Who Wrote the Disney Channel Theme? A Defunctland Documentary

Streaming review

I’m starting out my regular posts here by doing something a little bit different. There are many movies I could review that have come out recently, but I want to review something that I watched on YouTube. Kevin Perjurer is a YouTuber/content creator on the channel Defunctland who recently released a 90 minute video titled “Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery.”

In this video, Perjurer goes looking for the person who composed the four note theme that played during The Disney Channel’s station identifiers that help transition from the program to the commercials and back to the program, often with one of the stars using a wand to draw the mouse ears. Something like the NBC chimes or the Nickelodeon theme. But while it was relatively easy to find the people who composed those jingles, finding the composer who wrote the theme for The Disney Channel proved to be much more complicated. 

Over the course of an hour and a half, we meet composers, producers, directors, and people whose sole job is to refresh brands when they have gone stale. Perjurer spends hours watching interstitials and bumpers, trying to pin down time lines and then using that to find people who might be able to identify the composer. The conclusion is one of the most powerful bits of media that I watched last year. 

But as much as this is a genuinely fascinating story about the person who wrote a four note piece of music that is recognizable to millions of people who grew up watching The Disney Channel, it is also a much deeper look at how we measure success and the value of art that might be described as low or unimportant. Is the person who composed the jingle for Farmers Mutual Insurance that everyone knows less successful than the person who composed an opera known by only a few? Is a YouTube documentarian less important than a filmmaker who has their work shown in theaters? Throughout the piece, Perjurer laments not being a “real” artist because his work is called a video instead of a movie and he’s called a YouTuber not a documentarian. But as I’m writing this, his video has nearly 3 million views. Isn’t that successful? 

One of the composers, David Norland, talked about the legacy of writing a television theme. “A four note mnemonic in its beautiful, minimal simplicity, completely captures an entire world of feelings and associations for millions of people across generations and around the world. I think that’s a pretty outstanding legacy.”

There was a time that I had a writing agent and was in talks with a publishing company about a book I was writing. Around the same time, my life took some big swerves and I needed to abandon that dream. I think about how it was my goal to be a “real author” not infrequently, and as another year wraps up without a published book, it’s easy to feel like a failure. 

But in 2022, I wrote more than 50,000 words for this column, which is essentially a book worth of words, and I get to write about what I love in the state that I love. I think that’s a pretty outstanding legacy as well.