Disney Channel is an American pay television channel that serves as the flagship property of Disney Kids & Family, a unit of Disney Entertainment Television, the television section of the Disney Entertainment business segment of the Walt Disney Company.
1977–1983: Origins In the mid-1970s, Walt Disney Productions executive Jim Jimirro proposed the idea of a cable television network that would feature television and film material from the studio. Since the company was focusing on the development of the Epcot Center at Walt Disney World, Disney chairman Card Walker rejected the proposal. Instead, they made a deal with HBO to air a select number of Disney films, cartoons, and specials, including a live production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at Radio City Music Hall. However, Disney revived the idea in November 1981, entering into a partnership with the satellite unit of Group W (which had sold its 50% ownership stake in one of The Disney Channel's early rivals, Showtime, to Viacom around the same time); however, Group W would disassociate from the intended joint venture that September, due to disagreements over the channel's creative control and financial obligations that would have required Group W to pay a 50% share of the channel's start-up costs.
Despite Group W's withdrawal, The Disney Channel continued on with its development, now solely under the oversight of Walt Disney Productions, and under the leadership of the channel's first president Alan Wagner, Walt Disney Productions formally announced the launch of its family-oriented cable channel in early 1983. Disney later invested US$11 million to acquiring space on two transponders of the Hughes Communications satellite Galaxy 1, and spent US$20 million on purchasing and developing programming. The concept of a premium service aimed at a family audience, which Walt Disney Productions would choose to develop The Disney Channel as, had first been attempted by HBO, which launched Take 2 in 1979 (the service, which was HBO's first attempt at a spin-off niche service (predating Cinemax's launch in August 1980), would shut down after only a few months on the air), and was followed by the 1981 launch of the Group W-owned Home Theater Network (which was the only premium channel that strictly competed with The Disney Channel for that demographic for much of the 1980s, until the 1987 launch of Festival).
1983–1990: As a premium channel
The Disney Channel launched nationally as a premium channel on April 18, 1983, at 7:00 a.m. Eastern Time. The first program to air on the channel was also its first original series, Good Morning, Mickey!, which presented Disney animated shorts. At the time of its launch, The Disney Channel's programming aired for sixteen hours each day from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific Time (comparatively, its competitors HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, The Movie Channel and Spotlight all had been operating on 24-hour programming schedules for a few years at the time). By the fall of 1983, the channel was available to more than 532,000 subscribers in the United States; this total would increase to 611,000 subscribers in December of that year.
For its subscribers, the channel provided a monthly (and later bi-monthly) program guide/magazine called The Disney Channel Magazine, which in addition to carrying listings for the channel's programming, had also carried feature stories on then-upcoming programs (the magazine also lent its name to a series of interstitials seen during promotional breaks on the channel that provided behind-the-scenes looks at programming). The Disney Channel Magazine was discontinued in early 1997 and was replaced by Behind the Ears (a print magazine which also shared its name with another series of behind-the-scenes interstitials that aired on the channel from 1997 to 2000) as the channel began primarily operating as a commercial-free basic channel.Gutman, Steve. "Letter from the Publisher". The Disney Channel Magazine, Vol. 14, no. 6, December 1996/January 1997: p. 4.
As a premium channel, The Disney Channel often ran free previews of five days to one week in length four times annually, as well as two periodic weekend-only previews (with ads targeted to cable and satellite customers who were not subscribers to the channel); this resulted in The Disney Channel offering more preview events each calendar year during its tenure as a pay service than HBO, Cinemax and Showtime had run during that timeframe. On April 1, 1984, the channel extended its daily programming to nineteen hours (from 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. Eastern and Pacific Time), with the addition of three hours onto its late night schedule.The Disney Channel Magazine, April 1984. On December 7, 1986, The Disney Channel began broadcasting 24 hours a day.The Disney Channel Magazine, December 1986.
By September 1983, The Disney Channel was available on cable providers in all 50 U.S. states. In October 1983, the channel premiered its first made-for-cable movie, Tiger Town, which won a CableACE Award. The first "classic" Disney animated film to be broadcast on the channel, Alice in Wonderland, premiered on the network in January 1984. That year, The Disney Channel entered into a partnership with Walt Disney Telecommunications and Non-Theatrical Company to produce foreign versions of the channel on videocassette, showing segments from the pay cable service, at a two-hour running time. By January 1985, the channel's programming reached 1.75 million subscribers, at which time the channel had reached profitability.
Starting in 1986, Colossal Pictures produced on-air identification bumpers featuring Mickey Mouse (his gloved hands, and sometimes his feet, only visible) and the logo, either animated or live action.
In August 1989, the channel launched a series of interstitial segments called The Disney Channel Salutes The American Teacher; the channel subsequently began telecasting the American Teacher Awards in November 1991. By January 1990, The Disney Channel had about five million subscribers nationwide. In May of that year, The Disney Channel won its first Daytime Emmy Awards for the original made-for-cable film Looking for Miracles, the documentary Calgary '88: 16 Days of Glory, and the special A Conversation with... George Burns, as well as its first Peabody Award for the television film Mother Goose Rock 'n' Rhyme.
1990–1997: As a hybrid premium/basic channel On September 1, 1990, TCI's Montgomery, Alabama, system became the first cable provider to carry the channel as a basic cable service. In 1991, eight additional cable providers volunteered to move the channel to their expanded basic cable tiers, with the first to make the transition (as a test run) being Jones Intercable's systems in Fort Myers and Broward County, Florida. Other cable providers eventually began moving the channel to their basic tiers, either experimentally or on a full-time basis. Even as major providers such as Cox Communications and Marcus Cable began offering The Disney Channel on their basic tiers, executives for The Walt Disney Company denied that the channel had plans to convert into an ad-supported basic service, stating that the move from premium to basic cable on some systems was part of a five-year "hybrid" strategy that allowed providers to offer the channel in either form.
In 1991, The Disney Channel tested a two-channel multiplex service on two cable systems. HBO, Cinemax and Showtime also launched their own multiplex services that same year. However, The Disney Channel would not launch its own multiplex service permanently, unlike the others. By 1992, a third of the channel's subscriber base were estimated by Nielsen Media Research to be adults who did not have children; and by 1995, its subscriber base expanded to 15 million cable homes, eight million of which paid an additional monthly fee to receive the channel.
In March 1992, the channel debuted the original children's program Adventures in Wonderland, a contemporary live-action adaption of Alice in Wonderland (which, in turn, was based on the novel Alice Through the Looking-Glass). In September 1992, the channel began carrying the Disney's Young Musicians Symphony Orchestra series of specials, which aired annually until 1998. In honor of its 10th anniversary, the channel embarked on a 14-city nationwide bus tour starting in April 1993. By January 1995, The Disney Channel was available to 12.6 million subscribers; the period from 1994 to 1995 saw the largest yearly subscriber increase with 4.87 million households with cable television adding the channel. In March 1995, the first international Disney Channel service was launched in Taiwan. That year, the documentary Anne Frank Remembered premiered on the channel; that film would win an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1996.
In 1996, veteran cable executive Anne Sweeney was appointed to oversee The Disney Channel as its president; that September as the launch of Disney Channel service in Southeast Asia, the channel began offering a film in primetime each night starting at 7:00 p.m. Eastern Time, with the expansion of the Sunday Magical World of Disney film block to Monday through Saturday nights; the new primetime schedule launched in September with the pay cable premiere of The Lion King.
1997–2001: Zoog era and first live-action originals On April 6, 1997, The Disney Channel underwent a significant rebranding, shortening its name to just "Disney Channel" (though the channel was typically referred to simply as "Disney" in on-air promotions and network identifications until September 2002) and introducing a new logo designed by Lee Hunt Associates (a black Mickey ear-shaped television set; though with the introduction of a new graphics package for on-air promotions and IDs during the channel's daytime and evening lineup in 2000, the TV's patterning often varied; early versions of the logo featured people and animated characters appearing within the TV set element of the logo such as a 1930s-era Mickey Mouse). The rebranding coincided with the cable television premiere of Pocahontas.
Disney Channel continued to transition from a premium service into a basic cable channel around this time, albeit with a similar programming format to the one it carried as a full-fledged pay service. However, Disney Channel began shifting its target audience more toward children (but continued to cater to family audiences at night), as it decreased the amount of older films it aired, and its music programming (such as Disney Channel in Concert) shifted focus towards the pre-teen and teenage demographic, incorporating music videos and revamping its concert specials to feature younger musicians popular with that demographic.
Disney Channel initially continued to offer free preview events for pay television providers that continued to carry it as a premium service, but discontinued them altogether within three years of the rebrand. Although many providers still required subscribers to pay an additional monthly fee to view the channel at the time of its decision to incorporate them, Disney Channel also began to air break interruptions within shows, featuring promotions for the channel's programs as well as for feature film and home video releases from Disney. By March 1998, the channel was available to 35 million cable subscribers.