How Disney’s ‘Descendants’ Saved My Family From The Early Anxieties of the Pandemic

by Greg Ehrhardt, OnScreen Blog Columnist

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Disney announced that yes, there will be a 4th live-action Descendants movie, with the working title “The Pocketwatch”. It will be partly based on the world of Alice in Wonderland, with all new characters, seven new songs, and everything you would expect from the ‘Descendants’ franchise.

We have a few questions, namely, why only seven songs, and whether the returning cast is coming back (we hope it would only be in cameos, namely because the new cast deserves their own chance to shine), but, my 8-year-old daughter couldn’t be more excited, considering all the Descendants merchandise and clothing she owns.

I of course, knowing all the money the franchise made, knew a 4th movie was inevitable, but, was still excited by this news; even by Disney Channel standards, the soundtrack is fun even for adults. We’ve played each movie’s soundtrack approximately 35,902 times without getting tired of it.

For me though, ‘Descendants’ has a special place in my family, namely because it might have saved it.

When the pandemic started in March 2020, my daughter was in kindergarten, and could not understand why she couldn’t go to school anymore, and also why she couldn’t go, well anywhere. Not only could she not go to restaurants or the indoor bounce house as we were accustomed to, but she couldn’t see her grandparents, cousins, or anybody for that matter.

It was her, me, and her mom. The worst part was, her mom works in an emergency room at one of the biggest hospitals in the state, so she was working long hours 5-6 days a week, while I was now working from home 5 days a week instead of at the office.

It was a big change, and my daughter, like many 6-year-olds, didn’t take the new way of life well. My daughter was a well-behaved kid up to that point, and a creature of habit. The pandemic, as we know, threw all the old routines out the window.

She started having daily, sometimes hourly temper tantrums. When she wasn’t having fits, I was struggling to keep her busy: she had 4-hour days at school instead of 6, grew quickly bored of the toys and games we had at the house, no new movies or TV shows were coming out, and I couldn’t take her anywhere because everything was closed.

She cried a lot. I would cry after putting her to bed. Our household was a mess.

This story is a common refrain of households around the world. Our solution though might be unique.

Enter ‘Descendants’. Up to that point, pre-pandemic, we had stuck to the classic Disney/Pixar movie portfolio. I had heard about Descendants, but didn’t know much other than it was a show about the kids of famous Disney villains. I didn’t even know it was a musical.

In normal times, I would have waited another year or two to introduce her to a live-action movie with teenage-type plots, even though by all accounts the movies were safe for kindergartners.

Desperate times call for you know what.

We tried the first movie out, and she fell in love with it quicker than anything else she had ever fallen for, even Frozen. We had a new routine, and the routine was listening to the soundtrack over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.

And we both loved it.

There were two aspects of Descendants that got my daughter hooked:

1) Mal and Evie are edgy, modern heroines, which was a stark difference to the typical Disney princesses she had seen to this point.

2) The music was a fun type of pop music she hadn’t been exposed to, while still being rated G (PG at worst).

The second part was really important. We kept her away from the pop music scene at 6 years old, mainly because enough songs in the popular rotations have something to do with sex or partying. There are Kidz Bops versions of these songs, which we played a little bit, but we mostly stuck to traditional Disney music songs, because it was just one less thing I had to worry about.

(Side note, at a K-5th Grade school dance I chaperoned this year, the #1 most requested song from the kids, according to the DJ, was Pitbull’s Timber. You don’t realize until you’ve become a parent how suddenly conservative you actually are.)

‘Descendants’ music is a great transition to the pop music scene, with really contagious hooks, while being silly enough to not mean anything serious.

We played the soundtracks non-stop from April through the Fall; we would sing it karaoke, have dance competitions, dress up as the characters, reenact scenes during the songs, it was the big fresh thing that she did not get bored of no matter what.

This was surprising because kids get bored of things fast.

Not Descendants.

Eventually, we got to see grandparents and friends again, school in Connecticut reopened in the Fall, and old routines slowly came back into focus. Descendants was our bridge from the loneliness and anxiety of the early months of the pandemic to the new normalcy.

Luckily, while the pandemic is still ongoing, we can look back at the beginning of it for our family as not the time when things got bad, but the time when we discovered ‘Descendants’ and had so much fun singing, playing, and bonding.

To ‘Descendants’, thank you, and we’ll be there on premiere night, probably in costume, for ‘The Pocketwatch’.