The Disney Channel original movies with the weirdest premises

From 1983 until 1997, the Disney Channel Original Movie was known as the Disney Channel Premiere Film. If that sounds a little fancier, well, these movies tended to be less goofy and more high-concept, generally speaking. A lot of adaptations of children’s literature or serious history tales of perseverance or what have you. Some of them, though, were still weird. “Mother Goose Rock ‘n’ Rhyme” is a musical about Gordon Goose learning to embrace living in Rhymeland through song. It has that acid-trip-by-way-of-children’s-programming feel that stuff like this used to, and it is packed with famous faces. Both Simon and Garfunkel are in it!

Ahh, Shelley Long. Had you only stayed on “Cheers.” Amy Jo Johnson (of Pink Power Ranger fame) plays Suzie Q, a girl who dies on the way to a high school dance in the 1950s and, 40 years later, returns to her childhood home as a ghost. With the help of the boy who now lives there, Suzie tries to keep her parents from being kicked out of their home in a trailer park. Cheerful! Long, once a sitcom icon, is relegated to playing the boy’s mom.

“Wish Upon a Star” is perhaps the pivot point when Premiere Films became Original Movies. It’s still from the former era, but definitely has the feel of a goofy, nonsensical Disney Channel movie. Essentially, by which we mean entirely, it’s a body-swap situation but with sisters who are pretty similar in age. That said, about as unimaginative as a body-swap movie can be. What is notable, aside from the silliness, is that Katherine Heigl plays the older sister.

The first Disney Channel Original Movie is definitely a template setter. Even the promotional material is way goofier, way more cartoonish, and way more neon-colored. Plus, the premise is both high-concept and silly. As you may have guessed from the title, there’s a mummy in “Under Wraps,” but would you believe this film is about three tweens who become friends with a bumbling mummy?

Okay, so we have here a Disney Original Movie called “You Lucky Dog.” You’re thinking it’s a “Shaggy Dog” kind of deal, right? Nope! This is about a dog therapist who used to be able to read his dog’s mind, then couldn’t read any dogs’ minds, but now he can read one dog’s mind again, and that dog just inherited $64 million. It would have been more fun had the star, Kirk Cameron, turned into a dog, if only for less Kirk Cameron.

“How can we vary the underdog sports movie?” is a reasonable question to ask, especially when you are Disney, and you are making a few original movies a year. However, Disney did get to bowling awfully fast. This film follows two towns full of crazy people who give a trophy to the winner of a junior high school basketball game, but when that game somehow ends in a tie, they decide the winner with a bowling match. Kaley Cuoco is in it, though.

Now this is the exact kind of title a movie like this should have. Drive the premise home, and do it as goofily as possible. We’ve had mummies, so now we need vampires. It’s not unlike a kid-friendly version of “Fright Night,” but with more Caroline Rhea in it.

“Twelfth Night” is not the most-adapted William Shakespeare play, but it may be the play that is loosely adapted the most often. People love to come up with their own take on the “girl pretends to be a boy, wackiness ensues” premise at the center of the play. In this case, the Disney Channel couldn't stop at a motocross movie starring children. No, it also needed to “Twelfth Night” it up!

Disney Channel really wants you to believe towns invest in junior high sports. “The Luck of the Irish” cribs heavily from “Teen Wolf,” but without any of the stuff that works in “Teen Wolf.” Which is saying something, because very little works in “Teen Wolf.” A boy on his school’s basketball team learns he is half-leprechaun, and when he loses his lucky coin, he begins to transform.

Even by 2003, it was a sweaty premise that a boy who liked to cook (and seemed to primarily enjoy masculine-coded cooking such as grilling) would be ostracized by friends and family for it. It would have been enough for him to care about baseball and cooking and have “the big game” and “the big cooking contest” on the same day and have to decide. Not for Disney Channel, though, which would also have you believe winning one cooking competition could both win you a million dollars and get you into a culinary institute.

“Pixel Perfect” starts with a ripoff of “Jem and the Holograms.” It gets weirder from there. At a certain point, Loretta, the holographic backup musician, lives in the brain of the main character. In the end, one protagonist learns not to worry about being perfect, and the other learns it’s not healthy to be in love with the computer lady you made to be in your friend’s band.

Brenda Song was a Disney Channel staple back then. She stars in “Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior,” a great name for a movie. Wendy finds out she is the only person who can stop an ancient Chinese dragon from destroying the world, naturally.

Disney Channel brought out its late-2000s big guns for this one. “Princes Protection Program” stars Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato. Yes, a princess (the princess of Costa Luna, naturally) is secretly taken into a protection program, where she hangs out by a lake and gets into an odd couple dynamic with the daughter of the agent who whisked her away. We do wonder why the villainous dictator of Costa Estrella is named Magnus Kane, though. Well, a lot of Nazis did end up in Argentina. Maybe it’s a pointed reference to that?

What is weird here is that “Frenemies” is a triptych. It’s an anthology film about friends having falling-outs and then reconciling, except the third one is way more of a riff on “The Prince and the Pauper.” Also, one of them involves a dog. The one we haven’t mentioned has Zendaya as a co-star, though!

You know the teen girls at the center of “How to Build a Better Boy” are smart because they wear glasses! The film isn't dissimilar to “Weird Science,” but it's arguably stranger. See, in the effort to create a virtual boyfriend so one of the girls can pretend she has a boyfriend, they accidentally hack into the Pentagon and put the boyfriend’s personality into a robot soldier prototype, and now he’s on the loose.

No, we didn’t slip up. In 2021, Disney Channel remade “Under Wraps.” The plot remains the same, and just as silly. It’s wild that Disney Channel remade one of its original movies. That’s how far the remake industrial complex has gotten its claws into the entertainment industry.

We didn’t cover the full run of the “Zombies” musicals on Disney Channel. As you can glean, this is the fourth one. Why this one is so odd, and worth mentioning, is that they decided not only to make a fourth one, but to introduce vampires. However, there are vampires, and they have enemies: the daywalkers. So now we have the fourth film in a series of zombie musicals, and it has vampires and “daywalkers” in it.