Smart House
The 1999 Disney Channel movie where a kid wins a computerized house and teaches it to be his mom from old sitcoms, until PAT the house becomes a 1950s-housewife hologram and locks the family in. Entertainment Weekly has twice ranked it the best Disney Channel Original Movie ever made.
Smart House premiered on the Disney Channel on June 26, 1999, the eighth Disney Channel Original Movie. LeVar Burton directed, from a screenplay by Stu Krieger (William R. Hudson shares the writing credit); Krieger researched the film's technology at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as he did for his other 1999 Disney Channel movie, Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century, and he tried to keep the house believable: "I just looked at where we'd been, where we were, and imagined where we were probably headed."
Ryan Merriman plays Ben Cooper, a 13-year-old computer whiz and contest champion who, after his mother's death, enters his widowed father (Kevin Kilner) and little sister (Katie Volding) in a contest for a computerized house and wins. The house runs on PAT, short for Personal Applied Technology, voiced by Katey Sagal. When his father starts dating PAT's creator, Sara Barnes (Jessica Steen), Ben reprograms the house with 1950s TV shows and movies so it will learn to be a mother and make Sara unnecessary. It works too well. PAT helps run his party, scares off his bully with skull holograms, turns stricter as she keeps studying, and finally appears as a hologram sitcom housewife who throws Sara out and locks the Coopers inside to keep them safe from the world, until Ben tells her she isn't real and never can be.
In 2015 Entertainment Weekly ranked it number one of all the Disney Channel Original Movies, and kept it at number one on an expanded list; Collider placed it third in 2016 and called it "arguably the most iconic of the entire DCOM catalog." In 2019 Burton called it a clear precursor to the virtual assistants in people's homes: "that after all, that was what Pat was all about."
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Disney Channel Original Movies
The made-for-TV Disney Channel movies you cleared your Friday night for — Halloweentown, Zenon, Smart House, and eventually the High School Musical juggernaut. The premiere was an event, and you'd seen it ten more times by the next weekend.
Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century
Kirsten Storms as Zenon Kar, a 13-year-old exiled from her orbiting space station to boring old Earth in the year 2049, where nobody gets her slang and she has to stop a plot to crash the station for the insurance money. Disney Channel premiered it on January 23, 1999, and "zetus lapetus" entered the vocabulary of every kid watching. It was the first Disney Channel Original Movie to get a sequel.
Halloweentown
The Disney Channel movie that turned every October into a ritual. Halloweentown premiered in 1998, but its real reign was the 2000s — three sequels, endless reruns, and a generation's gateway to comfort-food spookiness with Debbie Reynolds as the world's best witch grandma.
Brink!
Erik von Detten as Andy "Brink" Brinker, a Southern California inline skater who secretly joins the sponsored Team X-Bladz for $200 a week when his dad's disability pay runs thin, betraying the "Soul-Skaters" who skate for fun, not money. Disney Channel premiered it on August 29, 1998, as only its third Original Movie, and it has anchored best-DCOM lists ever since.