The Country Bear Jamboree Update Is One of Disney’s Worst Decisions Yet
Photos courtesy of Disney
UPDATE: The Country Bear Jamboree will close on Jan. 27, 2024, and reopen later in 2024 with the new show, which will feature “new, reinterpreted Disney tunes in different genres of country music – like bluegrass, pop-country, Americana, rockabilly and other styles,” the Disney Parks blog revealed on Jan. 9. The last day to experience the old show is Jan. 26, 2024.
There’s a true tragedy brewing in the redneck robot bear community: Last weekend Disney revealed that it’ll be updating the Country Bear Jamboree at the Magic Kingdom in 2024. The audio-animatronic Hee Haw riff about country-singing bears has been largely untouched since its 1971 debut. It’s been shortened, with two songs cut out, and it used to run a couple of seasonal shows that now only exist at Tokyo Disneyland’s version of the attraction, but what you’ll see at Disney World today is pretty much what you would’ve seen 50 years ago: a bunch of robot bears “performing” ‘60s country songs by artists like Buck Owens, Wanda Jackson and Tex Ritter. That might sound outdated, but I’d call it timeless, and the direction Disney is headed in is a disappointment.
The first major soundtrack overhaul in the show’s history will apparently replace those old country songs with classic Disney tunes performed in various country and western styles. The announcement played a snippet of one such song, a twangy version of “The Bare Necessities” from The Jungle Book. The new recording sounded perfectly fine, but adding it to the Country Bear Jamboree is a too-obvious choice that’s emblematic of one of the biggest problems facing the Disney parks over the last couple of decades. It also destroys the attraction’s sense of time and place and weakens its original concept, all just to further market Disney to customers who, based on the cost of the ticket they had to buy to get into the park, have probably already bought pretty deeply into Disney marketing.
Too often Disney strips away what makes its theme parks unique in favor of stories, characters, and music from its movies. Just look at the addition of Johnny Depp animatronics to Pirates of the Caribbean, or almost any of the changes to EPCOT and Disney’s Hollywood Studios over the last decade. Removing the songs that have always defined the Jamboree and become synonymous with its characters, just to turn it into one more opportunity to hear “classic Disney songs” in a theme park full of them, will undermine the whole point of the attraction. It’s a loving, lightly satirical mock celebration of country music and the Southern culture it arose from, heavily indebted to the time in which it was created: the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. The Hee Haw comparison would’ve been obvious even if the Country Bear song list didn’t include two Buck Owens numbers; it’s full of the cornpone humor that was popular on TV at the time, intentionally targeting the Southern audience that Disney expected its Florida theme park to heavily draw from.
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