disneyland’s pirates of the caribbean ride: on skeletons and stillness
The latest controversial change to Disneyland was unveiled today, and it’s a skeleton that moves in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. And the issue isn’t the new animatronic: the technology looks sophisticated and the scene is funny enough. The real problem is the storytelling.
Fantasy author Brandon Sanderson breaks down storytelling into three pillars: plot, character and setting. While there are many other valid ways of deconstructing stories into foundational elements, I’m going to use Sanderson’s pillars as a framework for this analysis of why the new skeleton animatronic does not fit into the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland.
Plot
The loose story of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride is that it takes you back in time to the golden age of piracy. From the warmth of present-day Blue Bayou and its restaurant, guests plunge into the chilling Dead Man’s Cove, where rest the skeletons of pirates who have met their unfortunate demise. Then, they proceed into the era of pirates, which begins explosively with the massive show scene of the cannon-firing pirate ship.
- Blue Bayou: present day, no pirates
- Dead Man’s Cove: dead pirates undone by their greed
- The Town: heyday of pirates pillaging and plundering
From a plot perspective, it’s very clear that a moving pirate animatronic should be in the third section of the ride, where pirates are running rampant. But, this new animatronic is a rework (“reimagining”, “plussing”, “adding new magic”) of a static skeleton in the ride’s Dead Man’s Cove sequence.
The animatronic shows the skeleton becoming human and then a skeleton again by removing and replacing a cursed Aztec gold coin (from the 2003 movie Pirates of the Caribbean movie, The Curse of the Black Pearl). The art style is cartoony, and the pirate’s movement is punctuated by grunting sound effects. But confusingly, this moving pirate appears before you get to the section where pirates are alive in the ride.
In a 2018 update to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, the redhead bride auction was famously removed. A lesser known change was the addition of a pirate, sometimes known as the “pirate robber”, at the end of the Dead Man’s Cove area, marking the transition from dead to alive. With a mirror trick, the static pirate robber transforms from skeleton to living pirate, and provides a thematic and physically located transition in the ride. Crucially, this character does not move.
No question about it, the location of the new skeleton animatronic before the transition pirate robber breaks the story flow of the ride. But it’s also a fundamental issue that the skeleton moves at all. This inconsistency disrupts the storytelling of Pirates of the Caribbean in another way.
Character
Disney has always been all about storytelling in their theme parks. It’s one of the company’s favourite buzzwords, and at this point every press release or announcement from Disney about changes will include the word “story”, probably more than once.
Sure enough, the Walt Disney Imagineering announcement video for the new pirate animatronic has Imagineer Joel saying:
Our pirate isn’t a new character. He’s actually the same character. We’ve seen him for the last 59 years, frozen in this moment of time as a skeleton. But now, using this new technology, we’re able to tell his full story, the story that’s been there all along, of him picking up the cursed gold and turning into a skeleton, and dropping it and turning him [sic] back into a human. And it’s this technology that’s enabled us to tell that full story.1
This statement is confusing and rather misleading in its attempt to reassure guests. First, it claims that the original static skeleton has existed in the ride for 59 years since its opening in 1967, “frozen in this moment of time as a skeleton.” But, being frozen in time and presented as a skeleton was the point. The central thesis of Pirates of the Caribbean, after all, is that “Dead Men Tell No Tales”.
Another strange part of the statement is how it insists that this particular pirate has a story we need to know, a “full story” about the cursed gold that was always there (it wasn’t really; the cursed Aztec gold story was invented for the Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl film). The pirates in the ride aren’t really individual characters, but an archetype. You’re not supposed to be wondering about the specific backstory of that one rum-swigging pirate with his leg hanging off the bridge, or the pirate in the striped shirt in the jail scene. What you see of them in the 30 seconds you pass by is enough to capture the fantastical idea of what pirates were like.
Did you think of each pirate as an individual?
X. Atencio: No, it was more a kind of “society” – a group of bad men interpreted in different ways. (X. refers to the “society” as “Dead men tell no tales!”)2
To truly tell a full story about a ride character means that guests need to follow that character’s arc. You get this in Peter Pan’s Flight, and even Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, both of which follow the characters through a story. This means that the main characters appear more than once in separate ride scenes, showing the progression of their story.
Thus, the only character that has a “full story” in Pirates of the Caribbean is Captain Jack Sparrow, who was added to the ride in 2006. It’s pretty shallow, as he’s just looking for a treasure map and then finds the treasure at the end, but he recurs throughout the ride and has a sense of progression, unlike the new skeleton animatronic.
Finally, the claim that the technology is what enabled the Imagineers to tell this character’s story is patently false. Advanced technology does not determine whether a story can be told, and Disneyland itself is an embodiment of that fact. Without the need for the “next-generation” technology, the skeleton character’s story was already told by the conceit of the ride itself. While those dead men in the grotto tell no tales, the ride takes you back to when the living pirates can tell their tales of how they ended up as those skeletons.
Providing context about the cursed gold and how it works to tell a “full story” is superfluous, and misses the point. In the end, it’s not the cursed gold that gets the pirate, but his greed when he was alive.
We don’t actually need to know about the cursed gold, but…
Setting
Before the 2018 refurbishment, Pirates of the Caribbean had ride audio throughout the Dead Man’s Cove scenes. The delightful Thurl Ravenscroft narration, as guests passed by the skeleton in question on his pile of gold, likely inspired the plot of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
Here’s the treasure room, a whole grotto, filled to gun holes with gold and jewels. Ah, but you’ve seen the cursed treasure now, and there’s little I can do.3
The following warning also references the cursed treasure as guests continue onwards past the pirate robber.
No fear have ye of evil curses, says you? Properly warned ye be, says I. Who knows when that devil curse will strike the beholders of this bewitched treasure? … Dead men tell no tales.3
While Dead Man’s Cove has always been spooky, the removal of Ravenscroft’s narration made the scene more eerie. Post-2018, Pirates has trusted the guest with the stories of the skeletons, whether or not they chose to interpret them through the lens of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie’s version of the cursed gold.
The haunting scenes where the guests were the only living people passing through were enhanced by the low lighting and the quiet background music track, not to mention how those skeletons remained unmoving and frozen in time. Echoes of “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me)” would drift by, and the sound of the waterfall and other boats’ muted screams would build the tension and suspense of the area.
The new skeleton animatronic drastically disrupts the contemplative atmosphere, first by moving, and perhaps worse, by making noises. That scene where guests are supposed to drift by the grotto and take in the sad skeleton on his treasure, admiring the ornate details and decorations, is interrupted by needing to catch a special effect.
The comical, cartoon gag of the audio-animatronic is out of place in an environment that is supposed to be strange and unsettling. It takes away the mystery of what happened to the pirates, and lessens the impact of the grand reveal of the pirate ship show scene around the corner.
That’s the crux of the issue with modern theme park design: the idea that plussing something means literally adding more, that stillness means a lack of storytelling. Over at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, their quiet and atmospheric storytelling has made the Rivers of America, Tom Sawyer Island and the Liberty Belle riverboat casualties of a new and shinier Cars Land that promises action and movement. On both coasts, benches where guests could sit and admire the theme parks have been disappearing for years, ripped out for walkways and higher capacity throughput.
Few new attractions nowadays have the 15-minute ride time of Pirates of the Caribbean. In an age of shortening attention spans, fewer still know how to slow down, be quiet, and let guests be truly immersed in a scene. Case in point: the newest ride at Disneyland, 2023’s Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, is a full-on neon-coloured animated assault on the senses from start to finish, all in a 4-minute whirlwind of a story.
Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean was the last attraction Walt Disney worked on before he died. Its creative team was a who’s who of WED-era Imagineering, including Marc Davis, Claude Coats, X. Atencio, Blaine Gibson, Yale Gracey, and John Hench, among others. Their storytelling in a time without the shortcuts of modern technology had to have been stronger, more creative, more trusting of the guest.
If dead men do tell tales in Dead Man’s Cove, maybe we all need to be still for a moment, and listen.
References Cited
- Walt Disney Imagineering. “AVAST YE, MATEY!! New magic has been spotted at Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland 🏴☠️.” Uploaded to Instagram, 26 June 2026. Web. 26 June 2026.
- The Walt Disney Family Museum. “Surprising History of the Pirates of the Caribbean Disneyland Attraction.” The Walt Disney Family Museum. The Walt Disney Family Museum Blog, 29 October 2010. Web. 26 June 2026.
- Ravenscroft, Thurl. “Pirates Of the Caribbean Adventure.” Walt Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Sound Track of the Fabulous Disneyland Adventure. Disneyland Records, 1968.
