There are a few rides at Disneyland that everybody should do when they find themselves there. Space Mountain is the park’s best roller coaster, and the Haunted Mansion is, I think, the best ride at Disneyland. Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance is the most expansive and impressive. However, one of the all-time great theme park rides is Pirates of the Caribbean.
Yes, Pirates is iconic. Even if you’ve never been on the ride, there are going to be parts of it you’re at least familiar with, if only because they have been referenced in the massive movie franchise inspired by the ride. Yet it turns out the ride’s most famous scene may have actually been borrowed from a sitcom with just as much prestige.
An Old Episode Of The Andy Griffith Show May Have Inspired A Classic Disneyland Ride Scene
If I asked you to think about the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, whether you’ve ever actually been on it or not, there’s a good chance you’re mental picture of the ride is one particularly famous scene. It's one that includes pirates locked in a jail cell, trying to get the attention of a dog that is holding the key to the door in its mouth. The scene was originally conceived by Imagineer and Disney Legend Marc Davis, but it turns out he may have gotten the idea from… Andy Griffith?
Tom K. Morris is a former member of Walt Disney Imagineering, but he’s also a font of knowledge about Disney history. In a recent post on Twitter, he revealed an episode of The Andy Griffith Show from 1964 that includes a similar sequence where Andy and Barney are locked in their own jail, and the dog has the key.
I try to only post obscure anniversaries, so here’s one: 61 years ago, Oct 26, 1964, a curious episode of The Andy Griffith Show aired. The timing was perfect, and thus an iconic theme park sight gag was born! pic.twitter.com/lpwaDTBETWOctober 26, 2025
The episode of the show was from the fall of 1964. Pirates of the Caribbean opened at Disneyland as part of the new New Orleans Square area in 1967. It would have been right around the time the episode aired that Pirates was being redeveloped from a walkthrough attraction to the boat ride we know today, following the development of It’s A Small World for the 1964 World’s Fair.
How Possible Is It That This Bit Of Inspiration Is True?
As for the legitimacy of all this, the timing here, as mentioned by Tom K. Morris does makes sense. It’s entirely possible that Marc Davis, the Imagineer who developed the sequence, saw this episode on TV, and it inspired him to create the moment for the new ride. Considering Davis also had a strong hand in creating the Haunted Mansion and, even in making Splash Mountain happen, though more indirectly, I wonder if any part of those also has classic TV origins.
The fact that this could have happened does not mean that it did. It’s entirely possible The Andy Griffith Show inspired Pirates of the Caribbean, but unless we can somehow prove Marc Davis watched the episode, and did so before coming up with his own design for the scene, we can’t know for sure that it happened exactly like this. I'd love to believe this is the real story though, and I'm happy this info is now out in the universe.
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