For those who don’t know, Defunctland is a web-based series of documentaries that dive into the history of theme parks and theme park-adjacent pop culture. Run by filmmaker Kevin Perjurer, their multi-part series on the career of Jim Henson was remarkable, and earlier in the pandemic, they released a feature-length documentary about Halyx, a short-lived band that performed at Disneyland in the 1980s and was, for all intents and purposes, Disney’s first major attempt to compete with Star Wars on its own terms, complete with a quasi-Wookiee member of the band.
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Yesterday, Perjurer released another feature-length documentary — this time about his search for the composer behind the four-note mnemonic that has closed out Disney Channel bumpers since 2002. The answer was…shockingly hard to come by.
You can see Disney Channel’s Theme: A History Mystery below.
While other network-ID jingles (like the NBC chime and Nickelodeon’s jingle, both of which are cited in the movie) have fairly well-documented histories, in the case of the Disney Channel’s, there was no way to just jump on the internet and look up who developed the trademark sound, until Perjurer made it his mission.
The composer in question, Alexander Lasarenko, passed away in 2020, so this moment of clarity will now become part of his legacy — something Perjurer analyzes in the last 10 or so minutes of the documentary. While he has some commercially-released music (available on Spotify), Lasarenko’s most-heard music is mostly content that he, with Elias Arts and Tonal, created for brand awareness campaigns. It’s the kind of music that most people don’t stop and think very much about. Still, they are heard — and have emotional weight and resonance — with millions of people over the course of many years.
“A four-note mnemonic that, in its beautiful, minimal simplicity, completely encaptures an entire world of feeling and associations for millions of people across generations around the world — I think that’s a pretty outstanding legacy,” said David Norland, who wrote music for the Disney Channel from 2007 until 2014, in the documentary.
Defunctland is a YouTube channel with over 1.4 million subscribers, and it’s fair to say that most, if not all, of those people had never heard of Lasarenko before this documentary. It’s interesting to consider the way that this odd little rabbit hole will expose his music, or at least his name and reputation, to a much broader audience than ever before.
