Dear Disney,
I have had these thoughts for a long time, but since reading many things about the That's So Raven spin-off, I have found that I am far from the only one. Most people in the approximately 16-25 age range agree that the classic shows were better, so I am making a request that I know you will never read. It would be great if you made a rerun channel.
You already have so many channels: Dinsey Jr. Disney East, Disney West, and Disney XD. It would be lovely if you would add one more channel. Maybe call it Disney Replay, like when you would show the old shows from about midnight to four in the morning?
I think there are few reasons that this is so appealing to my generation. The first is the easiest to pinpoint. It is plain ole nostalgia. We want to be able to watch the shows we watched when we were little, laugh at the old jokes again, and laugh at the ones that flew right over our heads when we were little. We also want to be able to share the magic with our younger siblings and eventually our children.
Another reason is the fact that it seems you handled more serious topics in a better way back when we were kids. Sure, you still try to cover serious topics like the Asperger's episode of Girl Meets World, and sometimes you have success, but it feels like you did it way better when I was a kid. You helped introduce us to life issues and teach us about them in entertaining ways. There are three main examples that stick out to me on that topic.
One was an episode of That's So Raven where Raven was trying to get a job and got denied solely because the lady didn't want a black person working there. I didn't even realize racism was a thing back then and was just so angry that the lady wouldn't hire Raven. I only realized years later what that episode was talking about, and how it was introducing us to a possible real-world issue as kids.
The second episode was an episode of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody that, like the episode of That's So Raven, I didn't recognize its message until years later. There was an episode with a fashion show in it, and one of London's enemies was there. She insulted both Maddy and London, calling London fat and Maddy too skinny. The episode mainly focused on the two of them gorging or starving themselves to try to get their bodies to look how the mean girl thought they should look. Finally at the end, after a hilarious disaster of a fashion show, of course, they realized their bodies were fine the way they were and ended up revealing that mean girl model stuffed her bra, so her body wasn't perfect either.
The final episode I vividly remember was another episode on body image, and it was That's So Raven again. There was an episode where Raven modeled a dress and went in to see the pictures, and they had basically put her head on a whole other body because they wanted a skinnier model. Well, Raven fought it, and in the end, she won.
All these episodes introduced me to concepts I probably wouldn't have known about otherwise. They planted a seed that I thought of when I started hearing about these topics years later. They showed my generation that the world may not always be the best place, but you can change that. This is the biggest reason that my generation would love to see a rerun channel, or even just more reruns.
Love,
A Fan Since Childhood
