Those of us who were lucky enough to grow up with the Disney Club on the air remember with great affection the series of drawings that were broadcast within the program. From classics like “Ducktales” or “Chip and Chop: Guardian Rescuers”, to spin-offs of the films we had seen at the cinema or more “thug” series like “Pepper Ann” or “The Backyard Gang”. The latter, created by Joe Ansolabehere and Paul Germain, was an absolute success. It went on to have six seasons and even a movie. Y in many ways it is still mythical because the adventures of TJ and the others were really ahead of their time.
With the wave of nostalgia that Hollywood has rode in recent years, it’s quite odd that a reboot of “The Band of the Patio” hasn’t been put on the table for Disney Channel or Disney +. Well, obviously it was put on the table. Joe Ansolabehere confirmed to Slash Film that there have been negotiations to restart the series and that he and Paul Germain have been developing a new version for a few years.: “We came up with a lot of different angles and tried different things. We worked on it for four years. But this is an example of how things have changed. Everything is slower now.”.
No matter how long it takes, I’m sure most of us are willing to wait a little longer for new episodes of “The Patio Band”, if only to see how they update it to current times. As we said at the beginning, the original series was full of moments that are seen with other eyes with an adult gaze, like that time when Miss Grotkey talks about totalitarian and repressive governments or TJ that becomes the vivid and dark image of capitalism.
The episode that Disney wanted to censor because it “criticized religions”
The creator of the series revealed that there was an episode that made Disney executives quite nervous. This is the end of the first season, in which Spinelli almost started a cult around the girl on the swing because he saw her turn to square one.. Absolabehere says the study prevented them from moving forward because he seemed critical of religions and couldn’t do it because “I’m Disney”. However, another executive considered the censorship of that chapter “stupid” and allowed them to move on. Disney tried to stop him again: “They said, ‘Okay, you can air it once, that’s it. It will never air again.’ to think ‘it doesn’t matter’ and they replaced it again because they didn’t get any letters. They thought they would get a lot of letters and people would get mad, but nobody cared.”. What proved that the Streisand effect, whereby a complaint or an attempt at censorship ends up being more the speaker of the controversy than the object of the controversy itself, exists totally.
Absolabehere, who has also worked on cult series like “Rugrats” or “Hey, Arnold”, says he is very proud of that particular chapter: “He was very proud of what he was and what he said about sects, the formation of sects and how we take ideas and fail to abandon them and how we modify reality to mean something else”.
That chapter and the rest of the episodes of ‘La Banda del Patio’ are available on Disney +.
Source: E Cartelera
