Disney: Later, gator
Fake crocs purged
Disney World off icials are f inally doing what Capt. Hook could never do — get rid of Tick-Tock the Croc once and for all.
Operators at the Florida theme park have started purging every reference to crocodiles and alligators at the rides and displays across their sprawling resort in response to the death of a 2-year-old boy snatched by a gator there earlier this month.
The reptile removal includes the elimination of Louis, the trumpet-playing gator from 2009s “The Princess and the Frog” from his place in the Magic Kingdom’s Friendship Faire castle show, according to the Miami Herald.
Meanwhile, the famous Jungle Cruise boat ride will no longer include a joke one-liner from the captain telling par-parents to “watch your children, or the crocodiles will,” according too the paper, which noted that the crocodile crack has been part of thehe Jungle Cruise since 1962.
Also onn the chopping block is Tick-Tock the Crocodile (inset), a costumed character who has lost hiss job chas-sing hishis movie nem-em- esis, “Peter Pan” bad guy Capt. Hook, during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at the Magic Kingdom. The removal of gator references is an effort to bow to heightened sensitivities in the wake of the death of 2-year-old Lane Graves of Elkhorn, Neb., who was snatched by a gator at the Seven Seas Lagoon at the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa on June 14. The boy was near his parents on a beach where signs warned against swimming but did not warn visitors that the waters around Disney were f illed with alligators. In fact, park off icials knew the danger well, as they had trapped some 240 of the beasts in the past 10 years, according to the Miami Herald. The effort to nix gator references is so thorough that guides have been told not to mention them on even more obscure rides, such as the Kili-manjaro Safari ride at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, where operators once announced that they would dump visitors into a vat of gators. The only alligators that still remain are the real ones at Epcot Center’s Living with the Land at-traction.