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Excerpt from the Los Angeles Times article:
Disneyland to make the Jungle Cruise more inclusive after years-long complaints of racism
by Todd Martens
Jan. 25, 2021
"Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise has set sail in the park’s Adventureland area consistently since 1955 and it stands today as one of the remaining opening day attractions overseen by Walt Disney himself.
But culture often moves faster than decades-old mechanical hippos.
On Monday, the Walt Disney Co. announced that it’s embarking on what many view as a long-overdue course correction for the Jungle Cruise. Numerous changes will make the attraction feel more inclusive and less racially insensitive in its depiction of other cultures.
The move follows updates to other older attractions such as Splash Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean, all done to remove now-outdated tableaus that can be cringe-inducing at best and racist at worst. The company had already announced that Splash Mountain, originally inspired by the critters in the racist film “Song of the South,” would receive a makeover themed to “The Princess and the Frog,” the movie that featured Disney’s first Black princess.
The Jungle Cruise, with its ties to the park’s patriarch, is likely to be viewed with a more protective lens by the company’s vast fanbase. Yet the ride has also been one under near-constant evolution since its inception. Its early influences were Disney’s own nature documentaries and the 1951 film “The African Queen,” a favorite of early Disneyland designer Harper Goff.
Its initial conception as “The Jungle Rivers of the World” leaned slightly more educational than today’s more humor-driven take. The ride’s unsavory tribal depictions, largely inspired by images from Papua New Guinea, were added in the years after its opening. These vignettes essentially depict indigenous people as either tourist attraction, attackers or cannibals.
“Horrifyingly racist” is how one of Disney’s peers in the theme park design community, the Thinkwell Group, characterized various Jungle Cruise scenes in an essay published shortly after Disney announced the changes to Splash Mountain.
A spear-waving war party was added to the Jungle Cruise in 1957, as was the “Trader Sam” character, a dark-skinned man today outfitted in straw tribal wear. Disney tiki bars — one on each coast — are named for the character that traffics in stereotypes. He’ll trade you “two of his heads for one of yours.”
“As Imagineers, it is our responsibility to ensure experiences we create and stories we share reflect the voices and perspectives of the world around us,” Carmen Smith said in a statement provided by Disney. Smith is the creative development and inclusion strategies executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s division responsible for theme park experiences....
Changes, Disney stressed, are being made independent of an upcoming Jungle Cruise-inspired film starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt. Expect all scenes that feature unsavory depictions of indigenous characters to be updated, said a Disney spokesperson, although details on potential tweaks to the war party scene and the Trader Sam finale have not yet been shared.
As silly and overly pun-filled as the Jungle Cruise may be, it has long been criticized as viewing adventure through an imperialist lens. Non-Americans are depicted as either subservient or savages. Although the ride is meant to be a collage of Asia, Africa and South America, human figures of the regions are presented as exotic, violent and dim-witted, humor that in the 1950s and 1960s was troublesome and today reeks of racism.
It’s also a point of view that clashes with the broader cultural Disney theme park mission, which over the decades has shifted from cartoonish and simplistic depictions of other cultures to a brand with a more global perspective. When Walt Disney World opened Animal Kingdom in 1998, Africa and Asia were shown in a more revered light, which only served to heighten the outdated cultural depictions of the Jungle Cruise...."
Full story at the LA Times.
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