“It’s time — laissez les bons temps rouler!”
After four years of construction, Princess Tiana is finally here.
Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, a Disney attraction featuring Princess Tiana in "The Princess and the Frog" movie, is gearing up to open on June 28 at Walt Disney World in Orlando, the theme park announced in a blog on Monday.
A similar attraction with a thrilling 50-foot drop on the ride will also be ready to open in Anaheim’s Disneyland later this year.
Get top local stories in Southern California delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC LA's News Headlines newsletter.
Here's what to expect
- Tiana’s Bayou Adventure tells a story that happens a year after the events in the movie, “The Princess and the Frog.” The audience will get to see immersively how Tiana’s life unfolds after the success of Tiana’s Palace, a restaurant she has always dreamed of.
- Although the old theme of Splash Mountain was replaced, the iconic big drop remains in the new Tiana’s version of the water ride. The 52-foot-plunge-down at the end is one of the fastest rides at Disneyland, going 45 miles per hour.
- The attraction also features “some of Disney’s most advanced Audio-Animatronics figures,” including Louis the frog, one of the largest dynamic figures Imagineering has ever built in Disneyland, the team mentioned in a blog.
- While mixing original and familiar soundtracks from the movie, Disney will also feature new music in the attraction, most notably the song “Special Spice,” with vocals by Anika Noni Rose, who originally voiced Princess Tiana more than a decade ago.
As Disney’s first Black princess animated in 2009, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure would be replacing the old water ride Splash Mountain that themed the 1946 movie “Song of the South,” which has been criticized for portraying racial stereotypes and glorifying plantation life.
After the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota in 2020, Disney officially announced the transformation of Splash Mountain ride into Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, just as many companies across the U.S. were remodeling their decades-old brands amid Black Lives Matter protests.
