The day after Splash Mountain closed permanently at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, work is underway to transform the log-flume ride into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. The attraction, which opened at the Florida resort in 1992, held its final day of operation on January 22nd and saw reported wait times of more than three hours as guests flooded into the park’s Frontierland to watch the last splashdown. On January 23rd, Splash Mountain shut its barn doors for good as construction began to replace the Song of the South-inspired theming with characters and imagery from the 2009 Walt Disney Animation Studios film The Princess and the Frog.
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Photos shared by WDW News Today show construction walls erected around the now-closed Splash Mountain and workers removing the insides of the attraction. A landing page for the ride has since been scrubbed from the Walt Disney World website.
The former Splash Mountain will reopen in 2024 as Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, a re-imagining in the works since 2019. In 2020, Disney confirmed Disney World and Disneyland’s Splash Mountain would close permanently to begin the transformation into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.
Picking up where the movie’s story left off, the reimagined ride sees guests “join Princess Tiana and Louis on a musical adventure — featuring some of the powerful music from the film — as they prepare for their first-ever Mardi Gras performance,” according to Disney.
Picking up where the movie’s story left off, the reimagined ride sees guests “join Princess Tiana and Louis on a musical adventure — featuring some of the powerful music from the film — as they prepare for their first-ever Mardi Gras performance,” according to Disney. Song rides like “How Do You Do?,” “Everybody Has a Laughing Place,” and “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” will be replaced with the Louisiana-set Princess and the Frog, which featured such songs as “Down in New Orleans,” “Almost There,” and “Dig a Little Deeper.”
“While we’ve explored many new themes in the past, [2019] is when we really began to hone in on Princess Tiana’s story,” Walt Disney Imagineering president Bob Weis told Disney’s D23 when announcing the Splash Mountain retheme in 2020. “That said, Splash Mountain has been the subject of many conversations through the years. Its brilliant ride platform and landscape create the potential for great storytelling.”
Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is scheduled to open in 2024 at the Walt Disney World Resort. Splash Mountain currently remains open at California’s Disneyland Resort, also set to open its version of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure next year.
