“So the story begins with a ten-year old girl named Opal who meets a scruffy dog in the parking lot of a grocery store and names him Winn Dixie…” Okay, okay, so it might’ve been a long time since you’ve written a “book report,” but surely, you remember them. Standing before the whole rest of the third grade, you’d be tasked with concisely, coherently re-telling the story of a book you’d read, giving your classmates a brief overview of the characters, the settings, the plot, and the resolution.
As fans of Walt Disney Imagineering will tell you, “book reports” have a place in Disney Parks, too. In fact, “book report rides” are considered a sub-genre of Disney dark ride… and not always a preferred one.
Take for example, the two Little Mermaid rides you’ll find at Disney California Adventure and Magic Kingdom. Both essentially take the 90 minute story you’ll remember from the film and condense it into a 3 minute ride-through experience. The same plot points. The same characters. The same songs. Just, y’know, the Spark Notes version. If you’d never seen 1989 movie The Little Mermaid before, the ride will get you close enough – even if it leaves out all the context.
Compare that to, say, EPCOT’s Frozen Ever After. Certainly of the same “generation” as the Little Mermaid dark ride, Frozen Ever After is decidedly not a book report ride. Just the opposite, it invites us back to Arendelle after the film’s finale. Sure, we hear clever reprises of familiar songs, but we are not just sailing through a three minute version of the story we already know. Instead, we’re seeing the characters in a new context – a sort of semi-sequel to the film, expanding the “lore” and turning the ride into something more than just a condensed retelling.
Of course, you know where this is going…
Princess and the Frog
Disney’s 2009 animated film The Princess and the Frog was an important one for many reasons. First, it featured Disney’s first Black Princess – Tiana, a would-be restauranteur who proudly proclaims, “Fairy tales can come true, but you gotta make ’em happen! It all depends on you!” Second, The Princess and the Frog was Disney’s high-profile return to (and ultimately, last feature length entry in) hand-drawn animation. Though the film only did well at the box office instead of great, it’s also the movie that reset Disney Feature Animation for its so-called “Revival” – the 2010s streak of hits we’re still in the midst of today.
As you know, in 2020, Disney made the announcement that The Princess and the Frog would become the basis for a reimagining of Splash Mountain at both Disneyland and Magic Kingdom. For a moment, forget the controversy surrounding that decision – either for or against – and instead think of what you pictured when you first heard about a Princess and the Frog ride…
For most of us, mapping Princess and the Frog onto the existing Splash Mountain layout was as easy as pie. It was difficult not to imagine floating through firefly-lit bayous; stumbling into the dark parlors of the film’s villainous Dr. Facilier; climbing that iconic lift to the rhythmic, percussive chanting of his shadowy “Friends from the Other Side”; splashing down into a colorful bayou, replacing the “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” finale with a Nawlins street party to the tune of “Dig a Little Deeper,” and return to the wharf and Tiana’s Palace to the tune of the film’s emotional crescendo, “Dreams Do Come True In New Orleans (Finale)”!
As we know, that didn’t happen…
