Kids Incorporated hit Disney Channel screens in 1986, ran back-to-back with MMC every weekday, and quietly became the longest-running show in the network's history. But Disney didn't own it. MGM did. And when a theme park deal went sour between the two companies, one of these shows got the full Disney machine behind it — and the other got buried.
Everybody remembers the All New Mickey Mouse Club. Britney. Justin. Christina. That legendary 90s star factory. But what if it wasn't the original?
Kids Incorporated ran for nine seasons on Disney Channel. It launched the careers of Fergie, Martika, Mario Lopez, and Jennifer Love Hewitt. It was the network's longest-running show. And then it just... disappeared.
Were you a Mickey Mouse Club kid or a Kids Incorporated kid? Or did you watch 'em both? Let me know in the comments.
Next up: Saved by the Bell's Disney origins — same era, same star-making machine. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it.
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00:00 --> 18:46 If you were a kid watching Disney Channel after school in the late '80s and early '90s, you probably remember The Mickey Mouse Club. But what about the show that was on right before it? Kids Incorporated. Schoolyard debates might have made you pick one over the other. You had to be a Mickey Mouse Club kid, or you were a Kids Incorporated kid, or you secretly loved them both. And that makes sense because these 2 shows had some definite similarities. They aired back to back every weekday for years on the same channel for the same age group demographics, and they both had kids singing pop hits, some of whom would go on to become massive stars. Mickey Mouse Club and Kids Incorporated share some real DNA, and that might actually have been on purpose. Hey, this is Synergy Loves Company, where we explore how Disney connects to everything. I'm Eric, and Today we're talking about Kids Incorporated and how it actually paved the way for that all-new Mickey Mouse Club in the '90s. And I want to know before we get started, were you a Mickey Mouse Club kid or a Kids Incorporated kid? Or like, did you even have a favorite? Did you watch them both back to back and love them both? Leave a comment below and let me know. But whatever way you slice it, everybody now seems to remember that '90s Mickey Mouse Club. It's always got some sort of like BuzzFeed article about you know interesting facts about it, or there's like a YouTube video. I mean, like hey, I I even just did a YouTube video about it. My last video was about the Mickey Mouse Club, and it is a legendary show that gave us Britney and Justin and Christina and so many more. But Kids Incorporated is really just as legendary, and it also was a big Disney Channel success, and it started earlier, and it ran longer, and it. somehow has now been completely erased from the pop culture conversation. So we gotta look at it and why it is that Kids Incorporated is the less remembered one. Back in 1983, 2 guys named Tom Lynch and Gary Biller had this idea. They described it as The Little Rascals meets MTV. So like, MTV had just launched a couple years earlier, and it was completely rewiring youth entertainment and how kids consumed music. Stuff like those Disney sing-along songs tapes started happening. You can see a video I did on those too. Anyway, Lynch wanted to take that music video energy and pair it with like a kids ensemble show, like The Little Rascals from back in the '30s and '40s. Like a fresh new MTV generation take on that old nostalgic formula. They shot a pilot in August of 1983, and it was a scrappy, low-budget experiment. I mean, I mean, look at it. They didn't have the big Hollywood budget and resources. I mean, their first casting call happened in a church basement near the Sunset Strip. Almost nobody showed up, so Lynch had to start working his own contacts in the industry just to scrape together enough kids that were worth putting on camera. But one of those contacts actually led him to someone pretty great, a 10-year-old named Stacy Ferguson. And you probably know her better as Fergie, the singer from the Black Eyed Peas and her solo career. She was talented for sure, but at the time they mostly wanted her because she had a cool kid look, and in the MTV generation that seemed to be more important. It was a good thing though that she was super talented. I mean, we're now in the future and she's got like a bunch of hit records and Grammys and stuff, so we know how that turned out. As soon as they assembled the rest of the cast, they put the concept to the test. It was kind of like a Kidz Bop kind of thing. Every episode had 5 songs. 4 of them were covers and 1 was an original. And the kids on the show played as a working band at a club called The Palace, except the first letter A on the sign was burned out early on and like nobody fixed it, so the club just became known as The Place. I mean, I like it. It's less pretentious. It's just a place, nothing special. The best part of the whole deal though was once the band on the show got the rights to play a song on the show, they would also record and release records of those Kids Incorporated kids performing chart-topping hits on K-Tel Records. Now that really is like Kidz Bop. On the show, there were basically no adults. It was kid-run show. The recurring grown-up was the guy running the soda counter at the place, and the kids mostly went by their actual first names. So when you were watching Stacy play in the band, you were watching a character who was named Stacy, but like Stacy Ferguson was Stacy. And that kind of blurred the lines between actor and person in a way that made you feel more connected with these kids, like they were your actual friends on TV. So these guys put together this show and the cast, and the major broadcast networks all passed on this thing outright. Nobody wanted it in their main lineup. So instead, it landed in syndication with a distribution deal and a production deal with MGM starting in 1984. And it seemed like those big networks were right. In first-run syndication, this show got canceled barely over a year after it started. But in the mid-1980s, cable was this booming Wild West situation, and cable networks were always looking for stuff to fill their schedules with. The Christian Broadcasting Network, CBN, saw an opportunity to pick up the pieces and show reruns of Kids Incorporated, and that actually eventually saved the whole thing. 'Cause CBN really just needed something to fill the airtime, but those reruns started pulling numbers that nobody expected from a canceled kids show, and people in the industry started to notice. All these networks needed to fill out their cable programming blocks, and this Kids Incorporated thing looked like it would fit in the Disney Channel lineup. It's got the right demographics, it's nice and fresh, and it's just the kind of, you know, wholesome kids' family entertainment that this new Disney Channel was looking for. Disney Channel had launched back in 1983 as a premium channel. It cost a little extra money, and at the beginning it mostly showed old Disney content and shows like the original Mickey Mouse Club. But they did start with some brand new content, but they needed to still keep some fresh new content coming to keep those subscribers. The channel itself was kind of in a weird spot. It was a project that was greenlit and launched by CEO Ron Miller, Walt's son-in-law. But pretty soon after its launch, Miller was ousted and Michael Eisner and Frank Wells took over the Disney Company. The Disney Channel was not a priority for them, so their budget wasn't big, but they still needed something fresh to fill out their programming lineup. So this Kids Incorporated thing seemed like a good idea. Disney wanted to revive the show, and they did in November of Disney Channel got the exclusive rights starting at season 3, but that's kind of weird because there's not really a clean season structure. The show didn't always have a normal kind of continuity like you would get out of a regular show. Sometimes kids aged out, like constantly, sometimes after a year or two, and just new faces would be rotated in whenever the old faces outgrew their roles. It was like a band swapping its members while still trying to keep the same name. But let's take a look at like who rotated through. Fergie held the record. She was on the show from the beginning and for six seasons. She was definitely the longest running member, longer than anybody else who ever passed through the place. Fergie's future Wild Orchid bandmate Renee Sands was also in the cast. That's kind of how they started the band together. Another big recording artist, Martika, came through the Kids Incorporated in the early years before she became an actual pop star in her. Own right. Mario Lopez, A.C. Slater from Saved by the Bell, started out as a background dancer and drummer years before anyone even knew his name. And Jennifer Love Hewitt, that famous actor from those teen movies we loved in the late '90s, she was on it too, but she almost didn't make it. She was actually packing to leave after she thought her audition didn't work out when Lynch changed his mind and called her back at the last second. And singer Rashawn Patterson landed his spot through a phone audition singing a Patti LaBelle song long before he even like stepped foot on the soundstage in Los Angeles. These names are all pretty big today and they were all working together on the show before they would break out as stars on their own. Mario Lopez has said publicly that his first on-camera kiss was with Fergie at age 10. Fergie actually confirmed this whole thing decades later on TV. So it's not just some internet rumor. This actually happened, and it happened here on the Disney Channel. Pretty early on in Kids Incorporated, Martika leaves the show and goes solo. And in 1989, her song Toy Soldiers hits number 1 on the Billboard chart. And the song actually features the Kids Incorporated singers as like the backup singer children's choir kind of thing. So like Fergie's in there, Rashawn Patterson's in there, Renée Sands is in there. And if you don't know Martika's version, you might know the sample from the 2004 Eminem song Like Toy Soldiers. So, back to Kids Incorporated. The show is running like a machine at this point. It is a smash success for Disney Channel. They keep renewing it year after year, but even though it's a Disney Channel show, it's not a Disney show. They don't make it. Kids Incorporated was never a Disney show. That original syndication deal set it up. MGM produced the show. MGM owned the name, the format, the whole production. Disney just paid them to air it. You were watching what you perceived as a Disney Channel show that Disney had no real claim to. But what if they could have claimed a show like that? Around the same time they take on Kids Incorporated, a different division of the Disney Company signs a licensing deal with MGM. And that deal is to use the MGM name and that famous roaring lion logo for a brand new theme park down in Florida. It would be Disney's MGM Studios, that whole theme park working film studio concept. And that deal was great for Disney, but not so great for MGM. The offer was only $100 a year to use the MGM names, that logo, and some of its iconic movies. Kirk Kerkorian, the billionaire who actually owned MGM, found out about this deal basically after it was already signed, and he was furious. His IP was worth way much more than that. His own people had handed over basically like the most valuable jewels of the company to a competitor for what amounted to him as pocket change, and he would not stand for it. He tried everything he could to get out of that deal. He tries to compete with Disney when He builds his own theme park at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas in 1993. And even though he can't get out of the Disney deal, you know that there is no way he is going to renew that when it's over, and he wants it to be over fast. Lawsuits start piling up between Disney and MGM arguing over how far that original park licensing deal actually extends. They argue about what Disney can do with the name, what MGM can license out to its competitors, where the lines even are and were any crossed. It's a legal mess that drags on for years. Bad blood between Disney and MGM. But even today, a lot of us call that park MGM Studios. Meanwhile, back in Florida, Disney-MGM Studios officially opens in 1989. And in that exact same year, the all-new Mickey Mouse Club launches too, because it's filmed right there at the brand new park with the studio in it. And that show is fully Disney-owned. Every bit of it— the soundstage, the format, the merchandising rights— it's all sitting inside of Disney's own walls. It was a reboot of The Mickey Mouse Club from back in the '50s, but it took a lot of the things that made Kids Incorporated special and incorporated them into the equation to modernize The Mickey Mouse Club for the MTV generation. I mean, the original blueprint for Kids Incorporated was to modernize a nostalgic hit like Little Rascals for the MTV generation, so why not a nostalgic hit like The Mickey Mouse Club? Disney could take the best parts of Kids Incorporated and apply those to The Mickey Mouse Club to make a better product in-house. They could even air the shows back to back, ensuring that their concept is always edging out the other one, which previously was one of the most popular shows on the network. So at this point, Disney Channel has 2 shows with similar concepts back-to-back after-school time slots every single day. One of them Disney fully owns, the other one, Kids Incorporated, is still MGM's property the entire time, even while it's airing on the Disney Channel. Tom Lynch, that guy who created Kids Incorporated in the first place, put it about as plainly as you can. He said it felt like Disney resented having a hit on their hands that they didn't fully control. No album for Disney to cash in on, no tour, no merch line. Every bit of ancillary revenue that a hit show usually generates was flowing somewhere else entirely. Disney didn't like that. Mickey Mouse Club, on the other hand, gets a budget of $125 per episode. It gets a custom stage built right there at the park. It gets the full merchandising machine behind it. That's that Disney synergy at work. The money you're spending flows back into your own pocket. On the other hand, Kids Incorporated gets a year-long hiatus in 1990. It gets thinner budgets every season after that. By 1993, the show even gets a rebrand as it tries to feel more current, more modern, and it's really just a last-ditch effort to try to keep the show relevant as MGM seems to care less and less about this Disney Channel hit they had on their hands. And then in 1994, that output agreement between Disney and MGM for new episodes expires, and Disney just doesn't renew it. No big announcement, no dramatic cancellation special or series finale. Just 9 seasons, 149 episodes, and it just stops. They can still show reruns on Disney Channel, and they do for a couple years more, but when it does end, Kids Incorporated is technically the longest-running show in Disney Channel history. And then it just disappears. Like, even today, if you ever have gone looking for this show on streaming services, you're not gonna find it. find it. Remember, it's not a Disney show, so it's not going to be on Disney Plus. And MGM held the rights for like the entire time, but MGM as a company has been an absolute mess for decades. It's been bought and sold and split apart and recombined and sold again, and chunks of that library have ended up scattered across different owners. And a good amount of it sits with Amazon today. But even on top of finding which parts of MGM it lies with today, remember, it was a musical-based show. Almost every song on show was a cover, which means you've still got a pile of music licensing to untangle before you could put this thing on streaming. So Kids Incorporated died out because of these corporate disputes between Disney and MGM. And after the sour theme park deal and the lawsuits, MGM didn't want to put much into their hit Disney Channel show. And instead of trying to work with Kids Incorporated, Disney just buried it because they had built a version of it that they fully owned that sat right next door to it on the listings, and that version made them money in every single way that this one couldn't. But those incorporated kids were definitely very talented. Speaking of which, after leaving Kids Incorporated, Mario Lopez became a huge star as A.C. Slater on Saved by the Bell, and That was actually first a Disney show too. Like, like really it was. So next time on Synergy Loves Company, we're covering Saved by the Bell's secret Disney origins. It's like the same era, the same star-making machine kind of show. So make sure you're subscribed so that you don't miss it at all. Check out that video I did on The Mickey Mouse Club next, and remember to keep discovering the magic. Magic in everything.