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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The title of this week's DCOM, Camp Rock, is misleading, because while it does take place at a camp, the only rocking taking place is the rocking back and forth by harrowed students who can't face another day of impromptu unaccompanied singing, people drumming on every available surface, and hip hop dance classes taught by Joe Jonas. Apparently though, there are people who actually want to attend Camp Rock, on purpose, people like Mitchie Torres (Demi Lovato), who scores a coveted spot at the ca...
Parents might seem like they've got everything figured out, but it's worth remembering that they're just one failed time travel experiment away from crying, throwing temper tantrums, and liberally pissing themselves at the slightest provocation. Not so high and mighty now, eh? That's the premise of 2001's The Poof Point, in which accomplished husband and wife scientist team Norton and Marigold Ballard decide to let a dog wander into their time machine and start pulling things out at random. Beca...
We're back in the Wonderful World of Disney this week, to check out Life-Size , the 2000 comedy starring Lindsay Lohan as a grieving little girl who uses a necromancy grimoire to try and resurrect her dead mother, and Tyra Banks as a doll who comes to life and tries to have sex with that little girl's father. Lohan plays Casey, a young girl who uses a mystical book to try and bring her mom back to life, but when some doll hair accidentally gets into her dark ritual she ends up with a life-sized ...
High-schooler Jamie Bartlett finds herself thrust onto the world stage when an email error sees her fictionlised journal become a nationwide best-seller. But what will happen if her fellow students find out some of the characters are loosely based on them?! If your answer is 'probably nothing?' then boy does Read It and Weep have a problem with you, buddy. Brace for one of the most incoherent DCOMs Luke and Andy have ever encountered, made only slightly more palatable by a Green Goblin-esque min...
High School Musical is back in High School Musical 2! Will this one contain an actual musical? No! And also it's not even set in a high school this time! With school out for the summer, the Wildcats of East High find themselves working at a snooty country club owned by the parents of objectively best characters Ryan and Sharpay Evans. But as sports star Troy starts being groomed for a scholarship to the prestigious University of Albuquerque, he finds he has to choose between his friends and his ...
Mom Can't Cook! returns on 20 Jan with High School Musical 2, but until then we thought we'd treat you to a feed drop of a classic episode of Extra Helpings , Mom Can't Cook's Patreon-exclusive bonus podcast. This episode originally aired on 22 April 2024, and covers Disney Channel Original TV Show So Weird season 2 episode 10, 'Oopa'. Get access to over 40 (and counting) hours of bonus episodes by going to Patreon.com/ExtraHelpings. In perhaps the most hatstand episode of So Weird yet, Fi and t...
Xmas is here folks, and what better way to celebrate than with a LIVE recap of a film about a violent kidnapping, let me finish, that takes place at Christmas? That's right, it's Holiday in Handcuffs, the 2007 romantic comedy in which Melissa Joan Hart, recently dumped by her boyfriend and facing the prospect of a dateless Christmas with her family, kidnaps Mario Lopez and forces him to pretend to be in love with her. It's as wild as it sounds folks, so strap in for some holiday fun, and remembe...
Hosts Luke Westaway and Andy Farrant dive into Netflix's "Hot Frosty," a DCOM-style film where a muscular snowman comes to life but acts like a toddler. They discuss the film's frustratingly chaste romance, physiological impossibilities of a cold, sweating snowman, and the bizarre plot involving comic relief cops and a town that easily believes in magic. The episode hilariously critiques the movie's missed opportunities for actual sexiness and ponders how to create a genuinely hot snowman story.
We return to The Wonderful World of Disney for this week's offering, 1999's H-E Double Hockey Sticks, which reunites Boy Meets World's Will Friedel and Matthew Lawrence as Griffelkin, a demon in training, and Dave Heinrich, an ambitious hockey player who would sell his soul to win the Stanley Cup, and then does do that. But that's when things start to go wrong, not only for Griffelkin, who finds himself getting attached to his human target, but also the movie, which then aimlessly spins its whee...
In a last gasp for Halloween 2024, Mom Can't Cook is back with our live Halloween special, in which we're recapping 2004's Halloweentown High! Marnie Cromwell, powerful witch and Best Person In The World is back with a new plan to unite the human world and Halloweentown: make a bunch of Halloweentown students attend her high school, in disguise, so that no one knows they're from Halloweentown. But having bet the Cromwell magic that this experiment will work, Marnie soon finds sinister forces of ...
Welcome, foolish mortals, to the Mom Can't Cook podcast! Consider this dismaying observation: this episode is about the 2003 Haunted Mansion movie, which offered us this chilling challenge: watching the 2003 Haunted Mansion movie. Eddie Murphy plays Jim Evers, a workaholic real estate agent who drags his family to the titular manse with the hopes of earning a big payday from selling it. But as soon as the Evers arrive they realise that all is not well at Gracey Manor, as the house's 999 happy ha...
Spooky season is here, Mom Can't Cook fans, and we're kicking off with a slam dunk DCOM about twins who are also witches. That's right, it's Twitches! Sister Sister's Tia and Tamera Mowry play Alexandra and Camryn, two strangers who run into each other in a clothing store and realise that not only are they twins, they are also powerful witches able to do magical spells like "Undress Mannequins" and "Explode Cola". But can the sisters defeat the evil forces out to stop them? Is Coventry a good na...
This week, the DCOM writers spin the sports wheel and get a teen... [BOXER] who is worried about the ridicule he'll receive for his secret love of... [COMPETITIVE DOUBLE DUTCH JUMP ROPE]. Huh. Not sure how that got on here, but let's see how they get on. The boxer in question is Isadore "Izzy" Daniels, a pugilistic prodigy under a lot of pressure from his overbearing dad to succeed and become the third generation of Daniels to win the prestigious golden gloves tournament. Izzy is fine with this,...
Jett Jackson is the star of the hit TV show Silverstone, a thrilling spy drama full of karate and explosions. He's also a regular kid trying to keep his grades up and ask his friend Kayla to the prom. As you can imagine, this is a challenging lifestyle to maintain that only gets more difficult when he accidentally falls through a dimension hole and ends up in the fictional Silverstone universe, while the fictional character Silverstone ends up in the real world, living Jett's life for him. If th...
Vega omega, Mom Can't Cook! fans, this week we're heading back to the spay-stay for another instalment in the Zenon series of sci fi films that is confusing major, as well as viral extreme (bad). When we join our hero Zenon, she has a lot going on, with a new cousin, her space driving test, and the Galactic Teen Supreme contest all vying for her attention. But when moon activist Sage Borealis approaches her to tell her that going to the moon is bad, Zenon must decide whether to pursue her dreams...
High School Musical may have been the most successful musical DCOM, but it wasn't the first. That dubious honour belongs to 2003's The Cheetah Girls, which charts the fortunes of a four piece girl group as they navigate friendship, fame, and deciding whether or not to trust a man who is literally named 'Jackal Johnson.' When we first meet the Cheetah Girls they're performing at kids' birthday parties to audiences just waiting for them to shut up so they can go ham on the pinata. But a chance enc...
Calvin Wheeler, the main character of Life is Ruff, is many things. A big man on campus, a world class skateboarder, master to a snivelling worm-like manservant named Figg and of course, the world's biggest fan of an unpopular superhero named Gotham Man. What he isn't, is a dog owner, something that proves to be a problem when he needs to win a dog show to get enough money to buy the rare comic Gotham Man #1. Enter Tyco, a large, rambunctious shelter dog whose antics prove to be more than the se...
What if Johnny Tsunami were a lot less fun, and a lot more about probate law and real estate deals? That's the question no one asked that was answered by Rip Girls (2000)! Sydney Miller is a 13 year old girl who suddenly finds herself the owner of a large parcel of land in Hawaii after a distant relative leaves it to her in their will. But it turns out that Hawaii holds painful memories for her overprotective father, who left the island after Sydney's mother was killed in a mysterious accident t...
High School Musical was a watershed moment for Disney Channel Original Movies, when they crossed over from odd, throwaway curiosities about mermen and telepathic horses, into huge mainstream success, with hit albums, merchandise and two bona fide stars in the form of Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. With all that being said however, it is still recognisably a DCOM, thanks to such unmissable genre conventions as a vaguely nonsensical plot, a budget of about $40, and of course, a weapons-grade Bad D...
The Even Stevens Movie (2003) is the culmination of three years and 65 episodes of television, which we have seen precisely none of. However, that's not going to stop us from recapping this wild movie, in which the Stevens family think they've won a dream vacation to a paradise island, only to end up unwitting participants in a cruel reality show. Having seen none of Even Stevens, it's hard to know what's a beloved Even Stevens Bit, and what is unconnected nonsense concocted for the movie. For e...
Can you think of any scenario in which you abscond with the President's daughter and don't end the night being killed by the secret service? Well, Disney can. In My Date With the President's Daughter (1998), regular teen Duncan Fletcher asks a girl at the mall on a date, only to discover later that she's the literal DOTUS. When Hallie decides to escape her handlers for a wild night of mayhem, hijinks ensue. Is this the worst secret service ever? What scandal is the President embroiled in now, an...
Ice. What is it? Science can only begin to guess. But without it we would not have figure skating or ice hockey, the two sports at the heart of this week's DCOM, Go Figure. Katelin Kingsford is a world class figure skater, but to afford training from the world's top coach she must accept an ice hockey scholarship to a prestigious school. Will Katelin be able to balance her figure skating, ice hockey and academic studies? Can she prevent her new team mates from discovering her shameful twirl girl...
How many great bands have never found mainstream success because their lead singer stands there singing, instead of rolling around on the floor doing yoga and the splits and stuff? It is literally millions. That's the predicament the band The Zettabytes find themselves in in Disney Channel Original Movie Pixel Perfect - that is until they meet Loretta Modern, who can sing, dance and is, regrettably, a sex hologram made by the world's worst boy. Will the band's original singer adapt to being usur...
We're halfway to Halloween, Mom Can't Cook fans, so what better way to celebrate than with a spooky DCOM! This week it's 2002's The Scream Team, which is, confusingly, about a group of ghosts called The Soul Patrol. It's also about Ian and Claire, two kids whose grandfather passes away, but unfortunately gets his soul crushed in the fist of an evil dead inventor called Zachariah Kull. And also about an insulting Halloween festival that Zachariah Kull is annoyed about? But also mostly about natur...
Miracle in Lane 2 tells the inspirational story of Justin Yoder, the first person with a disability to compete in the All American Soapbox Derby, and also presumably the first person to sit in a Disney screening room watching a movie about his life that inexplicably features loads of scenes of his parents going to town on each other. Frankie Muniz plays Justin, a plucky kid searching for a sport in which he can compete at the same level as his athletic brother Seth (So Weird's Patrick Levis). Wh...
The iconic good-vibes surfin', boardin' legend from Johnny Tsunami (1999) makes a glorious return to the Disney Channel in 'Johnny Kapahala: Back on Board' (2007)! Johnny returns to O‘ahu, Hawaii for his grandfather's wedding, but finds the island paradise under the cruel yoke of a gang of mountainboarding teens! Can Johnny save his increasingly large family from the poisonous influence of these bad dudes and their strikingly terrible extreme sport? Why won't his tiny uncle stop slipping through...
Apes. What are they all about? Can we trust them? Are they going to go ballistic and destroy our houses? If only there were some way we could ask them. Well friends, there is: sign language, the communication method that can be learned by apes. Unfortunately the ape in this movie, Jennie, isn't really interested in learning sign language, and is more interested in ape carnage and killing the mailman. Will Jennie be able to adjust to living with a human family? How quickly is she going to destroy...
Jace Newfield is a New Yorker through and through. He loves jazz music, playing baseball in Central Park and, of course, the great taste of an egg cream. He's also a person who is blind, although in a place like the Big Apple, he lives a normal life with his friends. But when his family uproots and moves Jace to Utah, he finds himself struggling with his new surroundings. The school won't get a beeping backboard to allow him to play basketball, his music teacher hates him, and his classmates don...
We all feel like we don't belong on this planet now and then, but very few of us choose to construct an intergalactic satellite communications dish in our backyard to beg aliens to come and pick us up, and even fewer of us have those calls answered by a talking dog with a necklace made of lips. Not so Mike Pillsbury, an awkward computer genius who decides to depart planet Earth when some bullies set fire to his skeleton roundabout (it's a long story). Mike soon gets more than he bargained for ho...
Imagine, if you will, some cooking. Seems pretty normal, right? Well get this: it was done by a BOY. Sorry to shock you with such a mind shattering scenario, listeners, but you'll need to be thusly prepared for this week's episode which is about Eddie's Million Dollar Cook-Off, a movie in which baseball-loving teen Eddie Ogden discovers a passion for the culinary arts that is as charming as it is devastating to his personal and academic life. Will Eddie be able to overcome the violent ridicule o...
