With the new Zootopia: Better Zoogether show premiering at Animal Kingdom, I got to thinking about recent reimagining wins and losses. And as much as I was hesitant to embrace it at first, having grown up with the original, I think nothing was a bigger win than the new Country Bear Jamboree.
Was it hard to lose the original? Absolutely. The Jamboree opened with Walt Disney World itself on October 1, 1971, and was one of the last projects personally greenlit by Walt. It was originally conceived for the never-built Mineral King ski resort in California, but when plans for the resort were let go the idea of the singing bears that Marc Davis originally imagined for there was too good to let go. The bears were reimagined for Magic Kingdom’s Frontierland, and the rest is history.
Having grown up on the original, and being perhaps Liverlips’ biggest fan, it was a hard pill to swallow when we found out we’d be losing My Woman Ain’t Pretty (But She Don’t Swear None), Little Buford, and Blood on the Saddle to some of Disney’s better known songs. But, to quote Baby’s father in Dirty Dancing, when I’m wrong I’ll say I’m wrong. And the new show is great. The country renditions of songs like Try Everything and A Whole New World are fantastic, and every time we’ve been in since it reopened it’s been packed full of people, including parents and their kids, laughing, singing, clapping along, and just generally making their own memories there.
Just seeing so much life in the space speaks volumes.