Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise is about to be updated to feel more inclusive and less racially insensitive:
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 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.”
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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 dimwitted, humor that in the 1950s and 1960s was troublesome and today reeks of racism.
It is “horrifyingly racist” to depict the natives living in the jungle as savages. Or as hostile to the imperialist colonizers.
All I have to say about this whole idea is “So?”.
Everybody does this shit, everywhere. Why the hell should I feel guilty because I’m white, of European descent, and we got there first? Nothing stopped any of these “exploited colonial” types from doing what the Japanese did, and getting their shit together sufficiently to enable telling the Eurotrash to feck off. The vast majority of the ones who didn’t were so backwards and internecine about their internal relations that they had significant fractions which welcomed the Euros in, and helped them. What does that tell you about the conditions prevailing there?
It’s like trying to guilt me for what the Spaniards did in Central America or the Andes… Seriously? WTF? You’re OK with “indigenous practices” that included human sacrifice? The Aztecs had industrial-scale operations going that would have had the Nazis taking careful notes, and the Inca used to take children up into the mountains to freeze to death in order to appease their imaginary gods… And, I’m supposed to feel bad we stopped that?
All I can say to the politically correct is “F**k off…”.
Suttee was a bad thing. Child sacrifice was a bad thing, and so was cutting out the hearts of people on top of a goddamn pyramid. I refuse to feel the least little bit of angst that the European conquests ended that crap, and if it wiped out a lot of other crap, tough shit. Those horror shows needed to end, same as the primitive “way of life” that the American Indian had going. Any reading of pre-Columbian history on this continent comes out as a horror show, period–Whatever replaced that crap was and is objectively better. We’re not killing people to satisfy the dark lusts of some priest-cult, nor are we dying in job lots because of the periodic famines and disasters that sweep through this God-forsaken continent.
I am so damn tired of this crap, and one of these days, the majority of the country is going to feel the way I do, and wipe these asshole guilt-mongers off the face of the earth. Pretty much the same way we did the Aztecs, and with the same amount of apology.
We wipe out the guilt mongers or they wipe out us. Their guilt mongering against Whites, and only Whites, has the purpose of justifying our genocide, which historians will date to 2020 and “erasing whiteness.” Anti-racist is code for anti-white.
Kirk nails it. The long course of human history is nothing but war, conflicts, slavery, genocide, etc. Somehow all of this is dumped at the feet of white western civilization and America in particular. F**k these liberal progressive bastards. Equating the advancements of European civilization to Sub-Saharan African tribes or equatorial cannibals has only one purpose… to destroy our civilization. None of these progressives promoting this crap live among the diverse populations in the urban democratic hell holes of Chicago, Atlanta or Camden that are basically third world societies they admire so much.
Are they going to omit that bit of imperialism where the British abolish slavery?
Allen, yes, the British abolishing slavery was the biggest thing imperialism did. And it was imperialism. Castlereagh pays a 100K bribe to the Spanish foreign minister to abolish slavery, Spanish American slaveholders raise giant slave armies to run out the Spanish, the slave armies revolt against slavery, the British move in and trade with liberated ex-Spanish America with the Monroe Act for a revolting colonial beard. The Brits spent the next hundred years knocking over Burma, the rest of India, any Arab stuff that looked useful, all while abolishing slavery. Propaganda, but they said what they meant and did what they said. Humble the Proud, Give Pride to the Humble was as Imperial as Divide and Conquer when when Rome did it, when the Brits did it, and when the Communist International did it.