Disney's Most Notorious Film (34 page)

These responses reiterate that Splash Mountain is ultimately, as Disney intended, about the drop. One such person asked, “I’m a bit of a wuss so how scary are the drops in Splash mountain? Any worse than the ones on Big Thunder Mountain?” [
sic
].
³⁶
Another responded to the query by stating, “The first is the easiest, the second is the worst, and the last one is really fast, so you can’t even tell when it happens.”
³⁷
Along with the drop is also the fear of getting wet. “I sat in the front,” wrote one representative fan, “and was drenched for the whole day!!!”
³⁸
There is surprisingly little commentary, however, on the narrative in the ride. There is at least one amusing instance where a rider thought that Brer Fox ate Brer Rabbit just before the drop
³⁹
—an understandable interpretation that highlights just how ambiguous, and fast moving, the story is within Splash Mountain. Few, if any, comment on the narrative of the ride as its primary appeal. Meanwhile, there are few mentions of
Song of the South
, and virtually no reference, however briefly, to its long history of cultural politics. Fan responses to the ride largely follow the corporate promotional strategy that highlights its affective potential and deemphasizes its cinematic origins.

One of the distinctive differences between theme park rides and two-dimensional audiovisual media like TV and film are the possible, even quite likely, disruptions somewhere in the “storytelling” process. In the
Project on Disney
, the most interesting account of visiting Splash Mountain is when Disney’s tight control (momentarily) breaks down. Most of Klugman’s account of their trip to Splash Mountain documents not the ride itself, but what unexpectedly happened during their long wait to get on. At one point, Klugman’s friend’s daughter got her whole leg stuck
between
two railings along the queue line, which led to her screaming wildly. Writes Klugman, “It was unclear to everyone whether the child was in pain or having a panic attack, but what slowly took hold of our murky consciousness was that this was an
unprogrammed
event that might require some initiative on our parts. . . . Meanwhile, no one left his place in line to get assistance. . . . It was clear that we were regarded as just another passing ‘attraction’ [to other waiting riders].”
⁴⁰
Eventually the two women were able to get her out after about ten minutes, and the exhaustion from that ordeal in part explains why their subsequent encounter with Splash Mountain itself was recounted so superficially. Such “unprogrammed” events happen all the time. A student in one of my Disney courses once mentioned anecdotally in class that he had a particularly annoying experience on the ride. After it broke down, his vehicle was stuck for an extended period of time in the final “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” room, subjecting him to hearing the song repeatedly until the ride was fixed. As another young commenter on YouTube wrote, “omg . . . my bff sami and i went on splash mountain like 4 times but like the 3rd time we went on there was a huge, fat, women in the last seat. man she couldnt get out and she was like stuck, so 3 ppl try to pull her out but at the same time the boat was moving and she was screaming. no! no! no!. man it was the saddest thing like ever!” [
sic
].
⁴¹

Disney parks are focused on controlling every aspect of the theme park experience. People are guided in the right directions (in and out of the ride), vehicles provide the right points of view, audio cues are perfectly in sync with the movement, riders must stay still the whole time (hands and arms kept inside), and so forth. This makes such unplanned moments of interruption all the more jarring. As Klugman later reflected, “My first thought was, ‘My God, Disney goofed!’ . . . It was a reminder that other details might not have been tested for borderline cases like Charlotte, who had just barely passed the height test for ‘Splash Mountain.’ Had Disney test-driven the eight-seater logs down the waterfall, for example, with four crash dummies weighing over two-hundred pounds all sitting on the right?”
⁴²

Another reason that her eventual “reading” of Splash Mountain was so shallow—brief and fleeting like the ride itself—was conceivably because she was doing little except focusing on everyone’s safety by the time her entire party of eight people got on the actual ride. Klugman did not perhaps realize the appropriateness of her rhetorical question, “Had Disney test-driven the eight-seater logs down the waterfall?” One of the most famous stories in modern Disney lore involves Michael Eisner and
his
desire to be the first one to ride Splash Mountain in 1988. Eisner himself recalled how he and his son, Anders, “were the first humans to try the new attraction, and were nearly decapitated by a board resting across the track on the final drop down the waterfall. I was no longer permitted to talk the construction supervisor into letting me test new rides whenever I felt like it.”
⁴³
Less humorous was when one man actually was killed on Florida’s version of Splash Mountain in 2000 after he got off the ride midway, fell in the water, and was struck a fatal blow by another trailing log.
⁴⁴
As recently as 2008, Disney raised the minimum height on the Disneyland version of the ride from forty inches to sixty inches due to concerns that small children were being injured because they had too much room to move around in the vehicle itself.
⁴⁵
Every aspect of the body, including its size, is central to the theme park visit and to Disney’s attempts to control that experience.

On a somewhat lighter note, the most celebrated breakdown of control on Splash Mountain may be the curious Internet phenomenon of “
Flash
Mountain.” This notoriously involves women exposing their bare chests during the final drop. As at many other theme parks, cameras are positioned on rides to capture visitors’ facial expressions during the most thrilling sequences. The function is to manipulate people into buying a copy of their respective pictures after they exit the ride and see their own comically exaggerated expressions. Splash Mountain is no different—cameras are stationed discretely across from the drop to capture people’s amused or horrified faces. At some point in the mid-1990s, it became fashionable for some women to pull up their shirts right as the boat drops and “flash” the camera. Such behavior is not limited only to this ride, but Splash Mountain does have a particular mythology around it for perhaps no other reason than the cleverness of rhyming words. These photos never actually make it to the gift shop where unsuspecting families could see them, since watchful Disney employees screen them all out of sight. Yet, thanks to some of these same diligent workers, these pictures
do
make it to the Internet on a regular basis. In a very literal sense, Flash Mountain exposes Splash Mountain’s symbolic focus on the body.

Defying easy categories for reception, the ride highlights how intensely focused Disney parks are on the scripting and promoting of a body’s physical motion in space. Many writers on Disney have rightly foregrounded the company’s heavy dependence on theme and narrative throughout its parks to distinguish them from competitors. Yet, especially in the case of Splash Mountain, the emphasis on story misses the
heavily
visceral experience that the thrill rides are meant to be. In other words, it’s difficult to “read” Splash Mountain’s retelling of
Song of the South
since the ride is designed to completely, if momentarily, engulf the senses of the visitor. This doesn’t make the ride any less ideological, as I will discuss below. But it does suggest that one is often consciously overwhelmed in the heavily controlled, but often viscerally incoherent, affective chaos that is a Disney theme park attraction.

DISNEY’S NATIONAL ANTHEM

The song heard in [Splash Mountain’s] finale, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” has, over the years, become something of a Disney national anthem.

DISNEY PRESS RELEASE

While Splash Mountain was unquestionably the most prominent and permanent “official” corporate version of
Song of the South
, it was far from Disney’s only reuse of the aging intellectual property. Disney repackaged the sensory overload thrill ride in tandem with the most powerfully affective remaining element of
Song of the South
—its songs. That Splash Mountain was originally named “Zip-a-Dee River Run” is not incidental. In its early preproduction stages, Disney Imagineers incorporated the classic tune as the ride’s key selling point. Splash Mountain stripped the old Disney film down to its most useful parts—the colorful animated creature characters and the Oscar-winning tunes. By the end of the 1980s, Disney believed that this one song, and its close relationship with the larger Disney brand, was ultimately the only significant property worth salvaging from
Song of the South
. In fact, much of the company’s continued use of the film can be reduced just to the recirculation, in different platforms, of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”

This was consistent with its larger corporate strategy of remediation. As early as Donald Duck’s
Soup’s On
(1948), Disney had been finding often-subtle ways to incorporate “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” into other company products. In 1984, Disney’s “adult-friendly” distribution label, Touchstone, was founded so that the studio could release non-G-rated films. Touchstone was created to expand, but also inoculate, the Disney brand. They could market films to a more adult audience without attaching the official “Disney” name to them. This is the label, for instance,
that
released
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
(1988). Its first film,
Splash
, featured a scene where Tom Hanks sings “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” to himself while making breakfast. Here Disney used cross-references to position the song as a “routine” part of everyday life. There is also the rumor that Eisner wanted the ride called “
Splash
Mountain” to help promote the Hanks movie, though the movie and theme park attraction otherwise share nothing in common.
⁴⁶
Splash
’s intertextual reference to
Song of the South
both reflected and perpetuated the song’s appeal.

Nor was the value of the song lost on others. In May 1980, a man by the name of Judge E. Peterson sued Disney for $10 million in royalties, claiming that he—along with James A. Payton—were the real authors of
Song of the South’
s highly lucrative centerpiece song. Peterson claimed that the song was stolen in 1939 by a “
‘long-forgotten impresario’ of a Washington theater chain . . . [who then] eventually ‘laundered and converted’ the true authorship until it was sold to Walt Disney.”
⁴⁷
Meanwhile, others laid claim to the song, sometimes in odd ways. Shortly after the film’s final rerelease in 1986, a thirty-five-year-old man named Gary Eugene Duda in DeKalb County, California, went to court to legally change his name to “Zippidy Duda,” after having been called “Zippidy most of his life by friends and family after the tune.”
⁴⁸
According to the
Los Angeles Times
, Disney did not attempt to block him from doing so. It was less clear, however, if he was doing this because he was a devoted fan of the film, or if it was because “Duda, a wholesale jeweler, said he thinks the name change will help business.” Ultimately, any clear distinction between fandom and incidental opportunism was lost over the thirty-plus years of having being nicknamed after the Disney film’s most famous song.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” appeared more often than did
Song of the South
. The company began circulating recycled “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” footage as part of the second volume of its
Disney’s Sing Along Songs
VHS tapes (1986). The collection mixed a sequence from the film with a compilation of classic excerpts from other older Disney titles, such as
Peter Pan
,
Alice in Wonderland
(1951), and
Snow White
(1937). This use of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” was done to take advantage of the emergent home video market. It also promoted the last theatrical rerelease of
Song of the South
and eventually the debut of Splash Mountain. Another
Song of the South
musical sequence, “How Do You Do?,” was later included in the eleventh volume of
Disney’s Sing Along Songs
(1992). The long-term popularity of these compilations, new
volumes
of which thrive on DVD to this day, represents one of many successful ways—like
Disneyland
and
The Wonderful World of Disney
—that Disney repackaged the same material for added profit.

An early VHS copy of
Disney’s Sing Along Songs
, circa 1986. Although Uncle Remus and other “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” characters are included on the cover, only this one sequence from
Song of the South
is included on the tape. This is as close to rereleasing the film on U.S. home video as Disney ever got.