The year that Disney debuted the first Black Disney princess, Quiana Moore-Glenn was 21. She was juggling two jobs and applying to culinary school, and she found Disney’s new princess unexpectedly relatable: her name was Tiana, she was Creole, and she started her fairytale as an aspiring restaurant owner working multiple jobs in 1920s New Orleans.
“It reminded me so much of me,” said Moore-Glenn, now 37.
This month, the Detroit resident is dealing with the aftermath of an election in which US voters rejected the chance to elect the nation’s first Black female president. “We’re not there yet, clearly,” she said.
But Moore-Glenn and her Disney fan friends are celebrating a small milestone this week: inside Disney’s Fantasyland, Tiana, the hardworking princess, is finally getting a promotion.
In 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s murder, Disney had announced that its parks would be “retheming” an iconic, decades-old attraction: Splash Mountain, a log-flume ride with a storyline drawn from a deeply racist 1946 film.
The updated ride would be “inclusive”, a Disney spokesperson pledged at the time, with a concept that “speaks to the diversity of the millions of people who visit our parks”.
This week, Disneyland held a glamorous launch for the rebranded ride, which is now Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.
On Wednesday, Anika Noni Rose, the original voice of Princess Tiana, serenaded the California crowd from a Disneyland steamboat, fireworks exploding in the sky above her.
The ride is Disney’s “first attraction that is based on a Black character as a main driver of the narrative”, said Bethanee Bemis, a historian who studies how Disney theme parks reflect the nation’s identity. The new ride has drawn some praise from both fans and scholars for the way it spotlights Black artists, and how Disney’s imagineers used the smallest details of the ride to tell a very different kind of story about Black New Orleans history. (Disney World launched its version of the ride in June.)
When Disney made the announcement that the parks would be dedicating a ride to Tiana, “I was like, it’s about time,” said Chazlyn Stunson, a 23-year-old content creator who attended a Tiana’s Bayou Adventure launch event on Wednesday night.
Tiana, the heroine of The Princess and the Frog, is a waitress in 1920s New Orleans who, with the help of her bayou creature sidekicks and a voodoo priestess fairy godmother, ends up marrying a prince. Her story is inspired in part by a real New Orleans icon, the restaurateur Leah Chase, the “queen of Creole cuisine”.
Stunson was seven years old when The Princess and the Frog came out, and she remembers the film as “such a big deal” both to her, and to her parents. “Little Black girls deserve to see themselves as Disney princesses,” she said.
‘You are the people who kept Tiana alive’
It had taken Disney until 2009, a full year after the United States elected its first Black president, to debut its first animated Black Disney princess. The film met with some criticism – including questions about why the first Black princess spent the majority of her film as a frog – but it also generated plenty of fans, who call Tiana “the people’s princess”.
Fans see Tiana as more compelling than some earlier Disney royalty, like Sleeping Beauty. She’s “the first entrepreneur-princess”, as Natazsa Roby-Smith, 35, a former Disney cast member from Orlando, Florida, put it.
Black girls who had once felt they had to choose between dressing up as Jasmine or Pocahontas for Halloween now had an African American princess who looked just like them, several fans said.
But even once Tiana became an official Disney princess, her role in the Disney pantheon stayed somewhat marginal, fans said. (Disney did not respond to a request for comment.)
Roby-Smith recalls noticing how other, more recent Disney animated franchises, like Frozen and Tangled, had seemed to inspire theme park rides or huge cascades of merchandise, while her princess did not.
“She wasn’t really represented at the parks, and I wanted her to be,” said Phylicia Hubbard, a Disney content creator from Long Beach, California. Hubbard and other fans kept the flame alive, posting themed photographs on “Tiana Tuesdays” and making it clear they were interested in more than a “sprinkle of merch”.
Even Rose, the voice of Tiana, told Disney fans at the D23 fan conference this summer that she had once believed the story of the people’s princess had been consigned to the Disney archives.
“I thought we were done,” Rose told the summer crowd, which included many Black women. “You all are the people who kept Tiana alive … that’s why, 15 years later, we have a ride, and we have a restaurant, and we have a rebirth.”
From Song of the South to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure
Disney’s announcement that it was rebranding Splash Mountain had faced plenty of controversy and backlash in 2020, from both Disney fans and commentators who did not want to accept that a theme park ride they loved could have a racist backstory.
Song of the South, the mixed live-action and animated film that inspired the ride, had not been reissued by Disney since 1986, but the ugly stereotypes behind the ride’s cute-animal storyline were far from obvious to many riders. Still, there was no question about the racism of the source material: Song of the South was denounced at the time of its 1946 premiere for popularizing a dangerously rosy view of American slavery, and the film sparked protests and boycotts across multiple US cities, with protesters carrying signs like: “We fought for Uncle Sam, not Uncle Tom.”
The film was a “nostalgic fantasy of an plantation era American South”, and its main character, Uncle Remus, was “the archetypical Black Negro figure”, said Jason Sperb, the author of Disney’s Most Notorious Film. The comical cartoon animals that ended up in Splash Mountain were based on a white author’s rewriting of stories told by enslaved people in the South – stories that were also parables about slavery itself.
More than three decades after Splash Mountain debuted in 1989, there were plenty of sound economic reasons to refresh the attraction and tie it to a more recent, and popular, film franchise, which Disney is constantly doing with many of its rides, Sperb said: “That’s what it all comes down to: where is the profit?”
By March 2020, Disney CEO Bob Iger had told Disney shareholders that Song of the South “even with a disclaimer, was just not appropriate in today’s world”. By that point, the internal work on a new version of the ride was already reportedly under way.
But some fans pushed back when Disney publicly announced the rebranding of Splash Mountain in June 2020, at a moment when many corporations and other institutions were struggling to respond to nationwide Black Lives Matter protests. Some Americans bristled at the idea that a theme park ride they had enjoyed could be labeled racist, Bemis, the theme park historian, said.
“People felt like they were losing something that they enjoyed based on a history they didn’t understand, and there was a fear that the replacement attraction wouldn’t bring them the same feelings of enjoyment,” she said.
Four years later, though, Disney fans and others appear to have moved on, Bemis said. The biggest controversy that rightwing outlets like the New York Post and Fox News have been able to stir up about Tiana’s Bayou Adventure so far is that the new splash ride is “too wet”.
In some ways, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is not that different from Splash Mountain: riders float in a log boat through indoor and outdoor landscapes, meeting animatronic characters while Disney songs play.
“What has changed is the story of the ride and the perspective from which it is told,” Bemis said earlier this year. “In this case, that makes all the difference.”
The lead Disney imagineer on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, Charita Carter, worked her way from the Disney accounting department to becoming the first African American female executive producer of Walt Disney imagineering, Forbes reported in 2022. (Disney did not respond to requests for an interview with Carter.)
Carter has spoken publicly about how she “felt the weight” of making the first Black princess ride, and making sure itfelt authentic and resonated across Disney’s audiences. At Disney’s fan event this summer, Carter explained how her team did intensive research in New Orleans, including meeting with Leah Chase’s family at their celebrated Dooky Chase restaurant and working with New Orleans artists like the muralist Sharika Mahdi and the blacksmith Darryl Reeves.
The new ride is full of small tributes to African American history, like mementos that speak to Tiana’s father’s military service, and descriptions of Tiana’s New Orleans food company as a “worker-owned cooperative”. The experience also panders to the fandom with “two new looks for Tiana”, Carter told Disney fans this summer.
Roby-Smith, who has already adopted one of those new outfits into her Tiana costume repertoire, rode Tiana’s Bayou Adventure for the first time this summer in Orlando, and said she found the experience “very emotional”.
“It was very heartwarming to see Disney fix their wrongs, and make something beautiful and better,” she said.
