Originally published at: Disney World's Country Bear Jamboree to be revamped | Boing Boing
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To be perfectly honest many of those early “original” IPs were, shall we say, inspired by popular non-Disney IPs of the time. The Jungle Cruise ride bears more that a little resemblance to Bogart’s boat in The African Queen (1951) which would have been fresh in the minds of the Imagineers working to design Disneyland just a year or two later.
As for Pirates of the Caribbean, Disney had made a successful Treasure Island movie in 1950, so who’s to say that the ride isn’t at least partially based on that IP?
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Disneyland got rid of those bears and never looked back.
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I don’t disagree that the Country Bears could use a refresh, but apparently they learned nothing from the Brand-oriented re-theming of the Tiki Room. When it burned down, Disney chose to restore it to its original form and it’s been more popular than the revamp ever was.
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But if you do look back at the right point in the bear ride that occupies that old real estate, there’s a tribute to it…
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and the Hungry Bear restaurant is undoubtedly a tribute.
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For the record, the songs weren’t written for the show. They were licensed and gathered from various existing country music sources:
Thanks,
Peter
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That’s… not a great start. Nashville is where “authentic” country goes to die.
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Like those other rides, the Country Bears attraction did eventually get a movie, but it was so poorly received that its Rotten Tomatoes score rests in between 2003’s Haunted Mansion movie and 2023’s Haunted Mansion movie. Of course none of those films came close to matching the Rotten Tomatoes score for 2021’s Muppets Haunted Mansion movie.
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Blood on the saddle and many of the other songs were legit
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I may be the only person on earth that enjoys The Country Bears movie!
The attraction definitely needs some updates. When I was at Disney World, it was pretty raggedy looking. And they needed to re-launch it at the beginning because they couldn’t get it to work right. Also, we thought we’d at least escape the heat for a little bit, but the air conditioning was not working.
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Country Bear Jamboree in Japanese at Tokyo Disney is pretty wonderful. Here’s hoping that its somewhat-independent status means that it can buck the trend of enshitification that’s been afflicting the parks in the US for the last couple of decades.
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So in EPCOT, the Living Seas pavilion became The Seas with Nemo & Friends. The Maelstrom ride in EPCOT’s Norway pavilion became Frozen Ever After
Great examples of two different ways of doing things. The Nemo involvement in the Seas exhibit makes it better. It’s much more kid-friendly now, with the Crush part of the event my personal favorite (and I have some hilarious video from our last trip there with our little one). It has all the old plus Nemo on top.
Meanwhile, the Norway one is basically you going through the Frozen movie instead of experiencing much of Norwegian experience outside of “hey, they have snow!”
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This reminds me of the frightening animatronic bears that used to play at Showbiz Pizza, but of course that was Country Bear Jubilee, not Country Bear Jamboree. Totally different!
That’s so downtempo I had to check the playback speed!
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