Join Luke Westaway and Andy Farrant as they talk about cinema's greatest achievement: Disney Channel Original Movies. From X-TREME rollerblading, to Mermen, to homicidal smart homes, there's something for everyone in these brilliant, baffling films. Also, usually the mom character in the film is unable to cook, and this is considered richly comic. Hence the name.
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Andy deploys his 2026 wildcard (which is a movie we'll recap even if it's not a kids movie, TV movie or both), to devastating effect with Congo (1995), a jaw-droppingly stupid adaptation of Michael Crichton's novel that dares to ask the question: What if you had to go into the jungle to find special diamonds for the boss of a telecoms giant, but the whole region was guarded by a pack of genetically-altered super apes that happen to look like men trampolining around in unconvincing suits. Also: Y...
Like any 13-year-old, Kenny Witkowski is more interested in playing Mortal Karnage than he is with engaging in politics. But that all changes when it turns out an anonymous stranger he meets in a chatroom is none other than the President of the United States! If you think that sounds like a vaguely unsavoury premise for a film, well, good instincts. Buckle up for Mail to the Chief (2000), starring Randy Quaid as the titular Commander in Chief. If you crave bonus episodes of Mom Can't Cook!, mont...
Luke and Andy dive into the 2011 Disney Channel Original Movie "Lemonade Mouth," exploring its "Breakfast Club"-esque detention premise and the spontaneous formation of the band. They humorously critique the film's repetitive structure, the villain band Mudslide Crush's superior songs, and the main characters' parental traumas. The discussion covers everything from questionable lemonade to an unlikely rise to Madison Square Garden, concluding with listener mail and pitches for clone bands.
Can dentists go to heaven? That's the question that only Toothless (1997) is bold enough to ask, and also bold enough to answer: No. This is what dead dentist Dr. Katherine Lewis discovers after she is hit by a car and wakes up in limbo, and discovers that, as punishment for her life of fixing people's mouths, she is sentenced to be the tooth fairy, visiting children's homes unseen to collect their teeth and exchange them for shiny silver coins, until such time as the powers that be decide that ...
High school these days is tougher than ever, what with the pressures of social media, the looming spectre of AI and, of course, King Arthur's evil half-brother Mordred, who is always shoving you into lockers and putting plastic ants on your hot dogs. Or at least he is if you attend Avalon High, a typical American high school that may also be the setting for the resurrection of King Arthur himself, called back to the mortal realm by a world that needs him now more than ever. But can new Avalon Hi...
The Cheetah Girls are back! Well, some of them are. It's complicated. But stick with them, because this time, they're off to Bollywood! Still reeling from Galleria's departure for the dreaming spires of Cambridge, Chanel, Dorinda and Aqua need a win to turn their fortunes around. Great news, then, that all three of them are cast in a huge musical shooting in Mumbai, India! Bad news, however, that there is actually only one role, and the Cheetahs will need to audition against each other, somethin...
You know you're in for a good time when a movie features a 'witch mountain', right? Well, not if you've seen 1995's Escape to Witch Mountain. Then you'll know how it's perfectly possible for a film featuring a witch mountain to also be utterly incomprehensible and intensely dull! Never mind, at least this baffling remake of the 1975 family film - which tells the story of psychic alien twins reuniting after years spent apart - also features a hilariously stupid villainous scheme, and makes for an...
What if Home Alone starred a mouse instead of Kevin McCallister, and what if the Wet Bandits legally owned the house he was murdering them in? These are the questions that only Mouse Hunt is brave enough to ask. When brothers Ernie and Lars Smuntz inherit a dilapidated old mansion from their father, their disappointment turns to excitement when they realise that it is a lost architectural masterpiece that could earn them millions of dollars. Unfortunately for them however, the house is now inhab...
Mom Can't Cook! returns on 19 Jan with Mouse Hunt, but until then we thought we'd treat you to a feed drop of the first episode of our brand new Eerie, Indiana recap from Extra Helpings , Mom Can't Cook's Patreon-exclusive bonus podcast. This episode originally aired on 29 December 2025, and covers the first episode of 1991 paranormal kids TV show Eerie, indiana 'Foreverware'. Get access to over 60 (and counting) hours of bonus episodes by going to Patreon.com/ExtraHelpings. Extra Helpings is BA...
After this year's Halloween special on Haul Out the Halloween, we realised that we'd already ruined the year, so why not do Haul Out the Holly for our Christmas show? It's not like it could get any worse. Friends, how wrong we were. Haul Out the Holly is the first of three Haul Out movies, and this one shows us how Emily Melrose (Lacey Chabert) came to Evergreen Lane in the first place. How did she end up with a 2.6 million dollar house in suburban Utah? How did she become obssessed with the hol...
Are the Jonas Brothers real? That's the question at the centre of 2025's Disney+ original movie 'A Very Jonas Christmas Movie', which is either grimly cynical xmas fluff, or a biting comedy about siblings raised in the spotlight that lays bare the personal and professional failings of each Jonas Brother. It's very hard to tell. That said, we're trying our best to pin down this quantum-state Christmas movie, in which Joe, Nick and Kevin Jonas are thrust into a madcap chase across Europe in a bid ...
Mack and Brady have a problem. Their endless Summer of surfing, freedom and teen romance has come to an end, and instead of dying in a category 5 Kill Storm like they wanted, they've been washed by a magic wave into Brady's favourite movie, 1960s beach musical Wet Side Story. Now trapped in a living hell of dancing, songs and teen romance, Mack and Brady must figure out how to get back to the real world while navigating warring factions of surfers and bikers and the unwanted attentions of the mo...
Josh Townsend is having a bad week. His parents have moved him to New Mexico for his fathers' work, his new hometown is overrun with both buffalo and bicycle knaves, and to make things worse, he has to get a job as a fence repairman so the buffalo don't escape and murder one specific woman. But before long, Josh's initially fraught relationship with the local Navajo people and Buffalo steward John Blackhorse starts to thaw, and Josh realises that he must go on a vision quest, speaking to a glowi...
If you were making a film and one of your characters was a petulant manbaby who was obsessed with rules, spent half of the film in a costume store pretending to be Gandalf and could only become aroused by enforcing the rules of the local homeowners' association, you'd imagine that character would be the villain, right? Well, welcome to the Hallmark Channel's Haul Out the Halloween, where not only is this character, Jared, not the villain, he is also the romantic lead and deuteragonist, alongside...
It's spooky season folks, and we're hitting the ground running with 2012's Girl vs. Monster, an ooky, spooky, rip roaring romp about a girl who fights a lot of things that you could certainly describe as monsters if you were absolutely positive there would be no follow up questions. The girl in question is Skylar, a regular teen with a medical lack of fear who in a fit of pique one Halloween decides to destroy all her parents' scientific equipment, and by extension their life's work. But unbekno...
If the Disney Channel approached you and asked you to write a movie about mascots, but you didn't know anything about mascots, you would probably do one of two things: 1) Go away and learn about mascots, then write the movie. 2) Say "sorry, I don't know anything about mascots, I cannot write this movie". However, there is a secret third option, and that is to write the movie anyway, despite not knowing what a mascot is, or what one does, or how people would react to it. And friends, that's the o...
John Scaduto has a problem. If he can get through the school term without getting in trouble, he stands to get a $10,000 check from his grandma. Unfortunately, he has already set into motion an epic prank that will maim his headmaster and earn him up to one demerit on his permanent record. But when his headmaster is incapacitated by a second, unrelated Scaduto attack, John realises that the answer to his problem is simple: hire a random drifter to pretend to be the Principal and hope against hop...
Ice hockey skills. An unbearable personality. Alex Pearson has it all. But when he's suspended for his hockey team for accepting a sponsorship from a local flower shop, he must find new ways to occupy his time, such as becoming the new Den Mother of his sister's troop of girl scout-adjacent Bumblebees, even though... wait, am I reading this right? He's a BOY?! Cue plenty of Mrs Doubtfire-esque shenanigans as Alex tries to help his sister's troop stay together, while trying to earn his father's r...
If you've ever wondered what the Lawrence brothers, stars of such DCOMs as Horse Sense, Jumping Ship and The Other Me were up to in 2020, the answer is making Money Plane, a heist movie about a high stakes casino in the sky where you can bet on a man having relations with an alligator. Look, it was a bad year for everyone, alright? The film follows Jack Reese (Edge), a retired Special Heisting Guy who is forced into taking down the Money Plane by the baddest mother-effer on the planet, Darius Em...
We've all imagined how we would build a better boy (built in jetpack/hair made of candy/is actually a dog instead) but few of us have the technology at our disposal to make our dreams a reality. Not so teen geniuses Gabby and Mae, thanks to advanced character creation technology belonging to Mae's dad, a famous videogame designer who doesn't appear to have actually designed any games. Except get this: Mae's dad actually works for the Department of Defence, and by fiddling around in his office tr...
Are celebrities human beings who deserve basic respect and human dignity? Of course not, you're thinking, they're scum and deserve everything bad that happens to them and more. But to that I say: watch the Disney Channel Original Movie Starstruck. You might learn a thing or two. Starstruck follows the adventures of Jessica, a girl with no hobbies or interests who goes to Los Angeles to visit her grandmother and ends up being violently abducted by teen singing sensation Christopher Wilde. So far,...
While not officially a DCOM, Susie Q (1996) offered an opportunity for the Disney Channel to start experimenting with what works and what doesn't in a Disney Channel film. For example, high concept premise? Great, love it. Cute romance blossoming between reluctant companions? Also good, let's keep that. Shot of one of the main characters' smashed up corpse in the first four minutes? Probably we don't need to do that one again. And yet without that smashed up corpse we wouldn't have Susie Q (Amy-...
The 2008 Writer's Guild of America strike was responsible for many things: Increased pay for writers, especially in the context of the burgeoning streaming era. A boom in unscripted reality television. And, most regrettably of all, the plot of the Disney Channel Original Movie Dadnapped, in which a dad gets kidnapped. But not just any dad. This dad is Neal Morris, author of the Tripp Zoome spy novels, and with him missing, it's up to his plucky daughter Melissa to get her father home safe, despi...
Max Keeble has a lot of problems. His school's colourful bullies are out for his blood. An evil ice cream man wants to kill both him and skateboarding icon Tony Hawk. And he is friends with an unpleasant boy named Robe who wears a stinking bathrobe that canonically smells like diapers. But Max has an ace up his sleeve that none of these life obstacles will see coming: an imminent move to Illinois. When Max's proto-furry father tells him the family are off to Chicago, Max realises that he is free...
Dedicating your life to scientific pursuits can have countless benefits for humanity, but you have to bear in mind the potential drawbacks. You could study something before its dangerous effects are known, like Marie Curie, invent something monumentally destructive, like J. Robert Oppenheimer, or accidentally fall through a time hole to the court of King Arthur like Dr. Vivian Morgan, the protagonist of the film we're here to talk about today. Luckily, Vivian isn't the sort of person to get bogg...
World's fiercest girl band The Cheetah Girls are back and heading to the hometown of Chanel's soon to be stepfather, who is a sexual Frenchman named Luc. That's right, we're heading to Barcelona, Spain! Galleria, Chanel, Dorinda and Aqua are heading to Barcelona to enter a contest for undiscovered musical talent, but soon find themselves caught up in the charms of this wonderful and affordable city, to the detriment of their music, and the annoyance of Galleria. Will the Cheetahs be able to stop...
Happy Monday, Mom Can't Cook fans! We've got a bonus episode for you today, courtesy of Extra Helpings, Mom Can't Cook's Patreon-supported bonus podcast. This episode originally aired on Feb 24, 2025, and covers Disney Channel Original TV Show So Weird season 3 episode 6, 'Banglebye'. Get access to over 45 (and counting) hours of bonus episodes by going to Patreon.com/ExtraHelpings! Those video games that the kids are always playing. Almost seems like they're hypnotised by them, doesn't it? But ...
What would you do with the incredible power of time travel? No, look... no, you can't stop historical tragedies from happening because you can only go back in time 48 hours so- no, you can't buy a lottery ticket either because you're a teenager in this scenario, so you- no, you can't see wonderful things all over the world, you have to remain within a 20 minute travel radius of your school. You'd use it to stop nerds embarrassing themselves two days in the past? Yeah, that's probably as good as ...
Imagine the situation: the Walt Disney company wants to turn your life story into a movie! It's a dream come true. That is, until the movie comes out, and you realise it's a crushingly boring series of basketball games and for some reason they've decided to name it "Double Teamed". You'd be livid. Still, I suppose it has to feature some basketball, as Double Teamed tells the real life story of Heather and Heidi Burge, twin sisters and pioneers of the WNBA. But their rise to the top wasn't always...
Being a princess is hard work. You're the best person in your whole kingdom, and yet you're somehow expected to set an example for the scum who live there, and occasionally military dictators will stride into your throne room and declare a military coup. Luckily for those situations, we have the Princess Protection Program, a secret service just for young, female royalty, who will spirit princesses away from dangerous conflict zones and force them to live in a stinking bait shack in a Louisiana ...
