Disney Announces Opening Window for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, Reveals New Tiana Animatronic

The bayou’s coming to Disney World, and sooner than expected: Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, the first ride based on the 2009 Disney film The Princess and the Frog, will open in the Magic Kingdom this summer. The redesigned version of Splash Mountain was first announced in June 2020, and is on pace to open four years later, and about a year and a half after the old ride closed.

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure swaps out the Georgia swamp of Splash Mountain for Tiana’s home of New Orleans. It’ll take guests through a new story starring Tiana and other characters from The Princess and the Frog, with the successful restaurateur asking guests to help her search for a special new ingredient to celebrate Mardi Gras. After a leisurely boat ride featuring characters both old and new, the trip will inevitably end with a 50-foot plunge into the murky swamp below.

In addition to the ride’s opening window, Disney also revealed a first look at a new Tiana animatronic coming to the ride. It’s one of a number of new animatronics guests will encounter during their bayou adventure. As a dedicated fan of theme parks and their robots (as, indeed, all upstanding people should be), this brief glimpse at Tiana in action has got me all hepped up to ride this thing as soon as it opens. Who could resist a high-tech robotic alligator playing a trumpet, as we’re sure to get with this ride? Take a gander at Tiana below, and just imagine the animatronic possibilities with Princess and the Frog‘s cast.

@disneyparks FIRST LOOK 👀 at one of the new Audio-Animatronics figures coming to Tiana’s Bayou Adventure ✨💚 #Disney #DisneyParks #DisneyWorld #Tiana #TianasBayouAdventure #DisneyNews #MardiGras #Technology ♬ original sound – Disney Parks

Tiana’s Bayou Adventure is also coming to Disneyland at some point this year, where it’ll be part of an expanded New Orleans Square that also includes the already-open Tiana’s Palace restaurant. And hey, if you really miss the original Splash Mountain and its Song of the South characters that bad, you can always book a trip out to Tokyo Disneyland; that’s the only version of the old ride still in existence.

Part of me will always miss the original Splash Mountain, but as I’ve written here before, it was absolutely time for the ride to be changed. In fact, it’s still baffling that it was ever built at all, considering the movie it’s based on was already effectively disowned by Disney a few years before the ride originally opened. It remains to be seen if Tiana’s Bayou Adventure will capture the sheer joyousness that made Splash Mountain so special, but it’s a much better movie and character to base a ride on, and future generations will no doubt love it just as my own loved Splash Mountain.