Playhouse Disney

» see playhousedisney.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

At 8:55 in the morning on 13 February 2011, Disney Channel ran a short episode of Handy Manny's School for Tools, and that was the last thing Playhouse Disney ever put on air. The next morning the same hours came back as Disney Junior, carrying most of the same programs in most of the same order. Nothing was cancelled. The block was renamed, and the old name stopped existing.

It had held that slot since 1 February 1999. Before that it was Disney Channel Little Kids, which began on 6 April 1997, the year Disney Channel gave up being a premium subscription service and reinvented itself as ordinary basic cable. Counting from the earlier launch the block ran fourteen years, and it carried the Playhouse Disney name for twelve of them.

The audience was children between about two and six, which in 1999 was a group American cable had mostly left to public television. Bear in the Big Blue House was already running when the name arrived. Rolie Polie Olie and Stanley followed, and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse eventually became the largest thing on the schedule. The programming had a specific texture: deliberately slow, and repetitive on purpose, so that a three year old could predict what happened next and be right.

It also went wide very quickly. Twenty-two channels and blocks around the world eventually carried the brand, some as a full twenty-four hour Playhouse Disney channel and some as a morning strip inside a general Disney feed.

~ the record ~

~ before it had that name ~

The reason this one sits at a distance from me is arithmetic rather than geography. Playhouse Disney arrived in February 1999 and I turned fifteen that year, which is exactly the wrong age in both directions. I was too old to be its audience and too young to have anyone in the house who was.

There was also no Disney Channel in Turkey worth speaking of during those years. The Turkish version launched much later, well after the Playhouse Disney name had already been switched off in the United States, so the brand's whole life happened somewhere I could not have watched it even if I had been the right age.

~ the website that was only a redirect ~

playhousedisney.com is an unusual thing to look at in the archive. Every capture of it going back to 1999 is a redirect. First a 302, then from around September 2004 a permanent 301, always pointing into disney.go.com where the actual pages lived. The domain was bought, pointed somewhere and never given a page of its own for the entire twelve years the brand was alive.

That was normal for a television brand of that era. The channel was the product and the web address was something you read out at the end of a segment. Today the same domain still resolves and still forwards, landing on the Disney Junior show list inside DisneyNow.

~ the morning it changed ~

Disney Junior debuted on 14 February 2011 as a block, and got its own twenty-four hour American channel in March 2012 by taking over the frequency that had been SoapNet. The international conversions were staggered across two years, market by market, and the last Playhouse Disney anywhere was the block on Disney Channel Russia, which became Disney Junior on 1 September 2013.

For the children watching, nothing happened at all. The bumpers changed color and the voice reading the name said something different. That is the whole obituary: a brand that died without a single one of its viewers noticing, because the thing they actually cared about was still there at 8am the next day.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »