Jungle Cruise
| Jungle Cruise | |
|---|---|
| Park | Magic Kingdom |
| Land / area | Adventureland |
| Type | Guided boat ride |
| Opened | October 1, 1971 |
| Designer | Harper Goff / WED Enterprises
|
| Status | Operating |
Jungle Cruise is a guided boat ride in Adventureland at Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, Florida. Guests board canopy-topped riverboats for a tour of the great rivers of Asia, Africa and South America, passing Audio-Animatronic animals and jungle scenes while a live skipper delivers a continuous comic narration of puns and deadpan jokes. It opened with the park on October 1, 1971, as a version of the original Jungle Cruise at Disneyland in California, and it remains one of the few Disney attractions whose experience depends substantially on a live performer.
History
The original Jungle Cruise opened at Disneyland on July 17, 1955. Designer Harper Goff drew the look of its boats and boathouse from the 1951 film The African Queen, and the ride was at first played relatively straight, as a simulated nature expedition inspired by Walt Disney's True-Life Adventures documentaries. In the early 1960s Walt Disney had animator and gag writer Marc Davis add comic scenes — bathing elephants, a safari party treed by a rhinoceros — and the skippers' spiel grew steadily more jokey, setting the tone the ride has kept since.
Construction of the Florida version began in 1969, and the attraction was ready for Magic Kingdom's opening day. The Florida river is longer than California's and includes a major scene its predecessor lacks: a cruise through the flooded ruins of a Southeast Asian temple. The attraction's landscaping, grown from subtropical plantings chosen to read as deep jungle, has matured for over five decades behind berms that hide the rest of the park from the boats.
Changes have accumulated over the years. The queue was expanded and given an elaborate 1930s outpost treatment in the 1990s, acquiring a backstory about the Jungle Navigation Company, founded in the fiction by explorer Dr. Albert Falls. Since 2013, a holiday overlay, the Jingle Cruise, has dressed the boats, queue and spiel in Christmas decorations each season. In 2021 Disney completed a substantial reworking of several scenes on both coasts: figures depicting indigenous people as attackers or caricatures were removed, the treed safari party was restaged as a Jungle Navigation tour group — a skipper and four passengers with names and personalities — and the Trader Sam figure at the finale was replaced by a gift shop scene. The updated storyline follows the lost tour boat Kwango Kate and its crew along the river.
Experience
The queue occupies the Jungle Navigation Company's headquarters, a cluttered two-level outpost of crates, cages, expedition notices and a company radio station playing period music and announcements. At the dock, guests board one of a fleet of boats, each individually named, and take their seats around the skipper, who stands at the wheel — though the boats in fact run on a submerged guide system, leaving the skipper free to perform.
The roughly ten-minute journey is presented as a 10,000-mile voyage compressed into a single river system. It begins on the Amazon, among butterflies and the ruins of a riverside camp, then passes Inspiration Falls and goes behind Schweitzer Falls — the famous "backside of water" moment of the spiel. On the Congo, the boats find the lost party's camp ransacked by gorillas; on the Nile, they pass African elephants, lions guarding a sleeping zebra, and the treed tour group beneath a rhinoceros. A hippo pool, headhunter country and the temple — where tigers, snakes and treasure guard the dark interior — follow, before the boats return past the gift shop of Trader Sam and unload. Nearly every scene anchors a set of standard skipper jokes, but skippers improvise around the script, so no two cruises are identical.
In popular culture
A feature film, Jungle Cruise (2021), starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, adapted the attraction's setting, with Johnson playing a riverboat skipper.