The attraction is a simulated riverboat cruise that travels along a waterway using a concealed guidance system through areas with Asian, African, and South American themes.

Park guests board replica steam launches from a 1930s British explorers' lodge, and Audio-Animatronic exotic animals are displayed throughout the ride.

A live Disney cast member acts as a tour guide and boat skipper that loosely follows a rehearsed script, providing passengers with a comedic narrative.

A variety of changes were made over the years, including enhanced audio effects, updates to the storyline, and the removal of culturally-sensitive material.

The project was planned by Disney to incorporate a jungle-themed ride into the list of attractions featured at Disneyland's grand opening in 1955.

Disney Imagineer Harper Goff referenced The African Queen frequently in his ideas and drew inspiration from the steamer depicted in the film for the ride vehicle design.

He had used a well-known trick of uprooting local orange trees and replanting them upside-down, growing vines on the exposed roots.

[5][6] The ride's water clarity, known as turbidity, is controlled in a manner that obscures the boat's guidance system and other undesirable items like perches and mechanized platforms of the bathing Audio-Animatronic elephants and hippos.

The waterway depth is approximately 5 feet (1.5 m) and circulates southward from the northern end of Frontierland's Rivers of America to Fantasyland.

[citation needed] Although Goff and Evans can be credited with the creation and initial design of the ride, animator Marc Davis – recognized for his work on venerable attractions such as The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean – added his own style in later versions.

[10] The queuing area is cluttered with appropriate props, such as pinned insects, an old radio on top of a bookshelf, an old typewriter, and a chessboard with miniature animals and decorated shotgun shells replacing the pieces.

Big band music from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s plays overhead, punctuated by jungle-themed news bulletins, helping to reinforce the setting and threading together the show scenes and boat.

[8] The boats sail through a dense rainforest inhabited by large butterflies and a pair of toucans, before passing by the Temple of the Forbidden Eye and a shrine of a cobra beholding a crystal ball.

The boats now pass behind Schweitzer Falls (referred to as "the Backside of Water", which they call "the Eighth Wonder of the World") to enter the Amazon River.

Skeletal animal remains and warning signs featuring pictures of dagger-toothed fish forewarn the next show scene, where the boats encounter a swarm of leaping piranha.

The boats in 1955 were painted as clean, idealized replicas, but have since been given a more realistic theming reflecting the grunge and wear of actual watercraft due to the addition of Indiana Jones Adventure and its ruggedness.

This is the back half of the Lockheed Model 12 Electra Junior previously found at The Great Movie Ride at Disney's Hollywood Studios in the Casablanca scene.

[citation needed] Each variety of plant throughout the attraction was carefully selected by landscape architect Bill Evans to ensure that the foliage would be able to endure Florida's unique climate: hot summers and relatively cool winters.

The ride starts out in the Amazon River, where the passengers encounter butterflies with one-foot wingspans, or as the skipper might say, twelve inches.

The boat then passes a lost safari group that has been chased up a pole by an angry black rhinoceros and are now trapped and surrounded by spotted hyenas.

In Tokyo Disneyland, the station and surrounding area are themed to a more upscale African city, as opposed to an isolated jungle outpost.

After winding through the queue, guests board one of the boats and meet their skipper who speaks either English, Cantonese, or Mandarin, which are the official languages of Hong Kong.

Up ahead several crocodiles are seen resting on a small beach, while a school of hungry piranha are jumping in the hopes of attacking the guests.

Albert Awol is a fictional Jungle Cruise boat captain and disc jockey for the Disney Broadcasting Company.

A considerable array of visual enhancements were also made at that same time, from a series of new destination-based wall murals to the artifact-laden "office" in the center of the queue.

Various air personalities comment on the environment, the luminaries who are in the area (including references to the designers of the attraction - Harper Goff, Bob Mattey, Winston Hibler [True-Life Adventure films, upon which Jungle Cruise is based]).

The music was previously linked with the outdoor speakers at the Temple of the Forbidden Eye (Indiana Jones Adventure), however, two separate tracks of material with similar tone and some songs now exist.

[19] In 2010, with the environment having undergone fifty-five years of growth and care, Disneyland's man-made jungle was declared to be "real" thanks to its own self-sustaining ecosystem.

[23][24] The updated storyline emphasizes the re-imagined Trapped Safari characters consisting of Felix Pechman XIII, the unlucky skipper; Siobhan "Puffy" Murphy, an Irish ornithologist; Leonard Moss, a Black Canadian botanist; Kon Chunosuke, a Japanese entomologist in the Society of Explorers and Adventurers; and Rosa Sota Dominguez, a Latina artist, with the remains of their boat and supplies being taken over by a group of chimpanzees.

For years, Walt Disney Pictures contemplated the idea of making a full-length, action adventure film loosely inspired by the theme park attraction.