In its earliest incarnation, The Disney Channel was a paid service. My family paid for it—and Showtime, so Mom could watch things she wanted to see. But the thing about having Disney as a pay channel was that they still tried to start most things on the half-hour or the hour. This meant filler, as Disney was not in those days inclined to trim their programming to fit the time allotted. And some of the best of that filler was D-TV.

All told, nearly two hundred songs have gotten the D-TV treatment. I would come across the concept in later years as the anime music video, or AMV. Apparently, AMV came first, with the 1982 pairing of “All You Need Is Love,” by The Beatles, and a bunch of really violent scenes from the series Star Blazers. Disney tended to pair their songs and images appropriately, not ironically, for example pairing Paul Anka’s “Puppy Love” with various clips of affectionate dogs from Disney’s vaults. But for fifteen years starting in 1984, that was how Disney filled time.

You can find it on YouTube. Unfortunately, the problem there tends to be separating out fan-made videos from the official ones, not to mention the inevitable “filming the TV with your cell phone” videos and poor quality VHS transfers. However, the only official US releases were VHS, and they were a long time ago. This is one of the properties that’s sitting in the Disney vaults, fading ever further into obscurity.

And that’s too bad. Some of them are not great; actually, I really hate “Puppy Love” as a song, and adding clips of Pluto and that dog who’s apparently Dinah the Dachshund (despite not really looking like a dachshund very much?) doesn’t improve it. But my first encounter with Spike Jones was thanks to Disney; they did “Blue Danube,” “Holiday For Strings,” and “That Old Black Magic.” (I also became aware of him because of “Der Fuhrer’s Face,” but that’s another column.) They did classical, oldies, classic rock, disco, modern, novelty—all kinds of music.

This is one of those family memories, too, because you were a lot more likely to get Mom to sit through the Disney version of “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This” if she knew that she’d get “Sixteen Tons” or something afterward. Music for the whole family, you see. And these were the original songs, too, not covers. Actually The Eurythmics and actually Tennessee Ernie Ford and so forth. Let’s face it; Disney could afford the rights.

It’s hard to tell, watching it on YouTube, how good the editing actually is. It could be shoddy, or it could be uploaded with a bad frame rate or with the audio and video slightly out of sync. The only way to know would be to spend the money buying the out-of-print tapes and then actually get around to hooking up my VCR, and I’m not much inclined to do either. I don’t remember having a problem with it, even when I was catching the odd video here and there on Vault Disney or what have you, after I became familiar with the concept of AMV—come to that, the concept of editing. But who knows? I could have nostalgia goggles.

This is one of the places where I wish Disney would start releasing the more obscure treasures of the Vault in a lower-cost way. Maybe not the Warner Archives way, I suppose, though goodness knows they’ve got enough to start doing that. But something. It’s probably not cost effective for Disney to release the whole collection, especially given how much the music rights for that would probably end up being. Still, I can dream. I’m probably not the only one, either.