Splash Mountain
Of all the ride recordings on this site, this is the one that plays like a storybook. This post holds the complete Splash Mountain ride audio from the Magic Kingdom — beginning to end, from the first banjo notes of the loading area to the full Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah finale aboard the Zip-A-Dee Lady. Splash Mountain carried more pure music than any other ride in the park: three songs from Song of the South, a full cast of critter voices, and a story told in melody as much as in words.
Three Songs Carry Splash Mountain
The score leans on the 1946 film Song of the South, itself drawn from Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales. “How Do You Do?” opens the ride in sunshine, as Br’er Rabbit leaves home looking for adventure; “Ev’rybody’s Got a Laughing Place” turns sly as Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear close in; and “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” — the film’s Academy Award winner for Best Original Song — waits at the end, when the whole briar patch turns out to celebrate. Between the songs, vultures taunt from a lift hill, bees hum, and the river keeps time.
Photo: Mttbme, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
The ride began, oddly, as a name in search of an attraction: Michael Eisner wanted a log flume called Splash Mountain, tying it to Disney’s 1984 film Splash, and Imagineer Tony Baxter championed building it around Br’er Rabbit and the Song of the South critters instead. The Disneyland original opened on July 17, 1989, and the Magic Kingdom’s version followed on October 2, 1992 — the same day as its twin at Tokyo Disneyland. Riders floated through the story in hollowed logs, past dozens of Audio-Animatronic critters, until Chickapin Hill delivered the moment everyone remembers: a drop of fifty-two and a half feet at forty-five degrees, straight toward the briar patch below.
A Mountain Built Around Music
Plenty of attractions add songs to a ride; Splash Mountain was practically built out of them. Each scene lands on its musical cue — the tempo brightens when Br’er Rabbit is winning and sours when the briar patch closes in — which is why the complete audio works so well away from the park. It plays less like a soundtrack than like a sung-through stage musical. The concept had form, too: at Disneyland, many of the critters were veterans of America Sings, the Bicentennial revue whose animal cast Baxter rescued from a closed show and settled, happily, in the briar patch. You can follow the entire story with your eyes closed: the leaving, the chasing, the narrow escapes, and the homecoming celebration aboard the Zip-A-Dee Lady showboat at the end. Even the quiet stretches are scored: the loading area’s instrumental medley stitches all three songs together before the first log ever moves.
Photo: Laika ac, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).
The Last Splash
The Magic Kingdom’s Splash Mountain made its final run on January 22, 2023, closing a thirty-year life. The mountain, the flume and the drop all remain — the ride reopened on June 28, 2024 as Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, with a new story from The Princess and the Frog — but the Br’er Rabbit version now exists only in recordings like this one and in the area music loop that once played around the mountain, which has its own post here. For the mountain’s Frontierland neighbor, try the complete ride audio of Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.
Press play and take the whole trip: the songs are the ride, and the ride was the songs. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, indeed.