While most Hollywood studios in the post-war period saw the medium of television as a threat and a rival, the always visionary Walt Disney began imagining the ways in which television could be used as a promotional tool and an extension of his brand. As a result, Walt Disney Productions became the first film production company to enter the field of television.

The first of Disney’s television productions was an hour-long special called One Hour in Wonderland starring Bobby Driscoll, Kathryn Beaumont, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, the Firehouse Five Plus Two jazz band and Walt Disney himself. It first aired on NBC in 1950 on Christmas Day and featured clips from Disney films (including a sneak peak at Disney’s Alice in Wonderland which would be released a year later) and the Disney shorts Clock Cleaners starring Mickey, Donald and Goofy, and Bone Trouble starring Pluto. That special was so popular that Disney made another Christmas special for CBS the following year, and once TV networks realized what a ratings goldmine Disney was, they pursued Walt to create a weekly television series, and Walt took advantage of this interest by requesting funding for the creation of his theme park Disneyland, which the American Broadcasting Company agreed to do.

Three years after The Walt Disney Christmas Show aired on CBS, the Disney anthology series hosted by Walt made its television debut on ABC under the title Disneyland, which the series would be known as from 1954 to 1958 before being renamed Walt Disney Presents (1958-61) and then Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color (1961-69) which moved from the black & white ABC to the color NBC. Since then, the anthology series has continued airing under various names before finally landing on The Wonderful World of Disney. The series featured pre-existing Disney films but also featured brand new original films and weekly series, including brand new animation. Professor Ludwig Von Drake made his screen debut in this series, as did Fess Parker as Davy Crockett. It was a regular ratings success and it was also responsible for Disney’s very first Emmy win for the episode “Operation Undersea.” And the series even marked television’s entry into filmed productions rather than live broadcasts, which led to higher production values for the medium in general.

Disney also had two other TV series that decade: The Mickey Mouse Club and Zorro. And for a long time afterward, Disney didn’t create any more new series. Film production still took up most of the studio’s time. Although they still had plenty of success on TV. Davy Crockett became a merchandising phenomenon. The two films Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (1955) and Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (1956) were actually compilations of Davy Crockett TV episodes, and The Mickey Mouse Club, which every kid in America watched when they came home from school, was also a huge success when it aired on ABC from 1955 to 1959. Although Zorro (1957-59) was Disney’s first stab (no pun intended) at an episodic plot-based TV serial, in other words a traditional TV series, and the swashbuckler starring Guy Williams as a masked vigilante who fights the rich and aids the poor and oppressed in Spain-owned Las Californias was actually pretty entertaining. Although when it ended, Disney wouldn’t create another plot-based narrative series again until the 1980s.

Disney wouldn’t make a single new TV series in the sixties, and their one attempt at a new series in the seventies, Ward Kimball’s The Mouse Factory (1972-73) was not a home run. That is, if you don’t include the syndicated Mickey Mouse Club revival The New Mickey Mouse Club (1977-79). But once Disney severed its exclusivity deal with NBC in the eighties, they began jumping into regular TV production, starting with the CBS series Herbie, the Love Bug which was obviously based on Disney’s Herbie film series and aired for only five episodes in 1982. That was followed by the equally unsuccessful sitcom Small & Frye, the Western comedy Gun Shy based on Disney’s The Apple Dumpling Gang, and Zorro and Son, which all had similarly short runs on CBS.

The failure of these shows soured CBS’s relationship with Disney and the two companies parted ways, but Disney would find more success on premium cable where The Disney Channel launched the following year in 1983. The family-oriented cable network featured a wide variety of original programming in addition to airing Disney films, including original films like CableACE Award-winning 1983 sports drama Tiger Town (Disney would go on to produce other TV films as well, including ones for The Wonderful World of Disney, like Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, a film based on Walt Disney World’s Tower of Terror attraction, and a remake of The Love Bug, although they really only did this in the nineties as Disney’s official live-action television division would go defunct in 2003. Since then the only live-action Disney films made for television were Disney Channel Original Movies).

The Disney Channel was a huge success, and it continues to be a success today under the abbreviated name Disney Channel (the “The” got dropped in 1997). Plus Disney would not only have their own cable channel, but in 1996 they acquired the media company Capital Cities/ABC, which gave Disney control over ABC, ESPN and 50% of A&E Networks. They also acquired the cable network Fox Family in 2001 and renamed it ABC Family, later becoming Freeform in 2016, and following Rupert Murdoch’s sale of 21st Century Fox in 2019, Disney owned FX and Hulu as well. But there were a few other things besides the formation of Disney Channel and the acquisitions of TV networks that strengthened Disney’s television empire back in the eighties. And those things were Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television and Buena Vista Television.

Buena Vista Television

Founded in 1985 a year after Michael Eisner became Disney’s CEO, Buena Vista Television served the same basic purpose as Disney’s Buena Vista film distribution company which was founded in 1953, only it handled the television side. Buena Vista Television, known as Disney-ABC Domestic Television since 2007, is in charge of shopping Disney’s library of films and shows to distributors, and that includes not only a wide variety of Disney-owned TV shows like DuckTales and Bob’s Burgers but also the films of Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Studios and Searchlight Pictures. Occasionally Buena Vista Television produced shows itself without the Disney label, such as Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel’s syndicated movie review show Siskel and Ebert, and the Live with … series of morning talk shows that Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford popularized, as well as the Comedy Central game show Win Ben Stein’s Money and the American version of the game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Walt Disney Television

Walt Disney Television was founded in 1983 a year after Disney teamed up with CBS, but they didn’t start having real success until Walt Disney Television Animation was established in 1984 and the studio produced the popular Adventures of the Gummi Bears in 1985, which led to other popular shows like DuckTales, Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Darkwing Duck and the rest of the Disney Afternoon programming block. Although Walt Disney Television also produced many original Disney Channel shows such as Welcome to Pooh Corner and Adventures in Wonderland as well as shows for other networks like Jim Henson’s ABC sitcom Dinosaurs and the PBS series Bill Nye the Science Guy. But the animation division was the one having real success, and they continued to produce hit after hit, including many shows for ABC and Disney Channel. Now known as Disney Television Animation, the studio has produced many shows based on pre-existing Disney films and characters like The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Timon & Pumbaa, Hercules, Mickey Mouse Works, Clerks: The Animated Series, Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Lilo & Stitch: The Series, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Tron: Uprising, Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure and the Paul Rudish Mickey Mouse series (which continued on Disney+ with The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse) but they also have created many original series like Gargoyles, Recess, Pepper Ann, PB & J Otter, Teacher’s Pet, Kim Possible, Phineas and Ferb, Gravity Falls, Sofia the First, Elena of Avalor, Big City Greens, Amphibia, The Owl House, The Ghost and Molly McGee, Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur and Kiff. They continue making many entertaining shows for Disney Channel and Disney+ to this day.

Touchstone Television

The establishment of Disney’s adult-oriented film studio Touchstone Pictures in 1984 led to the creation of Touchstone Television a year later. Under the Touchstone label, Disney had many successful television shows, with some of the most popular being The Golden Girls, Blossom, Home Improvement, Boy Meets World, Felicity, Alias, Scrubs, Monk, Lost, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy and Ugly Betty. Over the years as Disney started venturing away from the Touchstone label, Touchstone Television morphed into ABC Studios in 2007 and later ABC Signature in 2020, which was part of Disney’s plan to drop less recognizable labels to simplify their brand. That’s what led to Buena Vista Television being renamed Disney-ABC Domestic Television the same year. Disney’s acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019 only complicated things further but basically, in the same way that Walt Disney Pictures, Marvel, Lucasfilm and 20th Century are divisions of Walt Disney Studios, ABC Signature, 20th Television and FX Productions are all divisions of Disney Television Studios (which is basically what Walt Disney Television morphed into following its collapse as a producer of live action in 2003). Meanwhile the networks ABC, Freeform and Disney Channel are all divisions of Disney Television Group and Disney-ABC Domestic Television is a division of Disney Platform Distribution. And all these units I just mentioned, including the film-based Walt Disney Studios, fall under Disney Entertainment, the entertainment-based segment of The Walt Disney Company founded in 2023.

As you can tell, Disney has a ton of TV productions now. But whatever happened to that anthology series that formed the basis of their television operations back in the fifties? Is The Wonderful World of Disney still around? Yes it is, and it’s one of the longest-running television programs in history. It doesn’t really air regularly. It’s more just special occasions now. Exclusively on ABC since Disney acquired the network, but it occasionally streams on Disney+ too. Once Disney’s most prominent television production, it is now probably their least prominent series. But to be fair, back in the fifties, the idea of watching a Disney movie from the comfort of your own home was a groundbreaking idea and there were only three major networks back then, so everyone watched Disney in those days. Today, as the television landscape has grown more varied and viewing options are allowed to skew more niche, Disney as a brand doesn’t have the power over American TV viewers that they once had in the days of Davy Crockett and The Mickey Mouse Club. Although Disney as a corporation has only grown bigger since then through mergers and acquisitions, so you don’t have to wear Mickey Mouse ears and sing “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” to show that you are a Disney fan anymore. They now infiltrate our lives in less obvious and more covert ways. These days when kids go trick-or-treating they wear Spider-Man masks. Not Zorro masks.