The Disney Afternoon

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"There's so much to do, getting ready just for you, Everybody's busy, bringing you a Disney Afternoon!"

A made-for-syndication programming block featuring many of Disney's original television shows that ran from 1990 until 1999.

The block was two hours long, consisting of four half-hour shows. The lineup changed after every season, adding a new show to the end of the line up while the first show would be bumped off. Eventually, the block was shortened to ninety minutes in 1997. While the block was a hit, it eventually became unpractical when Disney began producing more shows than could be featured in a two-hour block. It ended in 1999, after a successful ten year run.

During its run it spawned an attraction at Disneyland, a soundtrack (still available on iTunes), and a comic book published by Marvel. It also had a major comic event in Disney Adventures magazine called The Legend of the Chaos God. Currently a couple of shows have been revived in comics: Gargoyles had an all-too-short (and yet too long) comic by Slave Labor Graphics, while Boom! Studios has begun featuring DuckTales (1987) elements in the long-running Uncle Scrooge comics, then launched new series for Darkwing Duck, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers and DuckTales (1987).

See also One Saturday Morning, Saturday Disney, Disney Channel, Toon Disney, and Disney XD for other Disney television properties.

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Shows featured on the block, in the order they were featured:

• Adventures of the Gummi Bears
• DuckTales (1987)
• Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers
• Tale Spin
• Darkwing Duck
• Goof Troop
• Bonkers
• Aladdin
• Gargoyles
• The Schnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show
• Timon and Pumbaa
• Quack Pack
• The Mighty Ducks
• One Hundred and One Dalmatians: The Series
• Brand Spanking New Doug (aka Disney's Doug)
• Hercules: The Series

Tropes used in The Disney Afternoon include:

• Channel Hop: Several of the series starting with Darkwing Duck also aired on Saturday mornings (often on ABC). Doug also started as a Nickelodeon show before Disney bought it.
• Crisis Crossover/Cross Through: The Legend of the Chaos God, a five part story which ran in Disney Adventures magazine.
• Early-Bird Cameo: Darkwing Duck appeared in the opening a year before his show debuted.
• Ear Worm: The theme song, not to mention most of the individual show's themes.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Of the shows listed above, only half of them have DVD releases - and none of them are complete.
• Network Red Headed Stepchild: Gargoyles due to its dark nature, Schnookums and Meat because of its Gross-Out Show nature.
  • Tale Spin might count as Old Shame due to the legal issues surrounding the originally unauthorized use of King Louie.
• No Problem With Licensed Games: The games released for these shows are generally considered good, though the Tale Spin NES game isn't remembered as fondly.
• Recycled Script: "Allowance Day" in DuckTales (1987) and "The Time Bandit" in Tale Spin.
• Revival: Gargoyles, Darkwing Duck, and Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers eventually got comic books that picked up where their shows left off (after a Time Skip in Darkwing's case).
• The Smurfette Principle: As per usual for a Disney Afternoon cartoon.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: Darkwing Duck pretty much took over the Marvel comic.
• Vanilla Edition: Pretty much all the shows lucky enough to get a DVD release.
  • And of those, most of them used the episode cuts aired on Toon Disney, which utterly ruins some of the shows.
• Villain Team-Up: The Disney Afternoon Live! show contained one between Don Karnage and Fat Cat.