songs. Disney is looking for music that can be timeless,” says Morton. “I want to just make things that are beautiful and can last forever.”
And he’s keenly aware of the crucial and profound role he’s playing in creating a song for this ride in particular. “We use the word historic all the time now — maybe it’s overused. But this is history in the true sense of the word, on a lot of different levels,” says Morton. “Me just being a Black man from New Orleans, understanding how our culture has been used and misused — this is a huge olive branch to all that. This is still Disney; they don’t have to make sure they’re doing it right and taking care of the people doing it. I give them a lot of credit for being intentional about it. I know for a fact I’m part of history doing this.”