Former Walt Disney Imagineer Kathy Mangum says one of the biggest regrets of her 42-year career was building Splash Mountain at Disneyland with a backstory based on the controversial 1940s Disney movie “Song of the South.”
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Mangum spoke about her work on Splash Mountain, Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage and Cars Land at the Disneyland resort on the Dream Chasing podcast hosted by former Imagineering President Bob Weis.
“I knew building Splash Mountain based on a movie we would not show was not a great idea,” Mangum said on the podcast. “It was a horrible idea.”
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The Splash Mountain log flume ride debuted at Disneyland in 1989 with a backstory based on “Song of the South” — a controversial live-action/animated musical film that Disney shelved in the 1980s for perpetuating racist stereotypes.
Disney’s 1946 “Song of the South” was based on the “Uncle Remus” stories — a collection of folktales from the Southern plantation era compiled by Joel Chandler Harris and published in the 1880s.
Imagineering transformed the Splash Mountain rides at Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure in 2024.
Disney Legend Tony Baxter famously came up with the idea for Splash Mountain in 1983 while stuck in traffic on the I-5 Freeway as a way to repurpose the audio-animatronic figures from Disneyland’s America Sings attraction.
Baxter stood by his decision to use “Song of the South” as the backstory for Splash Mountain during a 2023 interview on Zeitgeist’s Spirit of the Time video podcast.
“There was nothing in the ride that in any way was detrimental to anybody,” Baxter said on the podcast. “Whatever the controversy is that has come up with it is more related to what the film is. And I think we’re way overboard on that kind of sensitivity.”
Magnum knew Splash Mountain was a bad idea in the 1980s and worked on it anyway despite her reservations.
“I’m not proud of that,” Mangum said on the podcast. “I wouldn’t do it today. Neither would Disney, but we did it.”
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The lowest point in the Splash Mountain project occurred during the voice actor recording sessions for the “Song of the South” audio-animatronic figures in the attraction, according to Mangum.
“When we had that actor come in and do Brer Fox, that was so uncomfortable,” Mangum said on the podcast.
Clones of Splash Mountain were built in 1992 at the Magic Kingdom in Florida and Tokyo Disneyland in Japan.
Disney decided to remove the “Song of the South” theme from the Splash Mountain rides in Anaheim and Orlando during the COVID-19 closure of the parks and amid social justice protests across the United States sparked by the 2020 death of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis.
Both attractions were closed in 2023 and transformed into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure with a “Princess and the Frog” theme.
The 2009 “Princess and the Frog” film was celebrated as Disney’s first animated depiction of an African-American princess. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated feature and received two nods in the best original song category for “Almost There” and “Down in New Orleans.”
“It was the right thing,” Mangum said of the Tiana’s Bayou Adventure transformations.
Mangum, who grew up in Orange, started her Disney career with a part-time job at Disneyland while she was a student at Cal State Fullerton.
During her Imagineering career, Mangum worked on Radiator Springs Racers and Luigi’s Flying Tires in Cars Land at Disney California Adventure, Toy Story Land at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage at Disneyland and the Typhoon Lagoon and Blizzard Beach water parks at Walt Disney World.
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Mangum retired from Imagineering in 2018.