Tianna’s Horrifying Salt Mining Collective
Well, Splash Mountain and Brer Rabbit’s adventure that has charmed families for decades is gone for good.*
As I have said before, the ride was in desperate need of refurbishment. And while Disney could have shown an ounce of integrity by preserving its groundbreaking contribution to the black American experience, this is fucking Disney we are talking about.
And Iger was just getting too many Boomer vapors because of Song of the South. They could have also preserved the integrity of theming in Frontierland by the very low effort reskinning of Splash Mountain as a Pocahontas ride. A minimum Native American theming, reskin the “logs” as “canoes” and all good. You even get to inject an IP, which seems to be Disney’s obsession now.
But this is a product of the Disney Stories Matter Group. It would be more accurate to call themselves the Narrative Matters Group but anyway…
The backstory of Tianna’s Bayou Adventure is as follows:
Picking up where that story left off, Tiana continues bringing people together with Tiana’s Foods, another treasured meeting place to spend time together and celebrate a diverse community. Tiana is also working with cooperative members to teach gardening and cooking to children of all ages, and inspiring other women to run successful businesses as the brand grows nationwide.
Tianna’s Bayou Adventure takes place on Avery Island. Anybody with any kind of knowledge of Louisiana’s history just had his jaw drop open in shock and revulsion. Using Avery Island as a setting for a ride is up there with using that abandoned train station and public shower facility at Auschwitz as a theme park.
During the Antebellum period it was a salt mine. It was, naturally, mined by slaves. The conditions were utterly abhorrent. It was little short of a death sentence. Slaves that had proven to be too much trouble anywhere else got sent to Avery Island as an example to others. Turnover was high due to a barely in control mortality rate but since they were known trouble makers the price per head was low to begin with.
Now this island which has a past that was rich with horror, is being turned into a happy go lucky 1920s mining kibbutz through the magic of Mickey the Great and Terrible. Disney is Disneyfying Avery Island’s horrendous past away to make it a happy, diverse multicultural collective, chockfull of unmarked graves.
Just as a quick reminder Song of the South was based on the Uncle Remus stories as collected by Joel Chandler Harris and is only collection of African American folk stories available. They would have vanished without trace if it hadn’t been for him. He told the stories using the eye dialect technique to simulate the accent and speech patterns of southern African Americans. Liberal whites are never comfortable finding out there are black people who actually talk that way.
Regardless, this collection of stories did indeed fall into disrepute in the mid-1970s. Ralph Bakshi grunted out a steaming pile of animation called Coonskin satirizing the Song of the South as a 1970s Blaxploitation crap pile condemning Walt Disney, Uncle Remus and of course America. Quentin Tarantino still over-rates the damn thing. White liberal Boomers like Bob Iger took the lessons of this cheap cartoon to heart. They were going to make a difference when they made it to the top.
In case you are wondering how even Disney could fuck up this bad, here’s the story. During the mostly peaceful riots of 2020, Disney sent out an emergency virtue signal. Normally these things have been planned years in advance but this one sure as hell wasn’t. Once it was announced the Imagineers went out to Louisiana to find some bit of terrain that could be turned into Tianna’s Log Ride. Problem. Louisiana is completely flat. It’s flatter than Kansas and that’s saying something. After looking high and low (but mostly low) Mickey’s little helpers ran across the salt domes of Avery Island, yelled “perfect” and set work erasing Avery Island’s appalling history.
At the end of the day, the folktales portrayed at Splash Mountain were based on a part of the genuine African American experience and it is now being replaced by a Stuff White People Like fantasy version of a black business woman’s Portland Workers Collective set in the 1920s. A black woman openly owning and operating a high end restaurant in the 1920s was a pretty big ask but I pushed the accept button because it was kid’s movie. Now she wants to run a mining commune too? And on top of a mass grave? The Shadow Man had shape shifting powers, are we certain he didn’t trade places with Tianna before being dragged off to Hell?
I can’t wait see what they are going to be selling in the gift shop.
Salt shakers probably.
* Unless you are in Tokyo Disney, it’s just fine there and you can get copy Region 2 copy of Song of the South in the gift shop. Don’t buy it. You can get those all over Japan where Song of the South has long been in the public domain.
