Latest news with #Tiana
Black America Web
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
You Geaux, Girl! Princess Tiana Is Taking Her Enchanted Talents On A Nationwide ‘Joyful Celebration' Tour In 2027
Source: Walt Disney World A timeee was had at Disney's Big Easy brunch experience during Essence Fest 2025 in NOLA where creatives from Walt Disney Imagineering and The Children's Museum of Indianapolis announced Tiana's Joyful Celebration–a nationwide traveling exhibition coming to a museum near you in 2026. The innovative exhibition will allow visitors to help Tiana with her community parade through a fun-filled series of interactive experiences inspired by Tiana's Bayou Adventure attraction which launched at both Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort last year. Source: Disney Beginning March 7, 2026, the exhibition kicks off at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis–the largest children's museum in the world–before expanding to 12 additional cities during a nationwide tour in 2027. Surrounded by love and wonder at NOLA's famed Dooky Chase's restaurant, guests were treated to delicious delicacies along with a special unveiling of concept art of the exhibition and a photo moment with Princess Tiana herself. Source: Disney Between beignets and buttered biscuits, we chatted with visionary Carmen Smith, Senior Vice President, Creative Development – Product/Content & Inclusive Strategies, who gushed about the upcoming exhibition which extends Tiana's beloved story beyond the parks. Source: Disney 'We want people who may not know her to get to know this beautiful princess who is full of strength and vigor and pride and joy,' said Smith who underscored the importance of bringing Tiana to families who may not be able to make it to the parks just yet. 'What makes [Tiana] so unique is she lives in all of us,' she added. 'This is a character that people identify with–that people from all walks can aspire to.' Building on the success of Tiana's Bayou Adventure, the Disney brand continues to thrive, especially at Disneyland Resort which celebrated its 70th Anniversary this week. Bustling with the brightest blues and pinkest pinks, the storied park brought together starry-eyed guests for an epic celebration at the happiest place on Earth. 'I'm excited!' said Sybil Crum, Vice President of Marketing & Commercial Strategy at Disneyland Resort, about the future of Disneyland Resort. 'I don't think there's any better way to describe it–just really excited. Happy. Grateful. Thinking about what's next–Walt Disney had a great quote, 'Disneyland will never be finished as there's imagination left in the world,' and there's plenty of imagination left.' Source: Disneyland Resort For more info on all things Disney Parks, click here. The post You Geaux, Girl! Princess Tiana Is Taking Her Enchanted Talents On A Nationwide 'Joyful Celebration' Tour In 2027 appeared first on Bossip. SEE ALSO You Geaux, Girl! Princess Tiana Is Taking Her Enchanted Talents On A Nationwide 'Joyful Celebration' Tour In 2027 was originally published on
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Disneyland at 70: artists on the park's five best rides – and why they still captivate
A visit to Disneyland can be an exhausting experience. The line for a ride can be hours long; there are hordes of overstimulated children and the sheer quantity of gift shops is overwhelming. When the park first opened, on 17 July 1955, an adult ticket cost $1 and kids were 50 cents: now a single day's entry for one person can easily run $200 or more. Despite all the kitsch and cartoon capitalism, though, Disneyland still delivers moments of actual magic, and that's largely due to the inventiveness of its theme park rides. Disneyland's most beloved attractions are not simply rollercoasters or carousels – they're enduring works of immersive art. Teams of visionary designers and fabricators have collaborated to make and remake these rides over the decades: some popular rides from the park's opening in 1955, such as the Jungle Cruise and the Mark Twain Riverboat, are still in operation, while the park's newest ride, inspired by Tiana, Disney's first Black princess, opened just months ago. Alongside its beloved mid-century relics, such as Sleeping Beauty's Castle, Disneyland has constructed new 'lands' to woo new fandoms, including a replica of Batuu, the smuggler's outpost on the Outer Rim of the Star Wars galaxy, which features new tech and more interactive Star Wars rides. Disneyland's new work and its seven-decade creative legacy continues to inspire some of today's leading experience design and immersive theater practitioners. 'You could take any single medium from any of these rides and it would most obviously be art – whether it's sculpture, scenic painting, the sound design, the storytelling,' argues Vince Kadlubek, a co-founder of Meow Wolf, an American art collective that has built interactive art experiences in five cities, including Las Vegas, Nevada, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. But the fact that many of Disney's rides have been designed with children in mind means their creative merit and ambition is often discounted. 'Why is fun not part of art?' Kadlubek asked. 'Why is joy and play not a part of art? Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a UK-based immersive theater company responsible for transformative hits like Sleep No More, agreed. A Disney ride 'is a complete hybrid of all the disciplines, and will deploy everything simultaneously', Barrett said. And with an amusement park ride 'you're feeling alive in a way you very rarely are when you experience single-discipline art, because you're physically present'. Even the long wait times for Disneyland rides have been turned into opportunities for creative innovation, Barrett noted. Disney's 'mastery of queue design', particularly on newer rides, is an inspiration: 'It's not just about the ride, it's about the anticipation building up to that ride.' The park turned 70 this week, and to mark the occasion we talked to artists, designers and historians about five of Disneyland's greatest artistic masterpieces, and why these rides continue to inspire new generations of storytellers. It's a Small World is a placid ride, without big thrills or surprises: visitors sit in small boats and glide past arrangements of animatronic figures dressed as children from cultures around the world. The ride's tinkling theme song plays overhead. But six decades after it first premiered as part of the 1964 World's Fair, the ride still has long lines. The mid-century aesthetic of the ride's building, scenes and characters, is mesmerizing in its detail. Mary Blair, the concept artist for Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, designed the look of the ride and chose its bold colors; Rolly Crump designed its gleaming tower and the Sherman brothers, who wrote many of Disney's hits, composed its signature song, with major feedback from Walt Disney himself. The rides' themes of youthful innocence and longing for global cooperation still resonate, said Bethanee Bemis, who curated an exhibit at the Smithsonian and wrote a book on the reflection of American history in Disney's parks. 'All children share the universal language of play,' Bemis said. Today, some of the cultural symbols chosen in the 1960s may read as racial or ethnic stereotypes: there is a snake charmer in one scene, and crocodiles and hyenas in an African tableau. Disneyland has tried to strike a balance between preserving the ride as a nostalgic time capsule and meeting more contemporary expectations about cultural representation, Bemis said. Some of its most successful updates have been adding new touches of cultural authenticity, like including traditional parol lanterns during the Christmas season for Filipino visitors. Long before it inspired the early 2000s film franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean was a standalone ride – one that put visitors in a boat and sent them on a seafaring journey. The ride is the last one that Walt Disney worked on himself – and it's ambitious, both in the quality of its audio-animatronic pirate figures and its narrative sweep – not to mention the engineering challenge of digging the tunnels underground necessary to build the ride, Bemis said. The experience begins gently, with riders drifting through the dusk of a bayou and listening to a banjo play. Then the boats descend into darkness, and with a sudden drop, emerge into the dangerous world of the pirates where cannonballs fly overhead, ships glide past cities on fire and pirate crews fight and carouse onshore. While the ride has been updated with details from the more recent film franchise – such as animatronic figures made to look like Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp's character in the films – what makes it work is the attention to the ride's fundamentals, designers said, from the pirate costumes that the ride attendants wear, to the temperature at different phases of the ride: humid and warm in the bayou, and then chilly when riders plummet into the skeleton-filled 'Davey Jones' locker' under the sea. 'Somehow, they have manipulated the environment to set mood and tone through temperature and humidity control,' said Noah Nelson, the publisher of No Proscenium, a publication that covers the US immersive experience design industry. He called the technique 'super effective'. 'Every single aspect of these rides has been designed with the most care and attention. I don't think we go inside a lot of places like that these days,' said Jeff Stark, who teaches a course on design for narrative space at New York University. 'The craftsmanship that you encounter inside of Disney – the level of thought, of preparation – matches what it is like to go inside a cathedral. The amount of care that was put into Pirates of the Caribbean is far more than the care that was put into the church that I grew up going to.' The Haunted Mansion begins with a group initiation in the dark tower room of an old Victorian house. The tower appears to grow to uncanny heights, as the oil paintings of ancient dignitaries on the walls expand to reveal their deaths. 'We have 999 happy haunts, but there's room for a thousandth,' a deep voice asks. 'Any volunteers?' The ghostly figures and spooky tricks of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion were created in the 1960s, and they're decidedly low-tech, made with old-fashioned smoke-and-mirror devices like Pepper's Ghost. That only makes the ride more appealing, said Kathryn Yu, a Los Angeles-based game designer. 'In a world that's increasingly digital, it is charming to see these physical effects in person.' As candles flicker, visitors are led through the dark halls to the tombstone-shaped 'doom buggies' that will whisk them through one haunted scene after another: a ghostly banquet hall, a seance, a graveyard. Many Disneyland's first 'imagineers' came from backgrounds in animation, 'so they really understood cinematography, and the perspective of the audience as a camera', Yu said. In The Haunted Mansion, as in the Pirates ride, the designers packed each spooky vignette with 'character development, backstory, an emotional connection to one of the ghosts'. One of the famous moments in the Haunted Mansion is when the 'doom buggies' swing backwards before descending into the graveyard, putting viewers on suddenly their backs, staring upwards at skeletal branches, as if they themselves are being lowered into a grave. In creating Punchdrunk's latest experience, Viola's Room, a gothic mystery now playing in New York, the British team repeatedly referenced Disney rides, Barrett said, including discussing how to create theatrical surprises that would affect viewers' bodies in the same way as a sudden drop in a roller coaster. (One tactic they're trying is asking visitors to go through the experience barefoot.) The 2006 cartoon movie Cars, a toddler favorite, might not seem like the most inspirational source material for an immersive work of art. But Radiator Springs Racers, Disneyland's Cars-inspired ride, is massive in its ambition: it's nothing short of a full recreation of the red rock spires of the American south-west, complete with native plants and the replica neon-lined main street of a small desert town. (At a reported $200m, it was also the most expensive Disneyland ride at the time it was built). If you visit Zion national park in Utah or Monument Valley in Arizona after seeing Radiator Springs Racers, Bemis, the Smithsonian curator, said, 'You feel like you've already seen the real thing.' The ride taps deeply into the American nostalgia for Historic Route 66 in the 1950s, Bemis said, an era of nostalgia that came too late for Walt Disney himself to appreciate, but that strikes a chord with the park's other tributes to small-town American life. 'It's really stunning work,' said Kadlubek, the Meow Wolf artist. While the ride ends with a shriek-inducing car race and includes plenty of interaction with fast-talking cartoon automobiles, it begins with a more contemplative cruise through the faux desert landscape. 'There's this really beautiful romanticism to it,' Kadlubek said. The most popular new ride in Disneyland's new Star Wars-themed area 'surpasses everything that's been attempted before' in experience design, Kadlubek argued, calling it 'ambitious to a pretty absurd degree'. The ride is set in a newly built area of the park, Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, that allows movie fans to visit a replica of the battered frontier planet of Batuu. There are bars, restaurants, a giant version of the Millennium Falcon and Storm Troopers who stalk the streets, occasionally interrogating visitors. Several designers who are Star Wars fans said the atmosphere feels eerily like being inside the films: Nelson said he's sometimes content just to sit in the replica Docking Bay 7, listening to audio of space ships streaming overhead, and drinking a cup of 'Caf,' as coffee is known in the Star Wars universe. 'My first time stepping into it, I felt like I came home,' he said. Rise of the Resistance tells an elaborate story that begins in the waiting line, where visitors are treated as new recruits to the resistance against the villainous First Order. After an early mission goes awry, they are taken captive. Costumed actors playing members of the First Order mock them while marching them off to an interrogation cell: members of the resistance have to break them out of prison, then lead them on a wild escape journey. The process of moving the visitors into the experience, and even getting them into the 'transports' they ride in, is deeply embedded in narrative. 'It goes from being a 3-minute ride to this 20-minute long saga. They really reinvented what we would expect from a ride,' Stark said. Under pressure from Harry Potter world at Universal Studios, Stark said, Disney introduced newer ride technology in Rise of the Resistance, leaning heavily on trackless ride vehicles, which are programmed to move the visitors through space without physical rails, creating new opportunities for ride tricks and surprises. But like the best early rides, what makes Rise of the Resistance thrilling is the accumulation of tiny details, Stark said, like the moment when 'the sparks from Kylo Ren's lightsaber are showering around you, and you feel like you're in this moment of threat'.
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Disneyland at 70: artists on the park's five best rides – and why they still captivate
A visit to Disneyland can be an exhausting experience. The line for a ride can be hours long; there are hordes of overstimulated children and the sheer quantity of gift shops is overwhelming. When the park first opened, on 17 July 1955, an adult ticket cost $1 and kids were 50 cents: now a single day's entry for one person can easily run $200 or more. Despite all the kitsch and cartoon capitalism, though, Disneyland still delivers moments of actual magic, and that's largely due to the inventiveness of its theme park rides. Disneyland's most beloved attractions are not simply rollercoasters or carousels – they're enduring works of immersive art. Teams of visionary designers and fabricators have collaborated to make and remake these rides over the decades: some popular rides from the park's opening in 1955, such as the Jungle Cruise and the Mark Twain Riverboat, are still in operation, while the park's newest ride, inspired by Tiana, Disney's first Black princess, opened just months ago. Alongside its beloved mid-century relics, such as Sleeping Beauty's Castle, Disneyland has constructed new 'lands' to woo new fandoms, including a replica of Batuu, the smuggler's outpost on the Outer Rim of the Star Wars galaxy, which features new tech and more interactive Star Wars rides. Disneyland's new work and its seven-decade creative legacy continues to inspire some of today's leading experience design and immersive theater practitioners. 'You could take any single medium from any of these rides and it would most obviously be art – whether it's sculpture, scenic painting, the sound design, the storytelling,' argues Vince Kadlubek, a co-founder of Meow Wolf, an American art collective that has built interactive art experiences in five cities, including Las Vegas, Nevada, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. But the fact that many of Disney's rides have been designed with children in mind means their creative merit and ambition is often discounted. 'Why is fun not part of art?' Kadlubek asked. 'Why is joy and play not a part of art? Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a UK-based immersive theater company responsible for transformative hits like Sleep No More, agreed. A Disney ride 'is a complete hybrid of all the disciplines, and will deploy everything simultaneously', Barrett said. And with an amusement park ride 'you're feeling alive in a way you very rarely are when you experience single-discipline art, because you're physically present'. Even the long wait times for Disneyland rides have been turned into opportunities for creative innovation, Barrett noted. Disney's 'mastery of queue design', particularly on newer rides, is an inspiration: 'It's not just about the ride, it's about the anticipation building up to that ride.' The park turned 70 this week, and to mark the occasion we talked to artists, designers and historians about five of Disneyland's greatest artistic masterpieces, and why these rides continue to inspire new generations of storytellers. It's a Small World is a placid ride, without big thrills or surprises: visitors sit in small boats and glide past arrangements of animatronic figures dressed as children from cultures around the world. The ride's tinkling theme song plays overhead. But six decades after it first premiered as part of the 1964 World's Fair, the ride still has long lines. The mid-century aesthetic of the ride's building, scenes and characters, is mesmerizing in its detail. Mary Blair, the concept artist for Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, designed the look of the ride and chose its bold colors; Rolly Crump designed its gleaming tower and the Sherman brothers, who wrote many of Disney's hits, composed its signature song, with major feedback from Walt Disney himself. The rides' themes of youthful innocence and longing for global cooperation still resonate, said Bethanee Bemis, who curated an exhibit at the Smithsonian and wrote a book on the reflection of American history in Disney's parks. 'All children share the universal language of play,' Bemis said. Today, some of the cultural symbols chosen in the 1960s may read as racial or ethnic stereotypes: there is a snake charmer in one scene, and crocodiles and hyenas in an African tableau. Disneyland has tried to strike a balance between preserving the ride as a nostalgic time capsule and meeting more contemporary expectations about cultural representation, Bemis said. Some of its most successful updates have been adding new touches of cultural authenticity, like including traditional parol lanterns during the Christmas season for Filipino visitors. Long before it inspired the early 2000s film franchise, Pirates of the Caribbean was a standalone ride – one that put visitors in a boat and sent them on a seafaring journey. The ride is the last one that Walt Disney worked on himself – and it's ambitious, both in the quality of its audio-animatronic pirate figures and its narrative sweep – not to mention the engineering challenge of digging the tunnels underground necessary to build the ride, Bemis said. The experience begins gently, with riders drifting through the dusk of a bayou and listening to a banjo play. Then the boats descend into darkness, and with a sudden drop, emerge into the dangerous world of the pirates where cannonballs fly overhead, ships glide past cities on fire and pirate crews fight and carouse onshore. While the ride has been updated with details from the more recent film franchise – such as animatronic figures made to look like Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp's character in the films – what makes it work is the attention to the ride's fundamentals, designers said, from the pirate costumes that the ride attendants wear, to the temperature at different phases of the ride: humid and warm in the bayou, and then chilly when riders plummet into the skeleton-filled 'Davey Jones' locker' under the sea. 'Somehow, they have manipulated the environment to set mood and tone through temperature and humidity control,' said Noah Nelson, the publisher of No Proscenium, a publication that covers the US immersive experience design industry. He called the technique 'super effective'. 'Every single aspect of these rides has been designed with the most care and attention. I don't think we go inside a lot of places like that these days,' said Jeff Stark, who teaches a course on design for narrative space at New York University. 'The craftsmanship that you encounter inside of Disney – the level of thought, of preparation – matches what it is like to go inside a cathedral. The amount of care that was put into Pirates of the Caribbean is far more than the care that was put into the church that I grew up going to.' The Haunted Mansion begins with a group initiation in the dark tower room of an old Victorian house. The tower appears to grow to uncanny heights, as the oil paintings of ancient dignitaries on the walls expand to reveal their deaths. 'We have 999 happy haunts, but there's room for a thousandth,' a deep voice asks. 'Any volunteers?' The ghostly figures and spooky tricks of Disneyland's Haunted Mansion were created in the 1960s, and they're decidedly low-tech, made with old-fashioned smoke-and-mirror devices like Pepper's Ghost. That only makes the ride more appealing, said Kathryn Yu, a Los Angeles-based game designer. 'In a world that's increasingly digital, it is charming to see these physical effects in person.' As candles flicker, visitors are led through the dark halls to the tombstone-shaped 'doom buggies' that will whisk them through one haunted scene after another: a ghostly banquet hall, a seance, a graveyard. Many Disneyland's first 'imagineers' came from backgrounds in animation, 'so they really understood cinematography, and the perspective of the audience as a camera', Yu said. In The Haunted Mansion, as in the Pirates ride, the designers packed each spooky vignette with 'character development, backstory, an emotional connection to one of the ghosts'. One of the famous moments in the Haunted Mansion is when the 'doom buggies' swing backwards before descending into the graveyard, putting viewers on suddenly their backs, staring upwards at skeletal branches, as if they themselves are being lowered into a grave. In creating Punchdrunk's latest experience, Viola's Room, a gothic mystery now playing in New York, the British team repeatedly referenced Disney rides, Barrett said, including discussing how to create theatrical surprises that would affect viewers' bodies in the same way as a sudden drop in a roller coaster. (One tactic they're trying is asking visitors to go through the experience barefoot.) The 2006 cartoon movie Cars, a toddler favorite, might not seem like the most inspirational source material for an immersive work of art. But Radiator Springs Racers, Disneyland's Cars-inspired ride, is massive in its ambition: it's nothing short of a full recreation of the red rock spires of the American south-west, complete with native plants and the replica neon-lined main street of a small desert town. (At a reported $200m, it was also the most expensive Disneyland ride at the time it was built). If you visit Zion national park in Utah or Monument Valley in Arizona after seeing Radiator Springs Racers, Bemis, the Smithsonian curator, said, 'You feel like you've already seen the real thing.' The ride taps deeply into the American nostalgia for Historic Route 66 in the 1950s, Bemis said, an era of nostalgia that came too late for Walt Disney himself to appreciate, but that strikes a chord with the park's other tributes to small-town American life. 'It's really stunning work,' said Kadlubek, the Meow Wolf artist. While the ride ends with a shriek-inducing car race and includes plenty of interaction with fast-talking cartoon automobiles, it begins with a more contemplative cruise through the faux desert landscape. 'There's this really beautiful romanticism to it,' Kadlubek said. The most popular new ride in Disneyland's new Star Wars-themed area 'surpasses everything that's been attempted before' in experience design, Kadlubek argued, calling it 'ambitious to a pretty absurd degree'. The ride is set in a newly built area of the park, Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, that allows movie fans to visit a replica of the battered frontier planet of Batuu. There are bars, restaurants, a giant version of the Millennium Falcon and Storm Troopers who stalk the streets, occasionally interrogating visitors. Several designers who are Star Wars fans said the atmosphere feels eerily like being inside the films: Nelson said he's sometimes content just to sit in the replica Docking Bay 7, listening to audio of space ships streaming overhead, and drinking a cup of 'Caf,' as coffee is known in the Star Wars universe. 'My first time stepping into it, I felt like I came home,' he said. Rise of the Resistance tells an elaborate story that begins in the waiting line, where visitors are treated as new recruits to the resistance against the villainous First Order. After an early mission goes awry, they are taken captive. Costumed actors playing members of the First Order mock them while marching them off to an interrogation cell: members of the resistance have to break them out of prison, then lead them on a wild escape journey. The process of moving the visitors into the experience, and even getting them into the 'transports' they ride in, is deeply embedded in narrative. 'It goes from being a 3-minute ride to this 20-minute long saga. They really reinvented what we would expect from a ride,' Stark said. Under pressure from Harry Potter world at Universal Studios, Stark said, Disney introduced newer ride technology in Rise of the Resistance, leaning heavily on trackless ride vehicles, which are programmed to move the visitors through space without physical rails, creating new opportunities for ride tricks and surprises. But like the best early rides, what makes Rise of the Resistance thrilling is the accumulation of tiny details, Stark said, like the moment when 'the sparks from Kylo Ren's lightsaber are showering around you, and you feel like you're in this moment of threat'.
Black America Web
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
Disney Dazzles With Melanin Magic, HBCU Pride & Bayou Blessings From Anaheim To Essence Fest
This summer, Disney is celebrating Black excellence coast to coast with two powerful initiatives: a historic HBCU celebration at Downtown Disney and a royal reveal at Essence Festival, spotlighting creativity and community for the culture. For the first time ever, Disney on the Yard, a program designed to build community among HBCU students and alumni, is bringing its vibrant West Coast YardFest to the Downtown Disney District on July 12, 2025, per a press release. The free, family-friendly event kicks off at 6 p.m. PT and will feature a live DJ, giveaways, and a show-stopping moment: the first-ever appearance of Drum Major Mickey Mouse and his HBCU Drum Major crew at Disneyland Resort, accompanied by the dynamic Brooklyn United Drumline. Guests are invited to rep their alma maters, don Divine Nine paraphernalia, or simply soak in the festive atmosphere near the Downtown Disney LIVE! stage and lawn. The event is open to the public and does not require theme park admission, though standard Downtown Disney parking rates apply, according to the release. Adding to the excitement, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., will hold its 2025 International Leadership Seminar just steps away at the Anaheim Convention Center from July 10 to 13, drawing over 9,600 members, per the press release. The timing presents a unique opportunity for sorority members to participate in both the leadership seminar and the cultural celebration. One of the event's key figures, Aramide Boatswain, who leads marketing and commercial strategy at Disneyland Resort and is a proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, played a major role in bringing this moment to life. In New Orleans, Disney delivered a major cultural announcement at the 2025 Essence Festival of Culture, unveiling Tiana's Joyful Celebration, a new nationwide traveling exhibition in collaboration with The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, according to Disney Parks. Source: Disney Parks / Disney Parks Inspired by the beloved Princess Tiana and rooted in the heart and soul of New Orleans, the interactive exhibit will take visitors on an immersive journey through music, food, crafts, and community traditions, all in the spirit of Tiana's Bayou Adventure attraction, which opened at Walt Disney World and Disneyland Resort in 2024. Source: Disney Parks / Disney Parks The exhibition will make its debut on March 7, 2026, at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis, recently named the No. 1 children's museum in the country by USA Today, and will travel to 12 additional cities beginning in 2027, per the announcement. Source: Disney Parks / Disney Parks In the exhibit storyline, guests will join Tiana's neighborhood crew as they prepare for a big Mardi Gras parade that's suddenly moved up. Everyone must come together to contribute their talents to help pull off the perfect celebration in time. As Disney continues to expand its cultural storytelling beyond the parks, these two initiatives reflect a powerful commitment to celebrating Black identity, heritage, and joy in all its forms. Source: Disney Parks / Disney Parks Stay tuned for more details on future Disney on the Yard events and city stops on the Tiana's Joyful Celebration national tour. The post Disney Dazzles With Melanin Magic, HBCU Pride & Bayou Blessings From Anaheim To Essence Fest appeared first on Bossip. SEE ALSO Disney Dazzles With Melanin Magic, HBCU Pride & Bayou Blessings From Anaheim To Essence Fest was originally published on
Axios
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Disney's new Princess Tiana exhibit to tour U.S.
Disney is taking its love letter to New Orleans on the road, starting in Indianapolis. Why it matters: Tiana's Bayou Adventure is the second-most popular ride at Walt Disney World, says Disney executive Carmen Smith, and is the inspiration for a traveling kid-friendly exhibit. The big picture: Disney is collaborating with the Children's Museum of Indianapolis and the Chase family on the new interactive Princess Tiana experience, executives announced over the weekend at Dooky Chase's Restaurant in New Orleans. Tiana is Disney's only Black princess and is based on the late chef Leah Chase. Stella Chase Reese and the Chase family worked with Disney on Tiana's Bayou Adventure ride for several years and are advising on the new exhibit too. How it works: Tiana's Joyful Celebration will open in March 2026 in Indianapolis. In the exhibit, Tiana and her critter friends are throwing a parade, but the time has been moved up and children need to help with the preparations. They'll grow pretend vegetables, cook gumbo, dress in costumes and help with music, says Jennifer Pace Robinson, the museum's president and CEO. The exhibit ends with a gazebo where children can sing and dance with Mama Odie. They also learn they are the special spice that was missing, Smith says. Zoom in: The Indianapolis museum also made an exhibit telling Ruby Bridges' school integration story. The New Orleans native is speaking at their 100th birthday celebration next month. What's next: The exhibit will travel to 12 cities, including Detroit, Tampa and Fort Worth, Pace Robinson says. The Louisiana Children's Museum in New Orleans currently doesn't have display space for it, says CEO Tifferney White.
