Thinking about it, Splash Mountain is also a "recap the movie" ride, but there's still something charming about it that makes it stick out compared to modern recap rides. Maybe it's because the imagineers added enough new scenes and immersive environments to make it not stick out as much?
On this specific level, there were a few things Splash Mountain had working in its favor - the ride only attempts to recap the animated sections of the movie, which do not represent the overall plot of the movie itself, but are more a collection of shorts presented as asides within the actual plot of the movie. There's less ground to have to cover in the short-form medium of a ride than the usual full-length animated feature. That most riders likely haven't seen the movie helps this too, because those guests come in with little to no preconcieved notion about the story being told. It's easier to find the holes in something like Snow White's Scary Adventures when you've seen that movie a few dozen times, but when it comes to new information people tend to make sense of what they see.
Since Splash Mountain doesn't rely much on the guest having pre-existing knowledge of the movie, and since there aren't huge swaths of some 90 minute story happening "offscreen" within the ride, Splash Mountain presents a relatively compact story that many guests are digesting for the first time without comparison to how the movie did it and what elements of that might be missing. All the pieces are there to make sense of what's happening, even on your first ride. This is a surprisingly rare trait for a ride based on a movie.
Truthfully, I think two of the biggest lessons that could be learned from Splash Mountain are 1) the value of basing a ride on properties people aren't as familiar with (or, dare I say it, ORIGINAL ideas), and 2) the value of basing attractions around shorter-form source material. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride somewhat speaks to these too - when your source is more condensed than a full-length feature its values are often more distilled, which makes it easier to hone in on the aspirational element that might suit a ride, and you're less likely to upset anyone in distilling further. There's less sauce to get lost in than a full length feature with famous and beloved elements, where it becomes difficult to choose which to exclude from the ride adaptation. One of the big problems with "Book Report" rides is that they require you to kill so many of your darlings to make an experience that can stand on its own, and that's seen as antithetical to the point of basing a ride on something people already love - you risk disappointing the fans by cutting somebody's favorite part. The flip side, of course, is that if you
don't make enough cuts you end up with a ride that piles in too much to actually satisfy anybody. The Little Mermaid dark ride is basically the poster child for this. Meanwhile, you'll basically never find anyone getting off Splash Mountain or Mr. Toad saying "They cut my favorite part of the movie!"
