Disney Channel has made over 100 Original Movies — Halloweentown, High School Musical, Descendants. But there's one they pretend never happened. The very first one.
Northern Lights premiered on August 23rd, 1997. It stars Academy Award winner Diane Keaton. It was executive produced by Meg Ryan. And Disney wants you to forget it exists. It's not on Disney+. It's not on YouTube. It's practically lost media.
So I had to find out why. I tracked down a pop culture historian who'd actually seen it. I dug through the Disney Encyclopedia. I cross-referenced old TV schedules. I found a VHS tape from 1997. And what I discovered is a story about branding, rebranding, and how a channel accidentally created its first DCOM before it even knew what a DCOM was.
Check Out Allison McClain Merrill:
https://www.instagram.com/pastfootforward/
https://www.allisonmcclainmerrill.com/
And Here is her review of Northern Lights:https://pastfootforward.com/2022/08/26/northern-lights-1997/
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00:00 --> 10:31 Whether it's Halloweentown or Johnny Tsunami, High School Musical, or even Descendants, we love those Disney Channel Original Movies. And Disney loves them too, except for one. The very first one. For some reason, Disney acts like it never existed, and they really don't want you to be able to see it either. Hey, this is Synergy Loves Company, where we explore how Disney connects to everything. I'm Erik, and today we're gonna shine a light on Northern Lights. It's the Disney Channel original movie that Disney wants you to forget that it ever existed in the first place. And I really got to figure out why that is. All right, let me tell you a little bit about how I got here in the first place. I've been working on some research for an upcoming video on Disney Channel. In fact, it's a bunch of upcoming videos on Disney Channel. Don't, don't worry, those ones are still coming soon. And while I was doing that research, I came across this list of DCOMs, Disney Channel original movies, in the Disney Encyclopedia. on D23's website. It lists Northern Lights as the first ever Disney Channel Original Movie, and that confused me because I never heard of it. I immediately grabbed my print version of the Disney Encyclopedia, and Northern Lights is in there too. It says, Northern Lights, a Disney Channel Original Movie first aired on August 23rd, 1997. A New York woman goes to her brother's funeral in small-town New England along with his one-time buddy Ben, and gets the shock of her life. They are inheriting a young nephew she never even knew she had. It's executive produced by Meg Ryan. Yeah, that Meg Ryan. And it stars Diane Keaton, Academy Award winner Diane Keaton. Now, I'm not surprised that I didn't remember a specific made-for-TV movie from 1997, even if it was a Disney Channel original movie with some big star power behind it. And that's because I can remember that my experience with Disney Channel Original Movies back in the day was super gradual. I remember vividly waiting for Smart House to premiere back in the late '90s. It was so cool to think of all that future tech, and it starred Katey Sagal, a big star. Okay, not as big of a star as Diane Keaton, but I really couldn't tell you a Diane Keaton movie as a kid back then. I guess like Father of the Bride, but it was— I always thought of it as more of Steve Martin's thing. Katey Sagal was Leela from Futurama. She was It was Peg Bundy from Married... with Children. I was familiar with these characters as a middle schooler back then. And at this point in my life, I had known what a DCOM was, and I knew what to expect. I knew that branding. It was a Disney Channel Original Movie, and I knew it was for me. I knew that Smart House was for me because I had already seen Brink and Halloweentown and Zenon. And those ones though, I didn't catch as premieres. I caught them like in the middle of a weekend day when I was flipping through the channels and they were there on Disney Channel, and I would sit and watch them. Movies like those taught me though what a Disney Channel Original Movie was. They were these stories where there was a kid like me, but they were somehow special and different, and that made them cool. Maybe they were like the underdog, or they felt like a fish out of water. Most of the time they tried to keep what made them cool or different a secret, but there would come a time when they would be put in a position where that unique trait would be the very thing that would save the day. Real quick, what's your favorite Disney Channel Original Movie? Does it kind of fit that underdog mold? I mean, a lot of them do, but not all of them do. Let me know down in the comments, of course. By the time Cadet Kelly premiered a few years later, I was fully invested. I knew what I was getting from the DCOMs, and I watched the Disney sitcoms too. So seeing Ren Stevens and Lizzie McGuire in the same movie, They were big stars to a Disney Channel kid like me, so sign me up. But even at that point, I didn't see every Disney Channel movie ever. I, I still haven't seen them all. So I wasn't surprised that I didn't know Northern Lights. I was surprised that it was the first Disney Channel original movie because Under Wraps was the first Disney Channel original movie. They even talked about that when they remade it in 2021. It was the first DCOM. And I even remember a decade ago in In 2016, Disney Channel was ramping up to its big celebration of the 100th Disney Channel Original Movie. It was this remake of the Touchstone movie Adventures in Babysitting, but this time starring Sofia Carson, you know, Evie from Descendants, and that friend girl from Girl Meets World, Sabrina Carpenter. Yeah, I guess she's the bigger star today, right? She's the short and sweet superstar. I know who she is. It's exciting to see when the Disney Channel stars make it big. Anyway, leading into the big premiere of Adventures in Babysitting, Disney Channel showed all the 99 previous DCOMs over the course of a month. They even name-dropped Under Wraps as the first one. And Under Wraps fits that DCOM mold too. It's like these 3 kids revive a long-dead mummy, and then they try their best to keep the whole thing Under wraps. So Disney Channel says that it's under wraps. It's the first DCOM, but then the A to Z Disney Encyclopedia says it's Northern Lights, and it's not something that I can easily wrap my head around because two different parts of Disney are saying two different, totally different things. So next, I had to hit up the old Google machine, and I find a bunch of this back and forth. But a couple of things spark my interest. One is this article on MTV.com from the Wayback Machine from during that 2016. replay of all the DCOMs, and it points out that Northern Lights was not being aired, and it was instead replaced by the High School Musical spin-off Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure, which is not a Disney Channel original movie but a straight-to-video release that got some heavy play on Disney Channel. And actually, Disney never claimed it was a DCOM. But that confused me a little more because, wait, back to that encyclopedia list. Yeah, okay, Sharpay isn't on there, but Adventures in Babysitting is listed on list as the 101st movie. And that means Sharpay didn't replace Northern Lights. It replaced something else. To figure out which other movie was left out, I had to cross-reference the list of airing times from the marathon and the Disney Channel Original Movie list from the encyclopedia. And I came up with Punxs, like P-U-N-K-S. Now, I never heard of this one either, but it's also got some big stars, Jessica Alba, Randy Quaid, and the Fonz, Henry Winkler. And it's from 1999, and it's got that DCOM special sauce. These punk kids are basically superheroes that have to overcome a supervillain CEO of an evil corporation and his evil augmenter invention. And it was advertised as and shown as a Disney Channel Original Movie. It's the Disney Channel Original Movie, Punks, Tuesday at 7/6c, followed by Wish Upon a Star on Disney. but it wasn't actually original to Disney Channel. Just like Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure, it got a home video release before it ever hit Disney Channel airwaves. And on top of that, the movie wasn't even produced by Disney. The home video wasn't even released by Disney, and it didn't promote it as a Disney Channel movie on the packaging. But not all Disney Channel Original Movies were produced by Disney. Some were produced by third-party production companies. So at this point, I'm even more confused. Ain't a DCOM, and Disney was calling it one. And so what does that make Northern Lights? That is a DCOM, but Disney Channel doesn't like to talk about. Is it legit the first Disney Channel original movie? I had to hit the books again, and I turned to another one of my favorites: Bill Cotter's *The Wonderful World of Disney Television: A Complete History*. That's the kind of thing I'm looking for. I need a complete history of Disney television. But I ran into a snag when I found out that this book is. Not so complete because it was published months before Northern Lights premiered, and it doesn't even mention the term Disney Channel Original Movie. The last movie it mentions is Night John, and that was called a Disney Channel Premiere Film, and that was actually the last movie dubbed a Premiere Film, because right after this book was published, Disney Channel went through a rebrand and started the Disney Channel Original Movie series, with Northern Lights. So I had to do it. I had to see Northern Lights. So I set out to see it for myself, but it's not out there. It's not on Disney Plus. It's not on YouTube. There was a time when it was uploaded to YouTube, but it has since been taken down. It's practically lost media. So I started reaching out to the internet and asking around if anyone could help me out. Nothing was coming up Northern Lights, but in all my searching, I think I found the best thing. Alison MacLean Merrill. She's a pop culture writer, a member of the Television Critics Association, and a Disney Channel historian. And best yet, she saw Northern Lights back when it was on YouTube, before it was taken down, and she wrote a review of it for her blog, Past Foot Forward. Maybe she could tell me about the movie and help me make sense of it, and maybe all Disney Channel Original Movies altogether. Allison, thank you so much for talking to me about this. I'm so confused about, like, what Disney Channel Original Movies even are, or, like, do— have I, like, been— you need to help me sort this all out.
10:31 --> 11:40 I think strictly by branding, we do have some, some guidelines for what a Disney Channel Original Movie was. This branding began In the mid to late '90s, that, that's when it was developing. The former branding was Disney Channel Premiere Film. So with this new iteration, the channel was inching towards a movie that was really made for a tween audience. Our parents could still watch it with us, but they were stories about kids. And they were broken into genres involving sports, fantasy, Halloween movies, music-driven movies, eventually full-blown TV movie musicals. So those are some pieces to the puzzle here. Usually there needs to be some coming-of-age element. The protagonist typically needs to be within this kid to teenage age range, overcome some struggle along the way, and gain a bit of self-discovery, at least, through the process.
11:40 --> 11:56 Let's talk about the reason I wanted to talk to you anyway, and that's Northern Lights. So, like, this is not easy to find on the internet. You, at some point in the past, have gotten a hold of being able to see it. What is Northern Lights?
11:56 --> 13:04 So this film is not what you would think of as the textbook definition of a DCOM. It's not a Brink or a Johnny Tsunami, Cadet Kelly, High School Musical. It's not a story about a teenager. There is a child involved, but it's, it's a movie where Diane Keaton is the protagonist, and she's a single woman living her life as a, you know, concierge booking Broadway tickets for people in New York City. She finds out that her brother has died, her brother she hasn't seen in 10 years, that this brother has asked her and an old friend acquaintance of his to share co-guardianship of his son. So she's meant to go and take care of her nephew. It's a really heavy film. It deals with mental illness, it deals with grief, and it does come together in, I think, a pretty satisfying ending. But this was really a rabbit hole I went down in my research, I think for some of the same reasons that you are, because it's such an anomaly in this brand.
13:05 --> 13:10 When do you think In your opinion, did the Disney Channel Original Movies solidify?
13:10 --> 13:40 I think about this a lot. You just— you see 1998, Brink and Halloween Town, and then '99 with Smart House and Zenon, Johnny Tsunami. I think that the basic ingredients come together very quickly. So I would say it solidified. what it should be by 1999, and it only intensifies from there until a certain point.
13:40 --> 13:53 Do you think that it was so planned and intentional that they, like, shifted course from, from the premiere films into the, the original movies?
13:53 --> 14:21 I don't think that the, like, specific branding Disney Channel premiere film to Disney Channel original movie was as stark as we might think that it would be, because there are some intervening years where they actually play around with the branding a little bit, even on air. I mean, the only reason that we can say definitively that Northern Lights was counted as a Disney Channel Original Movie is because that's said in a promo that was on air.
14:21 --> 14:32 Coming up next, a special encore presentation of a Disney Channel Original Movie, Northern Lights. Followed by Mark Twain's classic, The Adventures of Huck Finn, here on Disney.
14:32 --> 14:46 So, yeah, I think that the audience they were targeting— Disney Channel in the 1990s went through something Nickelodeon had already gone through, wanting to be cool and attract that young audience.
14:46 --> 14:53 I guess I want to ask you the big definitive question. Is Northern Lights a Disney Channel original movie?
14:53 --> 15:45 I just have to count it as one. Because they said it is. But like, like we discussed, it wasn't solidified yet what that really meant. And, and that's okay. I think that the reason Northern Lights existed— the best explanation that I've gotten was from someone who worked at the channel in scheduling, and it's because they didn't know what it was yet. They didn't have this whole arsenal of movies about tweens yet. There's a lot in-between stuff that's happening, and that will for a few years. Even while they're building this library, they're airing the Susie Qs and Wish Upon a Star. They're taking those Wonderful World of Disney movies from ABC and putting them on the channel so much that those feel like a big part of watching at the time as well.
15:45 --> 21:12 So all of that helped a lot. Talking to Alison filled in a lot of blanks. feel more confident now that Northern Lights is the first Disney Channel Original Movie, because Disney said it was back in 1997. But back then, we also didn't know what a Disney Channel Original Movie would become. When Disney Channel launched in the '80s, programming was diversified. Kids programming in the morning, grown-up programming at nighttime, movies for the whole family. But probably more movies for grown-ups that parents could still enjoy comfortably while their kids were in the room with them. But by 1997, Disney Channel was in a transitional period. Cable TV had expanded into many grown-up interests and pulled that demographic in a ton of different directions. Disney was now focusing on kids and going head-to-head with Nickelodeon for the tween demographic. Changing the name of the movie series didn't change the movies into juggernauts of millennial nostalgia. The movies evolved and changed based on what the teens were watching and talking about on the playgrounds at school. And as the rating numbers started to show Disney that the tweens were turning off Nickelodeon and turning on Disney Channel, Disney repeated more of that formula, that one we're now so familiar with. It got tweaked and stretched and changed. Zenon got sequels. And by the time High School Musical became a phenomenon, Disney Channel had perfected the recipe. The only part of the story that still bothers me is that it's not out there for us to watch. It's not on Disney+ or Hulu or showing as a nostalgia piece on Disney Channel and Freeform like Halloween Town. And there are other shows and movies that we missed, like House of Mouse and Lloyd in Space and My Date with the President's Daughter, and those aren't on Disney+, but you can still watch recordings that have been uploaded to YouTube, at least for now. It's almost Disney is keeping this one specifically out of sight, like it's something they're ashamed of. But I actually think it's more of a case of that classic Disney storytelling celebrating the Disney Channel original movie in its most evolved form, saying we've been giving you the same tween-led stories since the beginning, like in Under Wraps. That, that is a cleaner story. Kinda like, let's not lose sight of one thing, it all started with a mouse. That phrase doesn't acknowledge Oswald, or Alice, or even Ub Iwerks. But it's a cleaner story. It's easier to tell. So, just when I was coming to terms with all of this, I heard back from someone online. They sent me a VHS tape from 1997. I couldn't believe it. I had to find an old VCR, and I got to see The Northern Lights. It was a lot of the things that Allison told me it would be. It was an adult-led story. It was a fine made-for-TV movie. The whole family could watch it, but there were a lot of adults in this story. There was really only one kid character. There were some children's side characters, but there was like one kid, and it really wasn't even about him. It was about the grown-ups around him. And he lived in this quirky town, and the town was just like all of these very interesting adult grown-up characters who had these little quirks and tics and things, like a cab driver that barked like a dog. So it was goofy, it was zany, it had that. It didn't feel like a Disney Channel original movie that I knew, more of like a first pancake. that would prime the pan for the series of golden DCOMs to come. But the first pancake is still a pancake. It's made from the same ingredients, even if it is pretty weird compared to the rest. And Northern Lights actually has a very Disney ingredient: the creative mind behind the movie, screenwriter Jon Hoffman. Before Hoffman wrote this movie, we Disney Channel kids actually knew as the Mad Hatter on Disney Channel's Adventures in Wonderland. Remember that funky '90s live-action take on Alice? Northern Lights was both John Hoffman's last acting credit and his first successful foray into writing for TV and movies, a writing career that would lead him to write and co-create Only Murders in the Building with Disney legend Steve Martin for Disney's Hulu. Thanks for joining me on this journey into my understanding of Disney Channel Original Movies. And if you wanted to see the whole interview I did with Alison, it's up on my Patreon. Become a member and you could see it with lots more Synergy Loves Company bonus content. Also, definitely go check out Alison's Past Foot Forward blog and social medias. She's got great content out there. Now, those Disney Channel episodes I set out to research before I went down this rabbit hole are still on the way, so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss them. Check out this video next, and remember to keep discovering the magic in everything.