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The Disney Channel features hardcore wholesomeness for 16 hours every day. On Mousercise, mini-Jane Fondas are instructed to bend and stretch while imagining that they are puppets pulled by strings. The Edison Twins is a kind of scientific Hardy Boys in which 16-year-old twins discover the meaning of life and thermodynamic entropy. You and Me, Kid features a Pied Piper-like host who leads children through such activities as storytelling and "let's pretend" fantasies.
The channel's masterstroke is Mouseterpiece Theater, in which George Plimpton, doing a droll parody of Alistair Cooke, introduces classic cartoons from an overstuffed leather chair: he annotates a Donald Duck short called Straight Shooters by reciting a Baudelaire poem in French to explicate Donald's existential behavior. About 40% of the channel's programming is mined from the Disney library, a Golconda of 60 years of treasures that include 450 cartoon shorts, 561 episodes of The Mickey Mouse Club, 75 episodes of Zorro ("He makes the sign of the Zeee!") and 200 never-before-syndicated hours of Disney's long-running Sunday night series. (Not to be shown are 16 classic Disney films, including Snow White and Fantasia, which the company reserves for periodic theatrical releases.)
Filling the endless hours of their schedules without too much duplication is an expensive proposition for both channels. Paul Klein, the outspoken former NBC executive who heads the Playboy Channel, estimates that he needs at least 100 films annually to satisfy his audience. In the next year, 36 of those will be made-for-Playboy movies, with budgets of up to $1 million each and titles like Black Venus. The Disney Channel will spend at least $100 million on new programming during its first lg three years. President James Jimirro, a ten-year Disney veteran, has nearly 20 shows in development. One that will appear this fall is Five Mile Creek, a dramatic series set in Australia in the 1860s. Jimirro also plans to make six to eight movies a year. The first, Tiger Town, stars Roy Scheider as a fading phenom for the Detroit Tigers. It will air in October.
Some Disney viewers have complained that the service is too "adult," that its programming is oriented not to children but to nostalgic older viewers for whom the shows are a kind of video déjà vu. Jimirro acknowledges that 20% of Disney subscribers do not have children under 13. But he prefers to see this as a sign that the service offers "something universal."