Sure, Disney’s first star, even before there was a Walt Disney Pictures, was four-year-old Virginia Davis. But that’s a four-year-old. That’s not really the same thing. What I realized recently was that Disney has more teenage girls, as a studio, who were wild successes than . . . well, most of the rest of Hollywood. Nickelodeon is giving them a run for their money, but by and large, if there is a teenage girl who is successful in movies and television, going back as far as 1955, she probably worked for Disney. Other studios have had boys; Disney had both boys and girls.
I’m not claiming that’s deliberate equality on the Disney studio’s part, you understand, or that Disney himself was trying to make sure girls would have role models. I do think choosing to have roughly half the cast of The Mickey Mouse Club be girls was deliberate, but I think Walt would have been just as happy if the breakout star of the series had been Lonnie Burr as he was with the star’s being Annette Funicello. And of course, once he did have a star in Annette, he was certainly going to take advantage of that, and, say, shoehorn her into The Shaggy Dog where she didn’t particularly fit or seem necessary.
It is, however, true that Disney made more movies about girls than other studios did. It’s hard to verify this, you understand, because most of the lists of movies about teenagers I’m finding seem confused by someone as old as Molly Ringwald, much less the era I’m really talking about here. And certainly Molly Ringwald is one of the exceptions, though the ’80s also seem to have produced more movies starring and about teens than any other era. It’s also, curiously, a movie where Disney’s live-action product was more erratic, possibly because they weren’t great at making the kind of teen movie content the other studios did in that decade.
Child stars? Oh, every studio had those. In almost all cases, however, the kid disappeared with the onset of puberty and seldom made movies after that—possibly as an adult, but basically not from about thirteen to about twenty. Shirley Temple tried, Gods love her, but about the only person I can think of who made movies the whole way through was Natalie Wood. And let’s be real—Rebel Without a Cause was one of those movies that sealed the concept of “teenager” as something specific. Admittedly as something that’s just “learning to be an adult,” not like the teen movies of the ’80s where being a teenager is its own specific thing.
About the only star at all, I think, from the Golden Age of Hollywood who got started as a teenager and was genuinely a star as a teenager was Judy Garland. And this is another difference between Disney and the other studios—from everything I’ve read, Walt Disney actually cared about the teenagers, both boys and girls, who were working for him. I do know two examples of Disney child stars who developed serious issues in part stemming from their stardom, and they’re both tragic. But in one case, it’s decades after Walt’s death and almost certainly in part because of family issues. The other case is genuinely tragic—but not the Garland “all the drugs were the studio” issue, at least.
I suppose the three biggest names in “teenage girls working for Walt Disney” all had very different specific experiences. Annette Funicello, of course, started in The Mickey Mouse Club and ended up doing movies for Walt . . . well, in part because her contract wasn’t great, because Walt felt possessive of her, but that’s something we’ve already discussed. Then there’s Hayley Mills, whom Lillian Disney insisted should be Pollyanna. And of course Jodie Foster was after the end of the studio era and did Taxi Driver in the same year she did Freaky Friday.
It’s also notable, I think, that these girls share pop culture DNA with Molly Ringwald inasmuch as they were treated as normal girls in their movies. Both Hayley Mills and Jodie Foster have moments in a movie where they go out of their way to try to seem more attractive—it’s one of the themes of Freaky Friday, the underlying discontent with appearance—but none of the girls have the sudden “glasses off, hair down” moment. Even after the makeover in Freaky Friday, Annabel Andrews remains a good-looking teenager, not a dreamboat.
I think they could’ve made Kim Richards of Escape to and Return From Witch Mountain a bigger name, but the fact remains that she’s in the movie and an important part of it. Fairuza Balk and Meredith Salenger likewise felt like they could have been the next big name. And maybe you’re thinking that three names aren’t a lot, so far as “so many female teen stars!” talk goes. But though people don’t realize it, most Disney live action movies are about adults. And even if those three are the big stars from the classic years of Disney, you do still get Kim Richards, or Ellen Janov of The Horse in the Grey Flannel Suit. Lesley Anne Warren wasn’t a teenager during her Disney years, but she was a young adult and there was a definite drive to make her a star.
And, of course, if you include the ’90s and later eras of The Disney Channel, you start getting your Hillary Duffs and Selena Gomezes. Heck, Anne Hathaway really became a big name working for Disney. Yes, Disney inflicted Shia LeBeouf on us, but it paired him initially with Christy Carlson Romano. Maybe it’s for marketing—definitely it’s for marketing. But even if that’s the only reason, at least Disney was consistently marketing toward girls—which means realizing that girls exist, girls watch movies and TV, and girls want to see themselves represented. It’s an incredibly low bar, but only Disney has consistently cleared it.
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