A Nostalgic Look At Disney Channel in All Its Glory

I grew up watching and loving the Disney Channel shows. Although I didn’t have the actual Disney Channel until I was 10, I caught the best shows on One Saturday Morning, which showed reruns. Hence, I grew to love quality shows (at least they were quality in my young eyes) like Brotherly Love, Recess, Even Stevens, and Kim Possible. I know a lot of people liked Lizzie McGuire, but I never got into that show.

Wow. I miss these shows. Today kids have to watch shows like Wizards of Waverly Place, Cory in the House, Hannah Montana, and Sonny with a Chance. I do not care for any of these shows. All of them have the the same stale storylines, only with different characters, and all of them have laugh tracks that laugh when nothing’s funny. Most of the girls are bratty, selfish, and impeccably dressed. The boys are usually clueless, messing things up and hitting a stroke of luck near the end and everything turns out okay.

But let’s ignore these and talk about the good shows.

First off: Brotherly Love.
If the cute guys or the bad 90’s clothes aren’t enough to keep your interest, there’s the quirky characters themselves. Joe is the oldest brother, a mechanic, who decides to move back in with his stepmom and stepbrothers after their dad dies when he realizes his brothers need a male role model in the house. Matt is the worried teenage brother who tries to create as much drama as he can, to the annoyance of Joe. Andy is the 5-year-old who likes dressing up in costumes, doing hilarious impressions, and having an imaginary friend named Sid Jacobson, an Italian, who is 62 years old and works in a deli (that's just the tip of the iceberg on his weirdness). Then, there’s Lou, the girl mechanic in the garage the family owns. She’s sarcastic, pretty, artistic, and knows a lot about cars. Some of the good chemistry on the show is due to the fact that the three main guys are brothers in real life.


Even Stevens. Before he was famous, Shia LaBeauf was Louis Stevens, the misfit in his perfect family. His mom is a senator, his dad is a prestigious lawyer, Ren (his sister) is the perfect student, and Donnie (his brother) is the perfect athlete. Then, there’s Twitty, Louis’ airhead of a best friend, and Tawny, Louis’ environmentally aware crush. And then Bernard Arangaren (Beans), the annoying neighbor boy who loved bacon. And who could forget that gym teacher, Coach Tugnut? Or the episode where Louis dresses up as a penguin jockey? Or the one where he and Twitty buy popular shoes on the underground market by using the alias ‘Lars Honeytoast’? This show was hilarious, maybe even more so because it didn’t have a laugh track, so you didn’t feel like you had to laugh at certain points.

Another show I liked was Kim Possible. This is one of the only shows where the main girl on the show kicks butt. Yeah, her pal Ron Stoppable helps on occasion, but it’s really all about Kim. I think what I really liked about Kim Possible was the villains. Dr. Drakken’s plans were always farfetched in the most extreme sense (like the episode where he made mind control shampoo called “Lather, Rinse, and OBEY!”) and his comebacks were so stupid they were funny (“You think you’re all that…but you’re not!”). Of course, he had Shego, the brawn to what he thinks is his brains, who is actually smarter than him but doesn’t really care as long as she gets paid.

What do you think about Disney Channel today and in the past? Did you have or do you have a favorite show on this channel?

Molly and The Breakfast Club

You remember this girl, right? No? Well, she was the Meg Ryan of the 80’s, only Molly Ringwald specialized in teen romance movies, instead of romance movies opposite Tom Hanks. Ringwald was Claire “The Princess” from The Breakfast Club, Andy from Pretty in Pink, and Samantha Baker from Sixteen Candles. After that…well, that’s basically it. I can’t say that I’m a particular fan of hers, since I only liked one of the most popular three movies she’s been in:

The Breakfast Club.

First off, this movie is not about breakfast at all. It’s about five kids: The Athlete, The Princess, The Hoodlum, The Geek, and The Basket Case. All five of them end up in Saturday detention together without anything in common, but by the end of the day, they have bared their souls to each other.

This is one of my favorite movies. It has humor, drama, and hilarious dialogue (Does Barry Manilow know you raid his wardrobe?). It does have its weird moments, though. To this day, I can’t figure out why all the kids decided to smoke marijuana in the library. ALL of them (except The Basket Case)! Even Brian, the quiet, nerdy boy and the intense wrestler, who should be watching what he puts into his body! The clouds of marijuana smoke are filling entire rooms and the kids all get high. It’s like the lesson is: Unless you are a basket case, you should be smoking marijuana. Even nerds and dedicated wrestlers do it!

Yeah, I guess the filmmakers did this to symbolize how everyone was opening up and relating to each other (and a lot of teenagers experiment with drugs like this), but the whole thing was just strange.

Another part I find strange is the part is the teacher, who is supposed to be watching the kids and is a pretty standard authority figure until this point in the movie, is practically begging the hoodlum to hit him, telling him that he wants him to do it and that he’ll get him kicked out once and for all. All he needed was a strike of lightning in the background and a cat to stroke to become the complete embodiment of evil.

In fact, all the adults in this movie are “evil”. They demand the impossible with either grades or athletics, put their kids in the middle of their messy divorce, ignore their kids, or burn them with cigarettes and physically and emotionally abuse them. In fact, in this movie, one of the kids says “When you grow up, you die.”

And the other part of the movie I find strange is the ending. Yeah, it’s a nice fairy tale ending and everything, but it was just weird. Almost everyone ends up with someone. The Hoodlum and The Princess make out on her dad (the King’s?) car (while it’s occupied by her father), she gives him one of her diamond earrings, then lets him walk home alone. The Athlete and The Basket Case kiss, too, but The Athlete only began to notice her after The Basket Case is given a makeover by The Princess. I always felt bad for The Nerd, who had to drive away with his family without kissing anybody. Couldn’t the filmmakers just have added another girl for him to smooch at the end? I mean, he’s nicer than the Hoodlum kid, shouldn’t he get a kiss?

One thing that was also strange, yet totally awesome and iconic, was the famous dance sequence. Who could forget that? It is spoofed quite often, as shown here in this JC Penney commercial.

This movie shows us that even though those kids were labeled as only one thing, they were more complex than that. At least that’s what they discovered when they actually talked to each other.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I hear a ruckus in the other room.