All the episodes censored by Disney Channel from its most beloved series… with more or less reason

Censorship is never a good advisor when you’re making a movie or TV show. What’s more: if part of you thinks “We should probably cut this,” it’s important that you don’t do it under any circumstances: It’s probably much better than you think! However, of course, it’s easy to say that when you’re not running a mega-corporation like Disney, where viewers can get offended by anything. In fact, the studio itself has ended up pulling a handful of episodes of its most famous series out of circulation for the most ridiculous reasons.

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So you don’t have to rack your brain thinking about what you’ll be able to watch and what you won’t, we’ve sorted all the censored episodes (which are only available in edited form, if they can be found at all). Ready to take a tour through arbitrary censorship?

Shake it up: Party it up!

The first of these episodes makes all the sense in the world. Demi Lovato, who had serious problems with her weight after going through the Disney Channel machine (she even went to rehab in 2010), reported on Twitter that in the script for one of the episodes of her series, specifically the seventh, a character said, as a joke, “You’re so cute I could eat you. Well, if I ate”. Disney apologized immediately, removed the episode, and all later reruns have cut this gag. Turns out we didn’t miss anything anyway.

So Random!: Colbie Caillat

The sketch show, which in this particular episode had Caillat as a guest. As you can imagine, all the gags dreamed up by the Disney Channel team were white-bread as can be, except one, in which a character mentions that “I only eat one full meal a week, because my agent is always on my back so I look as good as possible. If I eat too many carbs, I won’t get the jobs”. This episode was removed and never heard from again.

Hannah Montana: No sugar, Sugar

You know you’ve done something wrong when the parents of diabetic children call to complain about how badly you’ve handled an episode… about diabetic children. In this episode it was revealed that Oliver, the character played by Mitchel Musso, had type 1 diabetes, and throughout the whole episode his friends kept him away from all kinds of sugar… when type 1 isn’t caused by sugar, but by genetics. What’s more, it didn’t realize that diabetics can and should eat sugar, just in a healthier way (like in fruit) and that, in fact, they need sugar to prevent something worse. The episode was completely reshot and aired again in the third season after consulting diabetic associations. You can’t say they didn’t care, but if they’d done it from the start there wouldn’t have been such a problem.

Jessie: Quitting Cold Koala

So, Disney’s kids’ series just wouldn’t stop putting their foot in it when it came to food. In the case of this episode of Jessie, there were endless jokes about a kid with celiac disease, like “If you call me ‘sweetie’ one more time, you’re going to eat gluten-free punches” or a kid throwing pancakes at him while yelling “Gluten!”. The episode was pulled, re-edited and aired without any major problems, but, according to reports, hundreds of families ended up crying seeing how they treated the character.

Andi Mack: The whole series

I’m very sorry if Andi Mack was your favorite series, because Disney has erased its 57 episodes, split into 3 seasons, from existence. Not because anything serious happened in them but because the actor who played Andi’s grandfather, Stoney Westmoreland, had sexual encounters with a minor and, for some reason, that’s not something you want to see in your teen series. For some reason, he hasn’t worked again since the whole thing blew up in 2018. And he shouldn’t again.

Gravity Falls: Weirdmageddon!

One of the best episodes of Gravity Falls ended up censored after the first airing because Louis CK, who was canceled shortly afterward for masturbating in front of women without their consent, voiced one of the characters. In this case, since it was animation, it was simple: the series creator, Alex Hirsch, just did the voice instead. Thank goodness.

Zack and Cody: Smart and smarterer

In this case the episode did air a couple of times, but Disney Channel’s own executives decided to pull it before things blew up. In fact, you can’t even find it on Disney+, and for good reason: in it, Zack pretends to be dyslexic to get more time on his exams. Whoever came up with that joke is probably working somewhere else now.

It’s not the only censored episode of the series: season 3 episode 20, in which the Cheetah Girls appeared alongside Chris Brown, isn’t available anywhere because… Well, we don’t need to say what Chris Brown did, do we? The less he shows up on our television, the better.