After-Action Report: The Jungle Cruise

My last After-Action Report was about something very new at Disneyland, namely the Fantasyland Theatre show, “Mickey and the Magical Map.” This one is about something very old at Disneyland—maybe the oldest thing, depending upon how you define “oldest” and “thing” and for that matter “at Disneyland.”

A common trivia item among Disneyland fans is that the Jungle Cruise is the “first” ride. This seems to mean not that it was the first one to open—it shared Opening Day status with 17 other attractions, many of which are still in operation—but that it was the first thing Walt Disney conceived of and decided that he definitely wanted for his park while it was in the early planning stages.

The thing is, I'm not sure this factoid is precisely true. Oh sure, a jungle river ride with canopied boats appears in all the concept sketches, including the really famous one by Herb Ryman that Walt used to pitch the idea to his investors:

But this sprawling hub-and-spoke design with all the separate themed lands was not the first concept art ever produced for a Disney park. In the early Fifties, Walt was considering a much more restrained park in Burbank:

When I study this sketch, I see...well, I see Frontierland, actually—Old West-style buildings and obvious precursors to the Mark Twain, Disneyland Railroad, Stagecoach, and Indian Village. But no Jungle Cruise.

Now, this doesn't mean the Cruise wasn't the first ride Walt Disney thought up. It could be that the site they were looking at didn't have room for the vast jungle-river adventure ride he always wanted, and that ultimately prompted the move to Anaheim. Or it could be that the decision to move came first, and the Jungle Cruise was the first thing Walt dreamed up for Disneyland, rather than transferring over from the Burbank plan. See, this is why it's so important to define all our terms.

But in any case, the Jungle Cruise has been up and running as long as Disneyland itself has, and it remains popular to this day...not Space Mountain-popular, but probably Peter Pan's Flight-popular. And that's kind of odd. It's not a thrill ride like the Mountains, nor an immersive narrative extravaganza like Pirates of the Caribbean or the Haunted Mansion. From time to time—most recently in 2005—it gets revamped with new scenes and effects, but the overall presentation remains distinctly, even deliberately, cheesy. It has even, barring a few temporary promotions, resisted the current trend of cramming crowd-pleasing characters into every ride that doesn't already have them. How has it not shriveled into total obscurity and been scrapped or grossly overhauled? Especially considering its immediate competition—the extraordinary Indiana Jones Adventure, which boasts thrills and outstanding effects and a successful film tie-in.

Well, for starters, having Indy as a neighbor probably helps the Jungle Cruise more than hurts it. It's not like you can only go on one or the other during a given trip, and I bet plenty of people approach Indy, see that hour-plus wait time (or that it has broken down, an unfortunately common occurrence these days), and happily pass it over in favor of the 25-minute queue next door.

But the main factor keeping the Jungle Cruise alive is its one really unique trait: the skipper and their live spiel.

Something a lot of people don't realize about Disneyland—and Upper Management realizes, but is trying like hell to subvert—is that it is not primarily a tourist attraction. It's a locals' attraction. Most of the people who walk through those gates have been there before and will come back again. Most of them will go home to their own beds after the day is over. Under these circumstances, it's important that the park remain able to surprise people even after they have become familiar with it. That's what's up with the three doors on the Indiana Jones Adventure. That's what's up with Star Tours 2.0 and its random adventure sequences.

The Jungle Cruise kicks both of them to the curb.

It's not the only ride to be presented by a Cast Member giving a live spiel, but it's the only one where that spiel is largely improvised. The Storybook Land host/ess works from a rigid script, too twee for color or humor. The Jungle Cruise jokes are also about 95% scripted (in that they are drawn from a list of established jokes), but the choice of which joke to use for a given scene is up to the skipper...and that remaining 5% is a goldmine of potential. The skipper also has a great deal of leeway in choosing their tone—anything from world-weary and sarcastic to cheerful-almost-to-the-point-of-mania—and the way this affects their delivery of a given joke adds another dimension of variety.

The upshot is that the Jungle Cruise is the only attraction at Disneyland that is practically guaranteed to be different every time. This no doubt accounts in part for its longevity with experienced Southern California guests.

Speaking of experienced guests, there's another aspect to the Jungle Cruise that helps its popularity: It is effectively the only post-modernist attraction in Disneyland. Post-modernism, in this context, is basically what you get when an audience gets so familiar with the media it is consuming that the best or only way for it to remain entertaining is to acknowledge its status as a work of media. The Jungle Cruise as we know it today is a complete parody of its original self, and it's not shy about spoofing the rest of the park it's in, either. The skippers gleefully reference the artificiality of the whole thing—the animals are animatronics, they themselves are following a script which they will repeat dozens of times throughout the day, and the ride itself isn't really in a jungle but in a theme park, which in turn is in a major metropolitan area. They poke fun at their coworkers, and even sometimes at the guests.

The odd thing is that other experiments in post-modernism have been tried at various Disney parks, but they usually aren't received well.* Yet the Jungle Cruise thrives. Part of this must be its age; it has existed for 60 years at this point and has damn well earned the privilege of being sarcastic and self-referential. It was snarky long before snark was standard, and thus its continued indulgence in snark doesn't come across as an attempt to be “hip and edgy” for cynical modern guests, but just the way the Jungle Cruise is.

And I think part of it is that there's only one of it (per park, that is). The rest of Disneyland cultivates an air of total sincerity, not necessarily in the sense of trying to make you literally believe it's all real, but in the sense of reassuring you that it's okay to suspend your disbelief and frolic in your fantasies of pirates and princesses and spacemen. The world we live in is often grim and definitely jaded as a rule, dominated by an attitude that caring and dreaming isn't cool. When we need a break from all that, we can go to Disneyland and enjoy some unironically childlike delights without feeling foolish. When that start to cloy somewhere around two in the afternoon, we can hop in line for the Jungle Cruise and get a nice dose of reality (and a break from sun and walking).

But we don't want the Cruise's brand of hipster cynicism to start cropping up elsewhere in the park—that would spoil the system. As long as the Jungle Cruise is unique, we can safely revel in the uncomplicated fantasy offered by the rest of Disneyland until we decide we need that cold shower. If the Jungle Cruise attitude begins to spread, we'll never know where and when we might be yanked out of the fantasy and asked to resume our outer-world ennui and we won't be able to relax...thus defeating the purpose of the Disneyland visit in the first place. Or to put it another way, the Jungle Cruise has evolved into a sort of designated “mockery break.” What happens in the jungle, stays in the jungle.

The Jungle Cruise is a true Disneyland classic. There has literally never been a time when the park was open but it didn't exist...and unlike most attractions with such a distinguished service record, it trades only on its own reputation, not that of a well-known movie or character. It deserves respect for that alone...even if it's not, technically, the oldest thing at Disneyland.

* See for example Orlando's retool of the Enchanted Tiki Room, which was frankly insulting to the history of the attraction and was sharply rejected by guests.