FOR OUR CONSIDERATION A spoonful of sitcom synergy: 25 years of the "Disney episode"

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If you’ve watched sitcoms over the past 25 years, there’s a good chance you’ve seen a “Disney episode.” They all follow the same basic formula: A family (it’s always a family) is suddenly presented with an opportunity to go to Walt Disney World (it’s nearly always Walt Disney World). Maybe the uncle’s band is playing somewhere inside the Magic Kingdom. Perhaps their annoying neighbor has entered an inventor’s contest at EPCOT. Or maybe the kids’ teacher in dark magic conjures a field trip to Animal Kingdom, so they can learn to brew potion from the local fauna. Whatever the excuse, the characters are soon making a trek to Orlando, where they discover something about themselves while plunging down Splash Mountain or dodging wildlife on the Jungle Cruise.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Disney episode: NBC’s Blossom, produced by Walt Disney’s Touchstone Television, aired an episode set at Disneyland in February 1993. It was followed later that spring by ABC’s Full House taking the entire Tanner clan to Florida. These sweeps-month stunts kickstarted a long-running sitcom trend—one that AdWeek called a “rite of passage” when ABC’s Black-ish became the most recent to make the pilgrimage in 2016. However, it’s a rite of passage that’s far less common than it once was. Seven sitcoms visited one of the Disney parks between the years 1993-1998. Since the year 2000, only four have. While the tradition is still alive, whatever value the “Disney episode” once had has changed dramatically: the Happiest Place On Earth doesn’t create the same TV magic it once did.



Although the Disney episode is commonly—and logically—understood through the lens of corporate synergy, that’s an oversimplification. While it’s true that Disney now owns ABC, it didn’t when Full House became the first “TGIF” sitcom to visit Walt Disney World in 1993. At that time, their promotional partnership was based on the huge family audience for ABC’s Friday night programming block, which created a mutually beneficial arrangement for the hit show and the Disney conglomerate. After Disney announced plans to acquire ABC, three more of the network’s shows visited in 1996—Boy Meets World, Roseanne, and Step By Step—though there wasn’t much in the way of overt cross-promotion. There, as always, the Disney episode was still predicated on connecting the company’s parks to TV for and about families. The synergy just made it easier to organize: According to the Orlando Sentinel, Roseanne pitched Disney World as a location because the writers knew it would be the easiest way to convince their network’s new owners to pay to let the crew film an episode on location.

Naturally, that synergy drew plenty of scrutiny. In 1997, The New York Times covered the growing Disney episode trend, asking, with the ring of accusation, “Has anybody noticed how many sitcoms have had episodes set at Disney World? And how lately they all seem to be on ABC, the network the Walt Disney Company announced its merger with in July 1995?” In response, ABC defensively noted that “Disney World has always used the medium of television to promote itself”—which is true. Disneyland itself was introduced to America through its partnership with ABC, where Walt Disney used his weekly anthology series to show off his Magic Kingdom to potential tourists.



But with the advent of the Disney episode, scripted shows were now being forced to contrive reasons for their characters to travel to Orlando, while also balancing the needs of the story with corporate expectations to highlight certain areas of the park. It’s no coincidence that Sabrina The Teenage Witch’s Disney episode is focused exclusively on Animal Kingdom: It actually filmed before Animal Kingdom had even opened to the public, airing only two days after its grand opening in April 1998. Especially when watched in succession, you can see how these certain, short-listed locations—like the restaurant in EPCOT’s The Living Seas, for example—are specifically highlighted across multiple series, in between the standard montages of character meet-and-greets.



Those post-merger ’90s Disney episodes are, on average, pretty weak episodes of television. Full House does a nice job of dividing story up among its characters, whether it’s Michelle’s “princess for a day” storyline, or Danny proposing to his girlfriend Vicky with a fireworks display at episode’s end. (There’s a reason why it’s the one Disney episode that I have distinct memories of from growing up.) But it proved to be a model other shows couldn’t repeat: Urkel’s trip to Disney World on Family Matters is a good excuse to delve into the fantasy of Laura’s relationship with his “Stefan Urquelle” alter ego, but the rest of the family has zero reason to be there except to roam the park. Boy Meets World is helped by only sending Cory, Shawn, and Topanga to the park, but it also weirdly isolates itself in EPCOT’s The Living Seas for much of its running time. (Disney must have been really worried about Sea World’s market share.) And the less said about the terrible Step By Step episodes the better.

But for the most part, we don’t remember Disney episodes because they were particularly good. We remember them because, in shows with long runs and lots of episodes that tell variations on the same story, they have an undeniable novelty—one that few shows managed to translate into great comedy. Besides, for most of these sitcoms, quality was never really a concern. They drew all of their value from their huge, family audiences, and none from critical acclaim. When the St. Petersburg Times covered its Disney episode, it matter-of-factly called Full House “mawkish and predictable and no threat to ever win an Emmy.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s one word-preview was “So?” Variety, meanwhile, dismissively reviewed Family Matters’ trip to Disney in 1995, arguing it was full of “Kodak Moments that otherwise would have cost Disney millions of commercial dollars.” But Variety would have reviewed any episode of Family Matters—or any “TGIF” show—with the same disdain.

[JO Sweet Heart]

Me being the country music fan that I have been all my life, my most favorite part of the Family Matters Disney episodes was hearing Waldo sing the country classic song named "On The Road Again".

God bless you always!!!

Holly