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9 Strange—but Great—Disney Channel Original Movies You Forgot About

Including mermaids, holograms, and aliens aplenty.

Movies

Photo by Geoffrey Moffett on Unsplash

Disney+ is trickling its way into our daily dependence on streaming services.

This means we've unlocked a whole new world (Aladdin pun intended) of movies to watch half-attentively while we also scroll on our phones. You probably already know of all the classic Disney Originals that are at your disposal, but what about the Disney Channel Originals?

It's probably a given that big hits like High School Musical, Zenon, and Camp Rock are now available for your adult self to stream and reminisce, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Name a DCOM, and it's likely available on Disney+, including all the strange, ridiculous low-fliers you might've forgotten about. Here are just nine to kickstart your nostalgia trip.

1. Alley Cats Strike!

Anything goes in the Disney Channel universe, including a bowling match to settle a basketball championship tie between rival towns. Why are both towns so invested in high school bowling? Why do the teenage winners get to pick the name of a new school in the area? We don't know, but we're still chasing the high of that final scene.

2. Stepsister from Planet Weird

In this sci-fi comedy from 2000, a literal alien refugee is immediately welcomed into the popular crowd at her new high school on Earth, despite thinking her human form is "grotesque." Not to mention that the emperor of her home planet is defeated by hair dryers and wind blowers.

3. Can of Worms

On the other end of the spectrum of Disney Channel's alien fixation, Can of Worms centers around Mike, who lives an entirely normal life besides believing he doesn't belong on Earth at all. After he accidentally sends a message to space, he's visited by an alien lawyer who deems Earth's living standards subpar. Strangely eerie 20 years later, isn't it?

4. The Thirteenth Year

Cody's birth mother is a mermaid who left him on a random boat when he was a baby. Now, as Cody approaches his teens, his merman features are beginning to present themselves, and he nearly gets accused for cheating during his swim meet. It's just fins, not steroids!

5. Luck of the Irish

There's little to take away from this film other than a white teenage boy finally embraces that he is both Irish and from Ohio, but leprechauns and river dancing will never not be amusing.

6. Motocrossed

Five years before Amanda Bynes posed as her own twin brother in She's the Man, Disney Channel offered their own adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. After Andi's brother gets injured, she decides to fill in for him in an all-male motocross tournament, chopping her hair off and all. The sexism is abundant, but—spoiler alert—Andi can totally take on the guys.

7. The Other Me

Poor Will. His grades are slipping, his dad is threatening to send him to military camp, and he just accidentally made a clone of himself who turns out to be way cooler and smarter than him, so they switch places. Kinda like the Parent Trap, but sciencey.

8. You Wish!

The lesson this film attempts to impart is: don't wish away your little brother, because he might instead become a child TV star and make your life even more of a living hell than it was when you lived under the same roof.

9. Pixel Perfect

The perfect pop star doesn't exist, until, of course, you make a hologram of her. Loretta Modern might have been programmed to become an overnight sensation, but she just wants to be a regular human, damn it! She ends up being helpful in more ways than one, but like all modern technology, she can't last forever.

Maybe they didn't all make total sense, but there's a reason DCOMs became such an integral part of growing up in the 2000s. DCOM creators conceived some of the strangest, most fringe ideas, and served them to a market that didn't mind how nonsensical they were; pair that with Disney Channel's omnipresence in the typical middle-class American household, and these oddly lovable films serve as a timestamp for an era.

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"El Camino" Forces Jesse Pinkman into His Own Cowboy Fantasy

Jesse Pinkman's story begins again in this coda to "Breaking Bad."

At the end of Breaking Bad, Jesse Pinkman was so deep in a pit of trauma and pain that it was difficult to imagine how he could go on.

In the series' final episodes, as Walter White spiraled through the final fallout from his megalomanic rise, Jesse found himself tortured, trapped, forced to watch a girl he loved get shot in front of her child, among other unendurable traumas.

So to re-enter Jesse's world, as we now do in El Camino, is to re-enter a space of fragmentation, a world made literally intolerable by memory. For better or for worse, El Camino never really dives into Jesse's inner thoughts in an explicit manner, and we never see him really break down. Instead, we're given a multitude of flashbacks, and we're left to surmise how Jesse is feeling on the inside, to read it from his weary eyes and from the way he processes things and others.

Like Walter in Breaking Bad, El Camino follows its protagonist on a quest that essentially has one end goal: to amass as much money as possible. In this film, Jesse is seeking out the funds to pay a man to invent him a new life—and without too many spoilers, many calamities and many deaths ensue as he tries to secure the cash.

Aaron Paul does a formidable job with this fractured version of Jesse, a subdued character in comparison to the one he played on the series. In Breaking Bad's early days he was charismatic and full of life (if usually high), his boyish callousness a sharp contrast to Walter's teacherly seriousness, which of course later morphed into the icy ruthlessness of Heisenberg. Here, Jesse is mostly silent, burdened by the weight of his past and the heavy legacy of the destructive empire he helped build.

Like its parent series, El Camino is a movie about what capitalism and greed can do to people. It's about the lengths a person will go to secure money, in a world wherein money is equated with masculinity and masculinity is equal to power. On the subject of gender, the women in El Camino are footnotes at best, corpses at worst. Whereas Breaking Bad had Skyler and Marie as powerful leading characters, El Camino's only women are a horde of strippers and a cleaning lady, whom a neo-Nazi named Todd strangled and then forced Jesse to dispose of (as we discover in a flashback). Sitting in the desert, Jesse and Todd look down over the grave. Todd asks if Jesse wants to say a few final words; when Jesse declines, he says, "Nice, nice lady. Excellent housekeeper."

Maybe the scene wasn't meant to be political, but it is indicative of the ways that male violence—led by the drug trade or not—so frequently puts women's bodies on the line, relegating them to positions as strippers and housekeepers, invisible laborers who exist only in the background. Countless women flee brutal violence every day in countries like Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and many of them wind up languishing in American border camps, often sent back to the abusive homes from which they came. If they're lucky enough to wind up in America, maybe they can get a housekeeper job, and even then they may wind up underground.

That's the runoff from this kind of violence, which so often stems from within America. It's the fallout from power-hungry kingpins like Walter White who feel the need to compensate for their own unfulfilled entitlement by lashing out at the world around them, becoming the cowboys, kingpins, or brutal Jokers or ruthless leaders they feel they have the right to be.

But this is not Walter White's story anymore. Unlike Walter, Jesse has always had a semblance of ethics, a desire for redemption. In the film, he's given a few moments in between the chases and gunfights to rise up from dark bathwater, or to gently balance a beetle on his fingertip. Jesse has always been drawn to small creatures, to invisible and innocent things. In this film, his main objective is to become one of them.

Still, Vince Gilligan can't seem to resist writing Jesse his own cowboy narrative. At the start of El Camino, Jesse was unable to actually fire a kill shot—but near the end, he ruthlessly kills two men, an action that is painted as something like a triumph. The mythology of the American cowboy never quite leaves him or the core of the Breaking Bad franchise, though it's always been clear that these narratives only end in violence, and there is no cleaning off the blood.

El Camino will probably only appeal to hardcore fans of Breaking Bad, as it's is too laced with reverberations from the series to stand alone and too much of a slow-burn to make for a self-sufficient thriller. Still, it has enough gorgeous images of the desolate American Southwest to please fans of the show's famed cinematography, and it's packed with the same kind of complex moral questions that always made Breaking Bad so difficult to look away from. Though it may provide few answers, it's a look into the questions that burn holes into the foundations of the American Dream.

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“Veronica Mars” Explosive Finale Divides Fans (It's for the Best)

Veronica is better as a closed-off, emotionally-stunted pessimist, with a soft marshmallow heart deep inside.

Hulu

SPOILER WARNING

Fans were elated last week when Hulu's reboot of Veronica Mars dropped one week early following the cast's panel at San Diego Comic Con. The hype quickly turned on its head after viewers binged the eight-episode fourth season only to find that Veronica's nemesis-turned-lover-turned-husband, Logan Echolls, was blown to smithereens by the last bomb planted by serial bomber, Penn Epner (Patton Oswalt). So what happens when an underdog series with a cult-ish following kills off its fans' favorite love interest? A fandom fractures.

When the series began in 2004, Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) was a young teenage private eye, following in her Sheriff dad's footsteps and trying to solve her best friend's murder. Meanwhile, Logan (Jason Dohring) spent much of the first season as a volatile rich kid organizing bum fights and ostracizing Veronica when her father fingered the wrong guy in the murder case. But soon, Logan and Veronica bonded over their grief over the loss of Lily Kane, and they ended up secretly dating at the end of season 1, kickstarting an on-again-off-again affair. Fans of the series (coined "marshmallows") shipped them hard, creating the nickname "LoVe" for the two unlikely lovers.

Six years after its cancellation, fans raised $5.7 million on Kickstarter to see their favorite sassy sleuth back in action, resulting in a 2014 movie that fueled the saga of LoVe and reignited their sexual tension. Now, 15 years and another tumultuous season later, Logan and Veronica finally tied the knot— only for Logan to be offed just minutes after the nuptials. To say some marshmallows are upset would be the TV understatement of the year.

— (@)

Although the quick one-two of marriage and death might have had a rushed execution, you can't help but balk at the overreaction from fans. Longtime fans have given up on the show, turning their backs on creator Rob Thomas for good. Some have even called him sexist and the writing lazy. For me, a strong reaction of any kind is a good sign; indifference is the enemy of fiction. I'd also argue that one character should not make or break a show. But in all the excitement, some may have missed the clues dropped by Thomas and Bell; and clearly, fans' failure to crack the case left them feeling blindsided.

But we can't say we weren't warned. Before season 4 debuted, Thomas tweeted, "The movie was nostalgic. The Hulu limited series isn't going to be. Hardcore So-Cal noir. One big case...This is a detective show." Bell even chimed in on the press tour, stating, "You might not want this version, but you do need this version."

It should've been clear that this was no longer the CW's VeronicaMars, nor would the season serve up a double-scoop of fan service like the movie did. As Thomas told TV Guide, "The show started out as sort of a teen soap-noir detective show hybrid. And in order for us to keep doing these, I think it needs to become a detective show—a noir, mystery, detective show—and those elements of teenage soap need to be behind us."

It was the right call. LoVe's relationship was just as much a ticking bomb as the explosive that killed Logan, and Veronica's tendency to emotionally manipulate Logan early in the season proved it. Drawn to the bad boy version of Logan from seasons past, the writers made it clear that Veronica was baiting him to lash out, despite his efforts to put his demons to rest. He worked overtime to overcome his traumas and be a better man for her, but Veronica remained hardened by her own past. Her initial rejection of Logan's proposal and her inability to confront their problems at his request is textbook Veronica: Trust is difficult for her, so she stays guarded. In sum, she's deeply flawed.

The DNA of the show needs to expand to move forward—and Veronica needed to be separated from Logan to do that. A season of couple's therapy isn't compelling television, nor is Logan's perpetual on-call status for the military. Veronica is now a woman in her 30s, and without Logan she can dig elbow-deep into her next case as a workaholic with severe trust issues, a passion for justice, and an extensive taser collection. Without Logan, her fire will burn brighter than ever.

It's uncertain if Veronica Mars will fight, scratch, and claw its way to a fifth season. If it's anything like its namesake heroine, it will. But the polarized reaction to Logan's death draws a definite line in the sand. There are those with fantasies of LoVe who refuse to let go of the past, and there are realists who can accept a necessary evil if it means more of the show they love. Veronica is most compelling when she's fighting from the bottom. Like so many classic noir heroes before her, Veronica is better as a closed-off, emotionally-stunted pessimist, with a soft marshmallow heart deep inside. She's the underdog we root for because she never gives up. But, as in all great fiction, the protagonist can't have everything she wants, and as viewers, neither can we.

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9 Strange—but Great—Disney Channel Original Movies You Forgot About

Including mermaids, holograms, and aliens aplenty.