Splash Mountain Area Music — Frontierland, Magic Kingdom

Before you ever reached the drop, Splash Mountain started working on you in the queue and along the Frontierland walkways — with this: an hour-long loop of the mountain’s music, played as bluegrass. Banjo, fiddle and guitar pick through the Song of the South score in arrangements that slow the whole land down to a front-porch pace.

The loop is built from the film’s three big numbers — “How Do You Do?”, “Everybody’s Got a Laughing Place” and “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” — stretched, swapped and reprised so the music never quite repeats while you’re standing in it. It is the sound of the Briar Patch before the briars: cheerful, unhurried, and just a little bit sly about where the path is leading.

Splash Mountain opened at the Magic Kingdom on October 2, 1992, and took its final plunge on January 22, 2023. The mountain has since been rethemed as Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, and this loop retired with the old ride — which makes this hour of it a piece of preserved Frontierland. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, one more time.