Disney Imagineer responds to Snow White ride backlash by explaining plot of Snow White
The Disneyland community has been rocked by controversy this past week ever since the park unveiled a redesigned version of classic ride Snow White’s Scary Adventure, replacing it with a more technologically advanced version called Snow White’s Enchanted Wish. The problem, though (as laid out by Katie Dowd and Julie Tremaine in a piece for SFGate), is that rather than ending with the dramatic death of the Evil Queen, like in the original version of the ride, it now ends with the Prince kissing the sleeping Snow White—as in the non-consensual “true love’s kiss” that only one person involved in is even aware of, a.k.a. the thing that makes the original movie problematic. Unlike the “‘wokeness’ is ruining Disney World” bullshit, it’s sort of like if Disney had replaced Splash Mountain with a second Song Of The South ride that didn’t try to hide anything racist.
So people are unhappy with that, and then people are mad that other people are mad, and now Disney Imagineer Jim Shull has chimed in (via Entertainment Weekly) with a halfhearted defense of the changes to the ride that basically amounts to him saying “that’s what happens in the movie.” (He’s right, of course, because that is what happens in the movie, but that’s also The Problem.) Shull notes that people are “allowed to dislike the story,” but he notes that the “Imagineering team did a spectacular job” at least. That’s fair, since it should be Disney’s job to stop making movies about kissing people while they’re asleep, while the Imagineers should just focus on finding new and exciting ways to carry Disney fans around in a little car, but surely somebody along the way should’ve objected to framing an entire ride around a thing that people have a lot more objections to now than they did 80 years ago.
Or maybe it’s about balance, and Disney is making an effort to keep its bad stuff and good stuff equal? Or maybe it should’ve kept the old ending where a bad lady dies?