The Magical Walled Garden of Disney

We're a little under a month away from the launch of Weigel's all-classic-animation over-the-air broadcast channel MeTV TOONS in the United States. The network, aimed towards older audiences rather than kids, is a joint venture with Warner Bros Discovery and will present classic cartoon titles from many studios and distributors, including NBC Universal, Sony Pictures Television, WildBrain, SHOUT! Studios, Fleischer Studios, Jay Ward Productions, Gerry Anderson Productions, and others. Even companies like Amazon MGM and Paramount Global are rumored to bring some of their classic animation libraries to the channel. Nearly every major animation studio who made an impact in the golden age of theatrical shorts and television animation will be represented on MeTV TOONS. 

Except one. 

The Walt Disney Company will likely have no presence on MeTV TOONS of any kind. It's not that unsurprising that they wouldn't want to be a part of the channel's roster of studio libraries. If anything, it would be ridiculously surprising if they WERE a part of it mostly because historically, Disney has been very reluctant to share its library with third-party partners. 

This isn't something that has only been part of Disney's business model in the streaming era. Disney has always been this walled garden of entertainment since the birth of the television industry. While Disney was one of the first studios to fully embrace television, they never really used the medium for their library of shorts the way other studios did. 

There has never been a regularly scheduled showcase for Disney's original animated shorts on broadcast television. Sure, there was The Mouse Factory from 1972, but that aired in sporadic markets in syndication and not widely syndicated. Plus, that series was a blend of live-action and animation, not fully animated. 1983's Good Morning Mickey was the first all-animated anthology series from Disney, and they aired it on The Disney Channel, not broadcast television. This was when The Disney Channel was behind a paywall as a premium network, so the audience wasn't as large as, say, The Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Show that aired every Saturday morning on CBS around the same time and had been on broadcast television since 1960. 

It wasn't until 1985 that Disney actually aired animation on broadcast television in a regularly scheduled weekly slot. Strangely, the studio's first two shows. The Wuzzles and The Adventures of the Gummi Bears, ended up airing in the exact timeslot when they premiered on CBS and NBC, respectively. 

(Hey, a couple of fun facts about The Wuzzles. That show had a stellar cast of voice artists. Bill Scott, the voice of Moosel, was also the original voice of Bullwinkle J. Moose, Mr. Peabody, and Dudley Do Right. Katherine Helppie-Shipley, the voice of Butterbear, is perhaps better known for her producing work being the architect of the reborn Warner Bros Animation studio and, until recently, worked directly with Looney Tunes longer than any producer since Leon Schlesinger himself)

Disney premiered several shows on The Disney Channel before putting them in syndication or on a national broadcast slot. This had been the model for nearly a decade until Disney bought ABC and largely premiered first-run animated series exclusively on ABC's broadcast television as well as continuing to produce originals for Disney Channel, which became a basic cable network by the end of the 1990s, and a new station, Toon Disney, which included all animation when it launched. 

Once Toon Disney launched, showcases of older Disney shorts began to slowly disappear from Disney Channel. Surprisingly, they began to disappear from Toon Disney as well, with most of the lineup becoming filled with One Saturday Morning and Disney Channel animated reruns. After Disney bought Fox Kids Worldwide, another shift began when Toon Disney started airing Power Rangers series, the first time live-action programming aired on that channel under the Jetix brand. They also aired Marvel animated series including X-Men, Spider-Man, and others. 

Suddenly, there was no room for the classic Disney shorts, and by 2003, every anthology series dedicated to them were gone from Disney Channel and Toon Disney, which transformed to Disney XD and added more live-action programming because they felt animation was beneath their core mission. Classic Disney shorts rarely get showcases, and you'll never see full collections on par with what Warner Bros has done with the Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry shorts without spending an arm and a leg on an out-of-print set, but you'll see a select few of them on Disney+ today., Disney largely kept their animated library on outlets they own, and that stance has been their status quo to this day.

And I don't see them changing that for MeTV Toons.

Bob Iger once told Disney investors “We are not looking to license our core Marvel, Disney, Pixar or Star Wars product to third parties,” but added that “we will consider on occasion licensing other product to third parties.” So, unless that position changed, I won't hold my breath on seeing any major Disney-owned cartoons on MeTV Toons. 

That said, I would more than welcome shows like Eek! The Cat or The Tick on the channel if Disney realized they were in their library and would be willing to offer it. They aren't core Disney properties, but if they offered them, it'd be nice to see on television again. Even a show like Jim Henson's Muppet Babies, which hasn't been seen on television in nearly 30 years and can't be available on streaming or home media would be welcome, and if the folks at MeTV Toons could pull THAT off, that would be a modern-day miracle. 

I'm not looking for anything else from Disney to be a part of MeTV Toons or anywhere outside of their magical walled garden. But if they manage to pull off something, that would make the channel THE best place for cartoons with the most diverse lineup of shows and shorts ever assembled.