We had Disney channel as a kid, and my dad got this device which we called "An A/B Box" that allowed you to get over the scrambling when taping Disney movies. We had a drawer of 30 or 40 things taped from the disney channel. I was born the next year and for as long as I remember TV existing, Disney Channel was a thing.
My dad, completely technophobic in every way, was such an early media pirate.
I remember watching "The New Mickey Mouse Club," which I think launched in like 1989 or 1990 right around there, because a lot of the zeal for it was "This is a new Mickey Mouse Club -- FOR THE NINETIES" which was like a cool hook to it, and it sitll had some of the actresses -- well the little black haired bob hair cut girl I don't know her name w/o googling it -- as adults. I'm sure my dates are wrong but that's my memory.
Grew up watching Mickey's A Christmas Carol, and I was SO happy to find that on Disney+ to watch that with my kid. I wish it was longer, I loved it then and love it now. I remember the Ichabod Crane / Headless Horsemen segments. All of the old animation shorts with Goofy and DOnald, like Goofy .. playing pool in one, and it's about math. And then the Paul Bunyon / Babe the blue ox, Johnny Appleseed, "American Legends" cartoons... I still remember the Paul Bunyon one ending with Paul and Babe wrestling, and those are the northern lights. Headless Horseman used to scare the jimmies out of me. There was also this ... audio movie of Halloween creepiness, which was this major storm and a spooky sound track, and the shot that I remember the most is this bird in a nest with baby birds in it, and the nest exists in the cogs of a windmill, and it seems like the bird will be crushed b a cog, but one of the cogs is missing in the hole that the nest is in. It's just very clever. I still have a STRONG memory of a short involving Donald and his nephews where they went to buy Donald a box of cigars for his birthday, and he thought that they were going to buy the cigars so they could smoke them, he caught them, and then forced them to smoke all of the box of cigars, making them insanely sick, like using a bellows to smoke them all up, and the three nephews got fucked up. That's been burned into my memory. Donald feels like an asshole when he finds a note in the box "Happy Birthday Uncle Donald" or something, but god do those boys get fucked.
As a kid we were a "Disney Channel house" and we weren't *really* allowed to watch Nickelodeon early on. I used to sneak it. Eventually my parents didn't care, I had older siblings that started watching MTV in the 80s and 90s and so me watching Nick was small potatoes. THere was a strong sense of "Disney channel is good, there's no ads, and Nick is trash," in my house, but really when you factor in all of the cartoons from the 1950s and 60s and you run that up against Ren & Stimpy -- utterly bizarre but also brilliant -- it's like ...... yeah... what's trash and what's treasure here.
