Pirates of the Caribbean

Opening Date: 1967

I wrote an entire Kotaku feature on why adding Captain Jack Sparrow to Pirates of the Caribbean attraction was a bad idea. Essentially, the designers took a ride that was a sprawling visual feast—more about atmosphere and ambience than The Story—and turned it into The Search for Captain Jack, by shoehorning his character into every scene. In Walt Disney World, the designers eliminated the entire end scene—where drunken pirates shoot their guns in the air—and replaced it with a single Jack Sparrow figure in a treasure room.

Since then, there have been additional changes to the ride. The most notable one came in 2018, when Disney redesigned the infamous auction scene. In its original incarnation, the pirates were auctioning off the town’s women to the highest bidders, and the pirates encouraged a redheaded woman to lift her skirt . Now, the pirates are auctioning off the town’s valuables, and the redheaded woman is a pirate herself, holding a gun in one hand and a bottle of rum in the other.

This, combined with decades-old changes to the pirates chasing women in the following scene, led to widely mocked complaints that Disney was now “woke.” Critics criticized these alterations as the product of a top-down liberal agenda, rather than a reasonable response to a society-wide shift in social norms and cultural awareness.