AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

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Hannah Montana can carry a tune and, apparently, a billion-dollar corporation. Disney was floundering until it plugged in its tween dream machine, cranking out the bubblegum-pop stars that make young girls scream—and spend, spend, spend.

erhaps it was my daughters singing along with Hannah Montana—“Get up, get loud, we’re pumping up the party now!”—eight times in a row that morning. Or maybe it was the 16 times I overheard High School Musical and High School Musical 2 playing on the television in the living room, or the several hundred dollars my wife and I spend on Disney tween products—aimed at nine- to 14-year-old girls—every year. Or the fact that a magazine (thankfully, not this one) asked me to profile a Disney tween star and then, almost before I could ask “Who?,” told me that another publication had beaten them to it. Finally, after my eight-year-old daughter pointed to a picture of Hillary Clinton and said she was supporting her for president “because she’s named Hillary, like Hilary Duff,” I decided I had to know: Who is doing this to me?

The original Disney formula, perfected through multiple generations of anthropomorphic animated animals, was simple: Develop adorable children’s properties—Mickey Mouse, the Lion King—and then franchise the characters to within an inch of their cuddly lives, across many platforms around the globe for vast amounts of dollars, euros, yen, and yuan. Disney gets credit for conceiving of and executing synergy long before other media conglomerates made it a bad word. Yet Disney executives were spoiled by their early success. They became too reliant on aging animated characters and couldn’t replicate the magic in the live-action world. The result was a gaping—and costly—hole in Disney’s demographic: While the company excelled at grabbing children under eight by their tiny lapels with Mickey Mouse and his ageless friends, it was losing more and more of that audience as it grew up and migrated elsewhere. The fear, on Wall Street as well as at Disney headquarters in Burbank, California, was that if the kids left, they would never come back.

And indeed, that was proving true. Disney’s vaunted animation businesses were failing with tweens, and its young-adult franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean were slicing over the pony tailed heads of that huge audience. Not anymore. As the peppy lyrics coming from my daughters’ bedroom can attest, the synergy is back, and it’s smacking the sweet spot that Disney had been missing. That squeak you hear is Mickey getting squashed under the wheels of the Disney Channel marketing machine as it pushes Hannah Montana, the Jonas Brothers, High School Musical, and a host of other tween products into our living rooms, if not down our throats.

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