It wasn’t intentional, but Disney+ could not have timed its UK launch any better. Almost as soon as the schools close, we’re being presented with a colossal glut of no-fail kids’ entertainment. If you have children and can afford the subscription (£5.99 a month), it will be hard not to fall on Disney+ as your personal televisual childminder, grateful and weeping the moment it appears online.
My boys are five and two. So far – we yanked them out of school and nursery as a precaution last week when my wife’s health took a weird dip – our stay-at-home routine has worked. There’s some reading. There’s some garden play. I try to make them help me cook something every day, with wildly varying degrees of success. But the trickiest part has been screen time.
As we speak, I’m locked in battle with them over this. I want them to watch “good” things, such as CBeebies and Studio Ghibli films. They want to watch what they want to watch, which mostly consists of a single fan-made Sonic the Hedgehog YouTube video soundtracked by an objectively terrible 2014 Fall Out Boy song repeated over and over again for several hours. I cannot tell you how much I want Disney+ to solve everyone’s problems.
Fingers crossed, it should. The two-year-old is obsessed with elephants and the five-year-old is still fascinated with superheroes. For the former, Disney+ means that I can stop chasing Dumbo around the various streaming services like the guy from the Fenton video. For the latter, there are almost 40 Marvel shows, the overwhelming majority of which are animated (not to mention all the recent movies). Something vaguely wholesome, such as the 1981 Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends series, should keep him happy without turning him into a violent vigilante fascist, although at this point it’s basically damage limitation.
Disney+ claims that it will offer more than 500 films and 350 series, as well as 26 originals, at launch. But I cannot possibly allow myself to make it our primary form of entertainment, largely because everything about it is so heavily branded and relentlessly, insincerely, cultishly positive that it makes me want to tear my skin off with my fingernails and set it on fire. If we were to watch Disney+ every day, I am absolutely certain that we would all feel like we were drowning in treacle by the end of the week.
But these are desperate times. We’re going to be stuck inside for a long while yet, and our children are going to need as wide a variety of reliable entertainment as we can give them. If we can protect ourselves from the ickier strains of Disney’s suffocatingly ersatz optimism, there should be plenty here to keep everyone happy. Especially if it means I don’t have to hear that bloody Fall Out Boy song any more. Here’s a sample of what I hope will keep me sane during self-isolation.
Mickey Mouse Clubhouse
This 2006 animated show will have almost no appeal to adults or older children. It’s too bright, too repetitive and far too shrill. However, your preschoolers will probably lap it up. In every episode, Mickey and his friends confront an everyday problem and use cognitive, creative and social skills to solve it. Already, I’m planning for this to be my go-to if I want to keep the two-year-old in place when I need the toilet.
Bluey
A wildly popular Australian show in the Peppa Pig mould, Bluey is a bright, silly and fun cartoon about a family of dogs. It won’t turn your children into geniuses, but it may keep them at bay while you have a panic attack in the bedroom.
Forky Asks a Question
Now this one I am excited about. The plastic fork from Toy Story 4 harnesses his childlike naivety in order to ask big questions such as “What is art?”, “What is time?” and “What is cheese?” The running time – each episode is only three or four minutes long – suggests that Forky won’t receive satisfyingly thorough answers to his questions, but then again your kids probably won’t want to sit through Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, so this will be a happy medium.
Be Our Chef
It’s a nuts-and-bolts cookery show for families. The plan is to make my kids watch this until they love cooking, and then they’ll want to help me cook dinner every night. This plan is absolutely doomed to failure, and I am prepared for that.
National Geographic
I’m going to lump all the National Geographic output together because I’m convinced that it will form the Eat Your Vegetables portion of our viewing habits. Shows such as Bizarre Dinosaurs, Brain Games and World’s Greatest Dogs all promise to balance education and entertainment in a way that will keep the children occupied and alert. And, if they need scaring, Free Solo is also available.
The Simpsons
And now my big plan. If I have my way, self-isolation will be when I finally force my children to love The Simpsons. I’ve been seeding it for a while, slipping Do the Bartman into YouTube rotation wherever possible, but now is when I can hit the mother lode. Every episode of The Simpsons ever made is on Disney+ (the company owns the Fox back catalogue). We could watch nothing but The Simpsons for weeks. Maybe we will watch nothing but The Simpsons for weeks. I promise that I will do everything in my power to brainwash my children into liking The Simpsons.
The Mandalorian
And then there’s The Mandalorian, by all accounts the best original available to watch on Disney+. My children are too young for it but, God willing, I’ll be able to watch it in the evenings after my kids are asleep and I’ve frantically caught up on all my work.
