When the Disney Channel debuted as a premium channel 30 years ago this month, the lineup was rudimentary. Its 16 hours of programming from 7 am to 11 pm included a game show, a weekly behind-the-scenes tour of the Disney studios, and old Mickey Mouse cartoons. By the time I was a young kid, the network had evolved into a wonderfully bizarre 24-hour amalgamation of syndicated shows acquired from other networks, Disney movies, old cartoons, and original series. The network provided a wide spectrum of entertainment for kids, and it boasted a racially diverse roster of young and established stars.
The programming spanned decades, providing young people with a multitude of cultural nuggets and references in the days just before the Internet became a bottomless fount for such things. “Vault Disney,” which featured older Disney material like Zorro and the original Mickey Mouse Club, exposed me to the shows and movies my parents grew up watching. Mousterpiece Theater introduced me to classic Mickey cartoons. Faerie Tale Theatre, a live-action show from the mid-’80s later acquired for the Disney Channel from Showtime, brought storytelling to life with established directors like Francis Ford Coppola helming episodes. I have especially vivid memories of Adventures in Wonderland, an original live-action series in which a contemporary Alice would step through her looking-glass whenever she wanted to get away from real-life and head into a (surprisingly diverse) fantasy land. (The Queen was played by a black actor, as were Tweedle Dee and Dum.)
While much of the programming was light-hearted, there was also some quirkier—and, by kid standards—darker fare. Eerie, Indiana, about a teen boy named Marshall whose family moves to the eponymous small town and encounters bizarre people and events, gave me a taste for The Twilight Zone and The X-Files. In one episode, Marshall competes with his schoolmate Devon for the affections of a new girl, Melanie. She’s awaiting a heart transplant, and entertains both boys until Devon is killed in a car accident. Melanie gets his heart, then, strangely, starts acting just like Devon.
The short-lived series—which began on NBC before moving to Disney in the mid-’90s—stood out on the network, but it wasn’t unique. It was similar in spirit to later shows So Weird (in which a young teen blogged about her encounters with paranormal activity) and Bug Juice (a reality show about kids at summer camp).
In 2003, Fortune Magazine examined the dramatic makeover of the Disney Channel from the corporation’s “ugly stepchild” to “must-see TV” for tweens. A few years before, Anne Sweeney had become president of Disney Channel Worldwide and had decided that putting, say, Pollyanna on the network made it “too uncool to appeal to her then-10 year old son.” MTV was too old for tweens, and Disney saw an opportunity, aiming to become “hipper” with the 10-to-12 set by building multi-media franchises around young performers like Hilary Duff and, later, Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez. By 2003, Disney was—and still is, apparently, to that particular demographic—“cool.”
Of course, Disney has a long history of turning nearly everything it touches into a franchise—original Mouseketeer Annette Funicello starred in several films and recorded music while under contract in the mid-1950s and early ’60s. So it’s a wonder that it took them so long to get there with the Disney Channel. But as someone who came of age in the ’90s and early ’00s, I’m glad they didn’t. Today, kids may have a variety of pop culture resources, but a large piece of my pop culture knowledge would be missing if it weren’t for a channel where I could find kids who lip-synched contemporary pop songs, a young girl living in the early 20th Century, and Steamboat Willie on one after the other.
