![]() ![]() I won’t lie, The Proud Family Movie is mainly here on the merit of the television series, which remains one of the most beloved programs to air on Disney in the early 2000s. Just try to watch the first 30 seconds of “Amigas Cheetahs” with a straight face. We love an over-the-top performance, but the girls take it too far this time around. But the main highlight of the first film was its legitimately catchy soundtrack, and the sequel just can’t match it-especially when every song is seemingly required to contain seven different kinds of Spanish flair. If there’s one thing to be said for The Cheetah Girls 2, it’s definitely not boring. There, they encounter foreign love affairs, tango lessons, sightseeing, and infighting galore. The Cheetah Girls 2 cat-naps our favorite feline foursome from their native New York and sends them to Spain to participate in a Barcelona music festival. Hoping to capitalize on the success of the first Cheetah Girls movie, Disney fell back on a formula used way too often for unnecessary sequels: Send them on a trip. It’s a tale as old as time, but got damn it, it’s exciting as hell. (Seriously, how many Disney Channel movies have this kind of kick-assness?) All Wendy Wu wants to do is be homecoming queen, but when evil descends upon her town, she finds out she’s the only one who can defeat it. This DCOM doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but what it lacks in innovation, it makes up for by giving us a whole boatload of action. Starring Brenda Song as the titular Wendy Wu, the film is full of action and romance, and it’s legitimately so much fun. Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior is one of the most underrated DCOMs to come out in the last 20 years. … And You’re Watching the Disney Channel 40. But, we’re all in this together, and we did our best to put our preconceived notions to rest and determine the 40 best Disney Channel Original Movies. ![]() And it must be said that we are all guilty of biases based on our micro-generations-that is, we’re all most likely to prioritize the DCOMs that premiered in that aforementioned sliver of time, between the ages of 10 and 13 (or so). For every person who made Brink! their entire personality in middle school, there’s another person who’s more of a Cadet Kelly type. Now, ranking the 40 best DCOMs isn’t easy. Many of us at The Ringer have DCOM takes too, which is why it only felt right to make this list for the Disney Channel’s 40th birthday. You laud the eerie prescience of Smart House you’re willing to argue for High School Musical 2 over High School Musical you know what a Zequel is. If you’re nodding your head along with any of this, chances are you have highly emotional, deeply seated takes on DCOMs (Disney Channel Original Movies, which you obviously already knew). ![]() There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. And there were a lot of them-in 2001, the Disney Channel pumped out 10 original movies, which, apparently, is the exact amount necessary for kids to cultivate parasocial relationships with the actors on a made-for-kids TV network. They were expressly for kids of a certain age and almost exclusively featured kids of a certain age, thrusting them into situations both fantastic (she’s living in a futuristic space society) and aspirational (he’s finding community in the local Rollerblading scene). These movies were spiritual-and, in many cases, literal-extensions of the network’s television series, full of tween-centric bombast and bright lights. The Disney Channel turns 40 years old on April 18, but the Disney Channel really became the Disney Channel around 1997, when it first started airing original movies. Friday night mattered because Friday night was when the Disney Channel would release its latest original movie. Not because school was over and the weekend had arrived, not because you got to go to Applebee’s on Fridays, and not even because of ABC’s TGIF block of shows. If you were born sometime between roughly 19 and were lucky enough to have cable as a kid (and, honestly, if you clicked the link for this ranking), you probably remember a sliver of time in your life when Friday nights were the most important things on the planet. ![]()
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