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Niles: Jungle Cruise changes get Disneyland on the right side of history

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Theme parks should seek to entertain guests, not insult them.
With its announced changes to the Jungle Cruise ride, Walt Disney Imagineering is taking another step toward getting on the right side of history. But will Disney ever get there? Disney said that it will change the Jungle Cruise rides at Disneyland and Walt Disney World to add a new story line and remove what sources in the company called negative depictions of indigenous people. We cannot judge Disney’s Jungle Cruise specific changes until we see them, but Disney did do the right thing in deciding to make a change. Jungle Cruise always was intended to be corny. There is nothing serious about this fake cruise through a fake jungle to look at fake animals. It’s a joke — brought to life by the spiel of its real-life skipper. But one generation’s joke can become another generation’s insult. So it is with the attraction’s caricatures of African natives. There’s a saying that tradition is peer pressure by the dead. Just because past generations of Disneyland fans laughed at Jungle Cruise should not force the company to deliver the same experience to a new generation that cringes at the racist symbolism those past generations missed, or worse, embraced.

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