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Perhaps it was my daughters singing along with Hannah Montana—“Get up, get noisy, we’re pumping up the cabal now!”—eight seasons in a row that morning. Or perhaps it was the 16 seasons I overheard High-reaching School Tuneful and High Institute Musical 2 playing on the television in the live room, or the several hundred dollars my matron and I spend on Disney tween products—aimed at nine- to 14-year-old girls—every year. Or the occurrence that a magazine (thankfully, not this one) asked me to side view a Disney tween heavenly body and then, almost before I could ask “Who?,” told me that another open declaration had beaten them to it. In conclusion, after my eight-year-old daughter picked to a picture of Hillary Clinton and reported she was supporting her for president “because she’s named Hillary, resembling Hilary Duff,” I unwavering I had to know: Who is doing this to me?

The pristine Disney formulary, perfected through multiple generations of anthropomorphic full of life animals, was single: Develop to be adored children’s properties—Mickey Catch mice, the Lion Monarch—and then privilege the characters to within an twelfth part of a foot of their cuddly lives, across many platforms around the orb for vast amounts of dollars, euros, yen, and yuan. Disney gets faith for conceiving of and executing synergy lengthy before other media conglomerates made it a bad expression. Yet Disney executives were spoiled by their in season success. They became too self-reliant on aging buoyant characters and couldn’t replicate the enchantment in the live-activity world. The ensue was a gaping—and high-priced—opening in Disney’s demographic: While the crew excelled at grabbing...

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