Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. A new book looks into the programming powerhouse that brought us stars like Raven-Symoné, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Zendaya, Sabrina Carpenter, and the Jonas Brothers back when they did commercials that sounded like this.

Kevin Jonas: Hey, we're the kids from the future.

Nick Jonas: We're the Jonas Brothers.

Joe Jonas: From the soundtrack of Disney's new movie, Meet the Robinsons.

Nick Jonas: But in the present, you're watching Disney Channel.

Alison Stewart: For kids growing up in the aughts, Disney Channel wasn't just entertainment, it was a rite of passage. But behind the scenes, Disney's careful and conservative image controlled by what could and couldn't appear on the screen. For example, phrases like, "Shut up," and, "You suck," were given an automatic no go. Adult characters couldn't even be seen dripping as Shirley Temple mocktail. The book is titled Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire is out now. Author Ashley Spencer joins us to discuss. Hi, Ashley.

Ashley Spencer: Hi.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, get in on this conversation. Did you watch the Disney Channel or maybe you had children who watched the Disney Channel? Call in with your favorite memories or if you have any questions about the business side of Disney, we'd like to hear from you. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You can reach out to us on social media @AllOfItWNYC. When did you first notice the cultural impact Disney Channel had on kids who grew up in the 2000s?

Ashley Spencer: Well, I am one of those kids who was susceptible to Disney Channel's cultural impact. I really around the late '90s, that was my era of Disney Channel when I begged my parents as a kid to add the network to our cable package. Because at the time, Disney Channel, and what it had been since 1983 when it was founded was a premium cable network. Originally, you had to pay to add it to your cable package, like an HBO for kids. In the late '90s, as they started transitioning to basic cable, the reach grew wider and wider.

What I and millions of other viewers became enamored with, I think was this smart combination. They started tapping into of pop music, teen pop music, and the stars on their shows and utilizing all of the divisions of the Walt Disney Company to promote the talent that they had on their series and parlay that into record deals and theatrical releases and merchandise. It became, by the time you have High School Musical and Hannah Montana, Disney Channel has just created this global empire of tween content.

Alison Stewart: Let's roll it back to 1983. Why did the Disney Channel start?

Ashley Spencer: Originally, they were thinking the Disney Channel could be a home for Disney's previous theatrical releases to live on cable. In the 1980s, you really see cable TV start to proliferate. These niche cable networks pop up. You've got the Travel Channel, AE, and different things that focusing in on more tailored viewing for various consumer habits. With Disney, they thought, "Great. We'll put our movies on this channel." Also, how wonderful we now have a space to promote all of our upcoming ventures.

We can talk about EPCOT, we can talk about these theme parks we are expanding and later with the cruise ship lines and all of that. They really saw it as a place that Disney could talk about itself, and further promote the Walt Disney brand. In the '80s and the '90s, the content is kind of this hodgepodge and you have things that are very successful, like The All New Mickey Mouse Club, which is where we first met Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling, and Keri Russell. You also have things like Willie Nelson concerts and the American Teacher Awards.

It was really scattered in terms of what you would get when you turned on the Disney Channel. It didn't have this cohesive look and feel, and it didn't really have brand loyalty because it was paid. They were still catering to the parents because the parents are paying to add this to the package. You've got to make them feel good about what their kids are watching, but that doesn't necessarily equate to what kids want to watch.

Alison Stewart: This is an unauthorized record of Disney's history, meaning that it's not coming from the company itself. How was it to work independently on a book about Disney because Disney has long arms. How did you find the freedom to explore the topic as a journalist?

Ashley Spencer: Yes, it's interesting. I mean, that was something I knew from the very beginning that I wanted this to be a fully independent look at Disney Channel and not be beholden to whatever sanitized corporate version of events that Disney might want out there. It was really building brick by brick and reaching out to sources at every level across different divisions. I spoke with both people who worked on the shows themselves, the showrunners, producers, writers, actors, costume designers, wig makers, everyone at that level, but also with former executives at the network and people who kind of worked on this longer arc of the Disney trajectory.

What I found, I mean, really, when you talk about a company like the Walt Disney Company, as you said, there are long arms, Disney is now controlling Marvel, Lucasfilm, Hulu, and Fox, various things that people probably in the creative industry still want to be a part of. I really love retirees, people who no longer have in the industry. They're great sources. I think also when you talk about these shows, part of why I wanted to do this book was no one had really taken these staff seriously on a broader level.

Sure, it was being covered in The New York Times and papers and from a business standpoint as things progressed, but no one had really done this in-depth dive. For the people that worked on these shows and at the network building this, really an empire, they were very happy and eager most people to be recognized and to talk about that legacy and to talk about what they put into it and have someone want to spend time with them.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. Rachel calling in from Rockland County. Hi, Rachel, thank you so much for calling All Of It.

Rachel: Hi. I'm one of the moms who survived the early days of Disney Network, or I don't know if it's early, but I think so, in the early '90s and late '90s. I'm an early knots. Yes, in the early days, I survived it. I didn't think I was going to be able to handle it. It was so squeaky clean. I was like, "Okay, I can't believe my kids are watching this every day." Now, my kids, they were not allowed to watch much TV, but they were just so attracted to Disney Channel. It was amazing. I would give them enough, they get a little bit of time on that.

I found that one show, Wizards of Waverly Place was the one show we could watch together because the acting was so good and the writing was so good. It was like, "Wow, we all enjoyed this one show." We laughed and laughed a lot. They did something really well that even though they had to stay clean, their humor really-- they got really good and creative at getting the humor right for parents because I wasn't the only one, too. That means the parents talk about that.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much, Rachel, for calling. Listeners, did you watch the Disney Channel? Do you have a question about the business aspect of it? You can call in at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. My guest is Ashley Spencer. We're discussing her book, Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire. We got this text that said, "Competition to Nickelodeon?" What do you think? Tell us about that.

Ashley Spencer: Yes, it's so interesting because I think in hindsight, we view it as these two pillars, have two heavyweight pillars of Nickelodeon versus Disney Channel in terms of kids programming. Really, what had happened for a long time is that Nickelodeon dominated that space. Throughout the '80s and '90s, it was Nickelodeon's world. Disney Channel just started kind of clawing its way in at the end of the '90s and then became this super force in the 2000s.

I think it's interesting in playing off what that last caller was saying as well, in the late '90s, Disney Channel started doing focus groups and research. What they found was that millennial kids were saying they wanted to be closer to their parents, they wanted to have time with their families. Whereas Nickelodeon had banked on we will be a network that is for kids only. This is a parent-free zone. You come here for gross out humor, slime, gags. Parents not allowed.

Disney Channel started tapping into, okay, kids want to be with their parents, so we need to find a balance of content that within this show, the kids are going to love it and relate to it and think it's cool, but the parents are going to, one, not feel bad about their kids watching it, not be nervous that the content isn't going to be appropriate. Also, they're going to be pretty entertained, too. The writing gets a little bit sharper and the content is a little more entertaining because they really wanted families to come together.

You see that with a show like Wizards of Waverly Place and especially around Y2K with shows like Lizzie McGuire, and That's So Raven and things that really tapped into multigenerational viewing.

Alison Stewart: Yes, you pointed out that That's So Raven and Lizzie McGuire really played an important role in Disney's tween empire.

Ashley Spencer: Yes, huge, huge. I mean, Lizzie McGuire changed everything, and that was because of Hilary Duff. With Lizzie McGuire and Hilary in the title role, they've got this very relatable, very sweet lead girl, but she's also aspirational. She's kind of cool, but she could feel like she could be your best friend and she's not threatening. With Hilary, who wants to also become a singer and wants to expand beyond Disney Channel, they suddenly have a star who is marketable outside of just their TV series. You begin to see the different Disney lovers work in tandem.

Disney owns these record labels, Hollywood Records and Walt Disney Records, and they start to work with Hilary and put out her pop music on those record labels, and then they parlay Lizzie McGuire into The Lizzie McGuire Movie, which comes out in theaters and is a big hit. Suddenly, the stars of Disney Channel aren't just cable TV stars, they are superstars across America.

Alison Stewart: Yes. I was going to ask, how did Disney manage to find and develop talent like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Zendaya?

Ashley Spencer: I mean, every story is different, but they were really, by the 2000s, you start to see the Disney Channel casting directors. In addition to casting for an individual project that might come about and having the regular audition process, they're also routinely going on open casting calls across the country, looking for kids at performing arts schools, at acting classes, and pulling them out of these different geographical locations where you might not think of polished child stars coming from.

What that does, when you're scouting kids in Texas, Illinois, and all over the country, and not just in hubs like Los Angeles and New York, they're really looking for kids that still feel authentic and relatable. They don't want them to feel manufactured, even though it is a very manufactured system that they're going to come up through. They're really looking for this best friend factor in their stars, and then once they're at Disney Channel, they start seeding them into different shows.

A small guest role on a series, might become a bigger guest role on another series, might become your lead role on a show, which is what happened with Selena Gomez, who had various little parts and pilots that she was going through before she got her lead role on Wizards of Waverly Place.

Alison Stewart: We got a text here, it says, "I'm a Disney child at heart with movie classics like Beauty and the Beast. However, I never became a Disney tween teen. Dealing with poverty and parents' divorce just made a lot of the content unrelatable to me and actually felt like pandering to me as a person. Disney cartoon classics are close to my heart, but I never felt like the network got the right mix of growing up and speaking to harsh reality." What about that? What about Disney's role in dealing with the harsh reality that teens had to go through?

Ashley Spencer: I think that's a very valid complaint and observation because what you have with Disney that really you don't have with any other company that I can think of and certainly not any other network is this allure and this specter of the legacy of this brand. You've got Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney and this larger-than-life presence that's being felt at all times of what Disney content represents. It's got to be feel good, it's got to be warm and fuzzy in a lot of ways.

While they did venture into touching on different topics that kids were dealing with, such as after 9/11, they did these interstitials with their talent and they would talk about the importance of patriotism, firefighters, and things like that. They would never directly confront the horrors or the stark realities of kind of going on in global affairs. The way that, on Nickelodeon, one of their pioneering programs was Nick News with Linda Ellerbee. They would really, in a kid friendly way, but they would really address different issues that the kids were dealing with and the country was dealing with throughout the '90s and 2000s.

With Disney, there was always this barrier of we don't want to cross a line. To the extent that a Miley Cyrus music video, they were nervous about showing tween girls crying in the video because that would maybe upset viewers to see kids crying. There was just so much fear that if we break that social contract, parents won't see this as a safe place for their kids anymore. I think that kept them from touching a lot of those issues, perhaps to their detriment that a lot of viewers were dealing with in their own lives.

Alison Stewart: A: A new book traces the rise of the Disney Channel in the early aughts and how it shaped kids' media. Author Ashley Spencer joins us to discuss Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire. Let's talk to, I believe, it's Angel or Angel on Line 2. Hi, thanks for calling.

Angel: Hi, yes, it is Angel. I am a female angel. I am a parent of now-grown big fans of the Disney Channel. Both my husband and I and our daughters, we always felt it was a comfortable thing that they could watch without us really honing in on all of the content. They were Hilary Duff, Miley Cyrus, the Wizards of Waverly Place, we particularly related to. We are New Yorkers, we live in Westchester County, but we spend a lot of time in Manhattan and New York City.

It was just kind of fun to see someone also where we come from in White Plains, there was an obvious slant towards in the Wizards of Waverly Place people who were Spanish speaking and fully half of the public schoolers in my daughter's school district were Spanish speaking at home. It was just kind of a familiar thing. High School Musical was just the juggernaut for us. I mean, our daughters, the whole route, we had watch parties at the house. It was very not unusual to have 14 or 15 tweens or even early teens.

That was the thing is it kind of crossed over when our younger daughter was 11 and our older was 14. All of a sudden, the older girl and her sisters would be honing in on the younger girl's party. Watching it, it was a lot of fun. We even took them to see the concerts, the tours that went on. It was just an easy and fun thing to be a part of. There were times even my husband and I would almost find ourselves sitting down going, "Are we watching this without the girls?" Go ahead.

Alison Stewart: No, I'm going to dive in real quick. Thank you so much for calling, Angel. I wanted to get into this idea of Disney's image throughout the book, and it's described throughout the book, they are very strict about representation of the brand. What were some of the moments of Disney strict image? Well, first of all, what are some of the moments? Let's start with what is expected of Disney stars?

Ashley Spencer: Yes. With a Disney Channel star, you kind of have the mold set with Hilary Duff, who by all accounts, in the way that she talks about herself as a young person, was fitting within that mold. She wasn't really pushing the boundaries. She was pretty content to be a "good girl" in that system. It becomes expected that Disney Channel stars are going to be perky, they're going to be happy, they're going to be polite role models. Really. I mean, that's a huge thing that you see with Disney Channel and what they expect from their stars, is they expect them to be role models for the kids of America.

I don't know that that's necessarily a fair thing to put on the shoulders of a teenager who's growing it up and figuring everything out for themselves. What starts happening with someone like Miley Cyrus, who is different from Hilary Duff, and that Miley, everyone that I spoke to, Miley was just this spitfire. She was always so confident and sure of herself. She knew what she wanted. She was a bit of a wild child hippie. Miley and her parents, who are fully supportive of Miley and happy for her to do what she wants to do, they start pushing the limits of what Disney is comfortable with.

You see that with something like the Vanity Fair photo shoot, shot by Annie Leibovitz in 2008. I don't know if you remember that, but it was a big scandal at the time. Miley posed what appeared to be topless. She had a silk sheet over her top, and her back was exposed. That becomes this massive scandal. That was something that Disney Channel wasn't aware of that was happening until the photos started to leak. With Miley Cyrus, she becomes such a big star that she's able to get these opportunities without going through Disney Channel.

That brings a lot of tension, because suddenly, Disney can't control the way people are perceiving the talent on their network. You see with Miley, something like that with Vanessa Hudgens from High School Musical, had nude photos leaked during that franchise was still in production. They were the second sequel had just come out. That was also something Disney Channel was really not prepared to confront. The moment in time that this was all happening, the Internet and social media was really starting to take off. Suddenly, celebrities, their personal lives are not as private as they used to be.

Also, viewers of these shows suddenly have access to learning these things that they couldn't before. No longer is it just tween magazines that are Bop and Tiger Beat keeping this wall up between exactly what Disney wants the world to see of their young stars, but suddenly, it's now available in anyone's home and on the home computer and later with phones and with the rise of social media even further. That was something I don't think Disney Channel was really prepared for.

Alison Stewart: Got a text says "That's So Raven is truly one of the great sitcoms of TV history." Another says, "I was Disney tween and the 2000s were the best time for the channel." The name of the book is Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel's Tween Empire. It's by Ashley Spencer. Hey, Ashley, thank you so much for spending time with us.

Ashley Spencer: Thank you so much for having me. This was an absolute treat.

Alison Stewart: And that is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I'll be back here tomorrow.