Remember Britney and Justin before they were Britney and Justin? The two of them met on the set of the Disney Channel’s 1990s revival of The Mickey Mouse Club, a children’s variety show they starred in alongside Aguilera, JC Chasez (who went on to join *NSYNC with Timberlake), Ryan Gosling (The Notebook), Keri Russell (Felicity), and some now-unknowns. Spears opened for *NSYNC on her first tour. When she and Timberlake became an official item, Spears set about tarnishing what was left of her pseudo-good-girl/corn-fed/country-hot image. Here’s the abridged version: the video for “. . . Baby One More Time”; an admission that she and Timberlake had done the nasty; a random elopement with an old friend, followed soon thereafter by an annulment; and the unfortunate Kevin Federline years. Consider the Fed-Ex affiliation the official death-knell for her lingering associations with Disney, though Spears clearly doesn’t share the same feelings about the company that they probably do for her — she was rumored to have wanted to take her now ex-husband Federline to Disney World to celebrate their divorce.
Aguilera’s sweet-to-nasty transition started with Stripped and ended with her shockingly steady marriage to music exec Jordan Bratman. Which still doesn’t mean any Disney employee could ignore the fact that, in the “Dirrty” video, she was mud-wrestling half-naked amidst various fetish displays of dirrty-ness. For all of its hand-drawn, heaving cartoon bosoms, Disney manufactures meaningful memories, not strip-teases. X-Tina was nothing if not consistent about her re-issued persona — she even took a carousel-horse/stripper-pole with her on tour.
Somehow, Timberlake managed to stay pure longer than the ladies, but following the Spears kiss-off “Cry Me a River” and the launch of his solo career, millions watched Timberlake “accidentally” rip off Janet Jackson’s top, revealing her nearly-bare breast on Super Bowl Sunday. Once the hip-hop community starts issuing “street cred” for moves like that, consider your mouse ears officially retired. But what is it about Disney that makes some of its stars so itchy to flunk themselves out of charm school?
“Britney and Justin are the biggest examples of what happens when young stars break free of the white-gloved grip of Mickey Mouse’s magically clean world,” says Orlando native Tyler Gray, a senior editor at Radar magazine, who penned the Disney theme-park exposé “Wild Kingdom” for Radar’s Summer 2005 issue. “She shaves her head and hot tubs topless with a college hunk from her video shoot. He . . . brings sexy back.”
21st-century Mouseketeers
The cast members of High School Musical are, for all intents and purposes, the nü-new Mouseketeers — a sort of a Disney Channel–endorsed brat pack. Ashley Tisdale, who plays Sharpay in HSM, first starred as Maddie Fitzpatrick on the channel’s hit series The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, so fans were already familiar with her face. But the majority of the principal cast were unknowns, including Zac Efron (Troy), Vanessa Anne Hudgens (Gabriella), Corbin Bleu (Chad), Lucas Grabeel (Ryan), and Monique Coleman (Taylor). After HSM exploded, they were flooded with offers — record deals, side projects, guest appearances — all from Disney. Efron resisted the temptation, and instead of accompanying his peers on the live HSM: The Concert tour this past winter, he began work on the latest film adaptation of Hairspray. Yep, that’s Efron as Link Larkin, shaking his hips alongside John Travolta. While his co-stars rushed to promote themselves in the easiest way possible — via Disney — in the lull that fell between the first and second HSM, Efron was biding his time.
The 19-year-old Efron can also be found on the covers of two recent and very different magazine covers: the August 23 issue of Rolling Stone and the September issue of Disney Adventures, a pocket-sized, picture-heavy booklet printed by Disney Publishing Worldwide. In the rock rag, Efron is pulling a skin-tight white T-shirt up over his tanned tummy, a stylized, awkward grin of “Whoa, how’d I get here?” delight on his face. For the kiddie tabloid, his photo-shoot is Disney-sanctioned boy-next-door adorable: toothy, rosy-cheeked, and sexless.
It has been suggested that Disney provides its teen talent with talking points for the press, though recent interviews with Efron suggest he’s not as worried about sticking to the script. Over and over again, he casually expresses his debt to Disney for putting him on the leading-man map. Except the subtext sounds more like an obligation than a compliment, and he’s been more than blunt about his future plans. Efron even admitted to New York Times television critic Jacques Steinberg that “teen music things” are “the last thing I want to be doing at the moment.”
In the studio system that dominated Hollywood until the late 1940s, five major studios existed as fully integrated conglomerates. They placed their stable of performers under contracts, and many found it necessary to micromanage and maintain the image and life of their talent. Those practices were abandoned in the 1950s after a federal antitrust suit, though Disney appears to have taken a page out of the old-Hollywood playbook. The company’s meticulously crafted denials about the manageability of their living, breathing stars are especially disturbing, however, in light of recent events. As of this past week, Spears is in danger of losing custody of her two sons as a result of her erratic public behavior. Lindsay Lohan’s (her last Disney film, Herbie: Fully Loaded, came out in 2005) own mother can’t keep her mouth shut about her daughter’s rehab program. And a Maxim photo shoot with Hilary Duff (a/k/a Disney’s Lizzie McGuire) is already old news.
