Goodbye Disney Club, Hello Disney Plus
Jun. 20th, 2021 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spiderbraidsAnd now, time for something completely different from my usual...
Cricket gets a robot to help around the house, disrupting the life of the Big City Greens... but enough about that, let's talk about a different kind of technological disruption :-)
(ETA: On the same day this episode aired here, Disney TV Animation's Twitter featured a moment from this episode in its Father's Day post :-))
For the past 29 years, one of our local over-the-air stations here in Thailand has been airing Disney cartoons on Saturday mornings (and for the past few years, Sunday mornings as well; at one point, they even aired them on weekday afternoons :-)) However, given that Disney has lately been pivoting towards a direct-to-consumer first model with the shutdown of 18 Disney-owned channels here in Southeast Asia (out of the 100 they're shutting down this year!) and the upcoming launch of Disney Plus in the region (it seems they've been advertising their 30 June launch in every ad break) one may have suspected that the writing was on the wall for Channel 7's Disney Club...
(An aside: Apparently, the Channel 7-Disney relationship stretches back even further, because the oldest off-air recording of Thai television I've ever seen surfaced is a Channel 7 closedown link from 1980 coming out of "Disney Show"; actually a break in broadcasting from 6:30-8:00pm from the government energy-saving policy of the time)
Turns out we were right: As of July, Channel 7 is replacing Disney Club with a strand with a title that translates (rather blandly) to "Weekend Popular Cartoons", and (seemingly adding insult to injury) the PR report mentioning the new strand as part of new programs coming to the station only mentioned the new strand airing various Japanese cartoons and tokusatsu (which I'm pretty sure another channel has already had cornered for something like the past decade minimum), with no mention whatsoever of what it's replacing :-\ (Not to mention that it's been a long time since anime was on Channel 7, like early 2000s)
Far be it from me to give a comprehensive history of the block, but suffice to say, when Disney Club started, they were pretty much the only game in town for watching Disney on television in Thailand, until Asia's own version of the Disney Channel came along :-) Although Disney Channel was available on smaller local cable systems as early as the mid 2000s (one of the oldest posts on my blog mentions catching some Disney programming at a hotel in 2006... and I may have some stuff from that same vacation coming up :-)), TrueVisions picked it up in 2007, taking it off local cable in the process, causing much consternation to those who were looking forward to the second High School Musical (!) However, TrueVisions initially offered it as an a la carte package, keeping it away from our house until they moved it down to our package level around 2014 (at a guess; it was definitely available to us by January 2015)
(ETA: I've found some PR dating from October 2013 announcing the launch of Disney XD in Thailand, and the expansion of Disney Channel to more package levels, including ours... Disney Junior was still on a higher level though, but that channel would move downwards around 2017-8, though before then the main channel would air, say, Sofia the First with a "Disney Junior on Disney Channel" ID)
Even with a full time channel now available, Disney Club still had one advantage: By 2014, digital television had arrived in Thailand (very far behind the rest of the world, admittedly), so they were able to show their cartoons in HD, while Disney Channel on TrueVisions was still stuck in SD, while Disney XD got HD (Okay, so HD's not such a big advantage for cartoons, but still, look at the sharper lines and rendering :-))
Personally, I originally used to dread waking up early on Saturday mornings when it first started, because my sister would watch Disney Club... it wasn't because I didn't like Disney cartoons (au contraire, actually; I grew up with Disney Afternoon while I was living in the states), but because I couldn't stand Thai dubbing; there's something about the voicing of Thai dubbing that I strongly dislike, to the point that even now, working from home, I find myself sometimes having to move my laptop upstairs to avoid my dad switching over from the default original soundtrack whenever he decides to watch something :-\ So what changed, you may ask? Well, in the late 90s, about 1997-8, we got digital direct-to-home satellite, not only expanding the meager pay-TV offerings from IBC (TrueVisions' predecessor) to something more substantial, but also allowing our bog-standard television to receive the original soundtrack feed... and I remember seeing the Disney Club presenters bragging about the original soundtrack being a good way to help learn English :-) (Meanwhile, that other channel cornering the OTA anime market apparently stopped airing the original soundtrack for virtually all of their imported shows when they went digital :-\)
The word "legend" has been bandied about regarding Disney Club, and the above Facebook link about the end of the block has people talking about their favorite presenters, but as far as I'm concerned, it'd be easier to list the shows I remember watching on Disney Club, back when I had the energy to wake up at 6:30am to watch (started 6:45 back then): Pepper Ann, The Weekenders (once wrote reviews of the show on Usenet, remember Usenet? :-)), Buzz Lightyear, House of Mouse, Recess, Lloyd in Space, Teamo Supremo, Teacher's Pet, occasionally Proud Family and Kim Possible, and even Nightmare Ned, a show so obscure that Lost Media Wiki has written about it, and noted that many episodes were re-discovered in Greek before they were found in the original English (!) That puts my era of Disney Club at around the early to mid-late aughts :-) Two reasons I stopped watching: Channel 7 moved it up to 6:15am (!), and I graduated from college and got a job, which changed my rhythms, meaning I tended to wake up around 8:30-9:00am on weekends (or even later!) and also meaning the only times I watched Disney Club "live" after that were mainly when I had a day off from work during their weekday afternoon phase (which ended when Channel 7 decided to move the news up into that slot around 2016-7 :-\) Other than the usual on-air promos, Disney Club used to have its own Facebook page to advertise on-air contests and what shows were coming up, which at least allowed me to set recordings for anything worth watching, but they ended up shutting down their page around 2017-8 and rolling in their coverage together with Channel 7's general entertainment Facebook page... which was a) more or less limited to their contests, and b) lumped together with announcements for upcoming movie broadcasts, news about celebrities, and other stuff :-\ Also, in the later post-FB years, it was not very common for me to see on-air promos, to the point where, for example, after the first season of Star vs. The Forces of Evil ended on Disney Club, the next time I saw a promo for Star was late in the first half of season 3 (which they only aired up to the holiday episode)... and next time after that, they were on season 4 :-\ (And I have no clue if Amphibia ever aired there; you'd think they'd be all for promoting Disney's first identifiably Thai character :-\)
One of the last videos to be produced for Disney Club celebrated the block's 29th anniversary by inviting users to submit their feelings about the block, and they've also been doing giveaways on Facebook Live... Missing from all these recent videos and PR about Disney Club is any mention of the block coming to an end; although the anniversary video has at least some mention of it in the comments, many seem to be oblivious to its imminent end and are still wishing a long life to the block :-\
Given that the modern kid generation has been more and more into watching their cartoons online instead of traditional TV (even cable), I guess it seemed more and more of an anomaly for an over-the-air station to air Disney cartoons, and given how slow our country was to go digital, it meant that the first season of Star vs. The Forces of Evil went out on analog TV, which doesn't sound right but is completely true :-) Proof:
1. Yeah, once in a rare while I did manage to get out of bed at 7:30am... and went back to nap a bit more :-)
2. Channel 7 put out a different channel logo on the analog feed than the digital HD feed, so it would have been readily apparent to those still watching analog
3. This is from November 2016, the period immediately after the death of King Rama IX, so the logo is in B&W
This might come across as a bit old-fashioned, but given how beloved the strand was, I'm pretty sure that Channel 7 would have gladly kept Disney Club going as long as Disney allowed them, if only out of tradition, because to paraphrase a character from a different network: "What's wrong with old things? Some old things are great" With the end of Disney Club on over-the-air TV, one would think that at least there's still Disney Channel Asia, but as it is, they'll be following Disney Club into the gentle good night just a few months later because of the whole new D2C model :-\ While pivoting children's TV to streaming was somewhat expected, since I understand it's been the way to go these days (digital over-the-air TV in Thailand originally licensed three children and family-oriented services; all three have since shut down), it surprises me that they're also taking out movies and sports with them, because there's something to be said about watching big blockbuster premieres on the movie channels and live sports at the same time as many other people :-) And sometimes, it's just nice to plop down and put on the TV and watch whatever's on :-)
As for Disney Plus, AIS, primarily a mobile phone service provider, has decided to become their partner in Thailand (an interesting choice, given that TrueVisions has been carrying most of the channels that are being discontinued in favor of the new service, some of them for longer than AIS has been in the TV business), and this video from AIS features one of their current spokespersons, pop idol Peck Palitchoke, plugging the new service... and it's been pointed out that it's a fitting choice, given that Peck got his start as a Disney Club presenter :-) Here's a video of Peck reading letters from viewers from just after the millennium (judging from the mention of Atlantis), and here's another video of almost 10 minutes of links from an April 2010 airing with Peck (during the phase that it was called "Toon Disney") And word on the street is that (along the strand's original presenters) he'll also participate in the final ever broadcasts of Disney Club, so that's something to look forward to :-)
Cricket gets a robot to help around the house, disrupting the life of the Big City Greens... but enough about that, let's talk about a different kind of technological disruption :-)
(ETA: On the same day this episode aired here, Disney TV Animation's Twitter featured a moment from this episode in its Father's Day post :-))
For the past 29 years, one of our local over-the-air stations here in Thailand has been airing Disney cartoons on Saturday mornings (and for the past few years, Sunday mornings as well; at one point, they even aired them on weekday afternoons :-)) However, given that Disney has lately been pivoting towards a direct-to-consumer first model with the shutdown of 18 Disney-owned channels here in Southeast Asia (out of the 100 they're shutting down this year!) and the upcoming launch of Disney Plus in the region (it seems they've been advertising their 30 June launch in every ad break) one may have suspected that the writing was on the wall for Channel 7's Disney Club...
(An aside: Apparently, the Channel 7-Disney relationship stretches back even further, because the oldest off-air recording of Thai television I've ever seen surfaced is a Channel 7 closedown link from 1980 coming out of "Disney Show"; actually a break in broadcasting from 6:30-8:00pm from the government energy-saving policy of the time)
Turns out we were right: As of July, Channel 7 is replacing Disney Club with a strand with a title that translates (rather blandly) to "Weekend Popular Cartoons", and (seemingly adding insult to injury) the PR report mentioning the new strand as part of new programs coming to the station only mentioned the new strand airing various Japanese cartoons and tokusatsu (which I'm pretty sure another channel has already had cornered for something like the past decade minimum), with no mention whatsoever of what it's replacing :-\ (Not to mention that it's been a long time since anime was on Channel 7, like early 2000s)
Far be it from me to give a comprehensive history of the block, but suffice to say, when Disney Club started, they were pretty much the only game in town for watching Disney on television in Thailand, until Asia's own version of the Disney Channel came along :-) Although Disney Channel was available on smaller local cable systems as early as the mid 2000s (one of the oldest posts on my blog mentions catching some Disney programming at a hotel in 2006... and I may have some stuff from that same vacation coming up :-)), TrueVisions picked it up in 2007, taking it off local cable in the process, causing much consternation to those who were looking forward to the second High School Musical (!) However, TrueVisions initially offered it as an a la carte package, keeping it away from our house until they moved it down to our package level around 2014 (at a guess; it was definitely available to us by January 2015)
(ETA: I've found some PR dating from October 2013 announcing the launch of Disney XD in Thailand, and the expansion of Disney Channel to more package levels, including ours... Disney Junior was still on a higher level though, but that channel would move downwards around 2017-8, though before then the main channel would air, say, Sofia the First with a "Disney Junior on Disney Channel" ID)
Even with a full time channel now available, Disney Club still had one advantage: By 2014, digital television had arrived in Thailand (very far behind the rest of the world, admittedly), so they were able to show their cartoons in HD, while Disney Channel on TrueVisions was still stuck in SD, while Disney XD got HD (Okay, so HD's not such a big advantage for cartoons, but still, look at the sharper lines and rendering :-))
Personally, I originally used to dread waking up early on Saturday mornings when it first started, because my sister would watch Disney Club... it wasn't because I didn't like Disney cartoons (au contraire, actually; I grew up with Disney Afternoon while I was living in the states), but because I couldn't stand Thai dubbing; there's something about the voicing of Thai dubbing that I strongly dislike, to the point that even now, working from home, I find myself sometimes having to move my laptop upstairs to avoid my dad switching over from the default original soundtrack whenever he decides to watch something :-\ So what changed, you may ask? Well, in the late 90s, about 1997-8, we got digital direct-to-home satellite, not only expanding the meager pay-TV offerings from IBC (TrueVisions' predecessor) to something more substantial, but also allowing our bog-standard television to receive the original soundtrack feed... and I remember seeing the Disney Club presenters bragging about the original soundtrack being a good way to help learn English :-) (Meanwhile, that other channel cornering the OTA anime market apparently stopped airing the original soundtrack for virtually all of their imported shows when they went digital :-\)
The word "legend" has been bandied about regarding Disney Club, and the above Facebook link about the end of the block has people talking about their favorite presenters, but as far as I'm concerned, it'd be easier to list the shows I remember watching on Disney Club, back when I had the energy to wake up at 6:30am to watch (started 6:45 back then): Pepper Ann, The Weekenders (once wrote reviews of the show on Usenet, remember Usenet? :-)), Buzz Lightyear, House of Mouse, Recess, Lloyd in Space, Teamo Supremo, Teacher's Pet, occasionally Proud Family and Kim Possible, and even Nightmare Ned, a show so obscure that Lost Media Wiki has written about it, and noted that many episodes were re-discovered in Greek before they were found in the original English (!) That puts my era of Disney Club at around the early to mid-late aughts :-) Two reasons I stopped watching: Channel 7 moved it up to 6:15am (!), and I graduated from college and got a job, which changed my rhythms, meaning I tended to wake up around 8:30-9:00am on weekends (or even later!) and also meaning the only times I watched Disney Club "live" after that were mainly when I had a day off from work during their weekday afternoon phase (which ended when Channel 7 decided to move the news up into that slot around 2016-7 :-\) Other than the usual on-air promos, Disney Club used to have its own Facebook page to advertise on-air contests and what shows were coming up, which at least allowed me to set recordings for anything worth watching, but they ended up shutting down their page around 2017-8 and rolling in their coverage together with Channel 7's general entertainment Facebook page... which was a) more or less limited to their contests, and b) lumped together with announcements for upcoming movie broadcasts, news about celebrities, and other stuff :-\ Also, in the later post-FB years, it was not very common for me to see on-air promos, to the point where, for example, after the first season of Star vs. The Forces of Evil ended on Disney Club, the next time I saw a promo for Star was late in the first half of season 3 (which they only aired up to the holiday episode)... and next time after that, they were on season 4 :-\ (And I have no clue if Amphibia ever aired there; you'd think they'd be all for promoting Disney's first identifiably Thai character :-\)
One of the last videos to be produced for Disney Club celebrated the block's 29th anniversary by inviting users to submit their feelings about the block, and they've also been doing giveaways on Facebook Live... Missing from all these recent videos and PR about Disney Club is any mention of the block coming to an end; although the anniversary video has at least some mention of it in the comments, many seem to be oblivious to its imminent end and are still wishing a long life to the block :-\
Given that the modern kid generation has been more and more into watching their cartoons online instead of traditional TV (even cable), I guess it seemed more and more of an anomaly for an over-the-air station to air Disney cartoons, and given how slow our country was to go digital, it meant that the first season of Star vs. The Forces of Evil went out on analog TV, which doesn't sound right but is completely true :-) Proof:
1. Yeah, once in a rare while I did manage to get out of bed at 7:30am... and went back to nap a bit more :-)
2. Channel 7 put out a different channel logo on the analog feed than the digital HD feed, so it would have been readily apparent to those still watching analog
3. This is from November 2016, the period immediately after the death of King Rama IX, so the logo is in B&W
This might come across as a bit old-fashioned, but given how beloved the strand was, I'm pretty sure that Channel 7 would have gladly kept Disney Club going as long as Disney allowed them, if only out of tradition, because to paraphrase a character from a different network: "What's wrong with old things? Some old things are great" With the end of Disney Club on over-the-air TV, one would think that at least there's still Disney Channel Asia, but as it is, they'll be following Disney Club into the gentle good night just a few months later because of the whole new D2C model :-\ While pivoting children's TV to streaming was somewhat expected, since I understand it's been the way to go these days (digital over-the-air TV in Thailand originally licensed three children and family-oriented services; all three have since shut down), it surprises me that they're also taking out movies and sports with them, because there's something to be said about watching big blockbuster premieres on the movie channels and live sports at the same time as many other people :-) And sometimes, it's just nice to plop down and put on the TV and watch whatever's on :-)
As for Disney Plus, AIS, primarily a mobile phone service provider, has decided to become their partner in Thailand (an interesting choice, given that TrueVisions has been carrying most of the channels that are being discontinued in favor of the new service, some of them for longer than AIS has been in the TV business), and this video from AIS features one of their current spokespersons, pop idol Peck Palitchoke, plugging the new service... and it's been pointed out that it's a fitting choice, given that Peck got his start as a Disney Club presenter :-) Here's a video of Peck reading letters from viewers from just after the millennium (judging from the mention of Atlantis), and here's another video of almost 10 minutes of links from an April 2010 airing with Peck (during the phase that it was called "Toon Disney") And word on the street is that (along the strand's original presenters) he'll also participate in the final ever broadcasts of Disney Club, so that's something to look forward to :-)
