The new attraction at Hollywood Studios gives park visitors a unique opportunity to experience the different stages of the American Idol journey, from auditioning for casting directors and producers, to getting help from hair, makeup and voice coaches, to performing live in front of three judges and massive audience with the power to take them to the top.

“There are a couple of layers to it,” Director of Creative Development Reed Jones told FOXNews.com. “Some of our guests will get the opportunity to be on stage and perform for thousands of guests a day, and then there’s the point of view of the audience who gets to watch and vote for their favorite singer.”

Those audience members vote by hitting a number on a keypad located on the right arm of every seat in the theater.

“We have our preliminary shows throughout the day and then at the end of the day we take everyone through the day who got the most votes in there preliminary shows,” Jones explained. “All seven of those people compete in our final show, and then the person who wins the finale show wins a dream ticket and gets to go the Idol auditions of the idol show and cut to the front of the line.”

The prize is no dud. That ability to head straight to the judges and skip the preliminary rounds of the hit show’s audition process significantly increases a competitor’s chances at making it through to Hollywood.

“Something like this is awesome,” American Idol Season 4 winner Carrie Underwood said. “They get to come and live their own Idol experience and feel what it’s like, and hopefully you get a fast track to the actual real deal Idol auditions.”

And Underwood suggested the benefits go beyond just skipping a few rounds. “They may even have a leg up, because they’ve kind of been on the stage and stuff before,” she said.

But what might be even more impressive than the opportunity the attraction gives Idol wannabes is just how much the American Idol Experience theater resembles the real thing.

“It’s amazing how real the set looks on the inside we were all blown away,” Season 2 winner Ruben Studdard told FOXNews.com.

Season 7 winner David Cook said it all brought back some interesting memories:

“It’s eerie, you know I’ll walk on stage and feel completely transplanted,” Cook said. “I keep waiting on Simon to tell me it’s a karaoke performance … it’s about as close to Idol as your going to get without actually being on Idol.”

And Season 1 Runner-Up Justin Guarini thought the attraction showed just how much the show has grown … in more ways than one.

“It brought back a lot of memories — mostly of the fact that my stage looked nothing like that. It was about the size of a postage stamp compared to the stage they have nowadays,” Guarini joked.

As for the judges panel, they too bare a striking resemblance to the shows veterans Randy Jackson, Paula Abdul and Simon Cowell.

“We have the hip industry insider and nurturing soul, and then we have the one that’s a little more frank,” Jones said.

Staying true to that nurturing persona, Abdul had nothing but rave reviews for the American Idol Experience.

“It’s an exciting collaboration,” she said on the red carpet. “It shows you how big American Idol is and it’s stood the test of time.”

Was it fixed? Did DreamWorks take over the membership? How could this happen?

After all, "Wall-E" has trounced "Panda" everywhere else this awards season, even winning best picture votes from Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago film critics groups and taking best animated film at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice, PGA and BAFTA, among many others. It has six Academy Award nominations, named in more categories than any animated film in Oscar history. "Panda" has only one, where it competes for best animated film against "Wall-E" and "Bolt."

True, "Panda" won wide critical acclaim, was a huge international hit and has out grossed "Wall-E" as well, but both were major hits.

Looking at Annie history it seems unlikely DreamWorks could have stacked the deck. The only time the studio had previously won the Annie was in 2001 for "Shrek" (which also went on to win the first animated category Oscar). Last year, Disney/Pixar's "Ratatouille" was the big winner.

No, it simply appears the animators who vote in the Annies simply liked the butt-kicking panda over the lovestruck robot. But it's quite likely "Wall-E" will have its day at the Oscars despite the enviable track record of Annies predicting Oscars. In fact, since 2001, when the academy created a separate category for animation there has been only one year when winners of the two orgs did not match. "Happy Feet" took the 2006 Oscar over Annie winner "Cars."

"Wall-E's" very difference and boldness may be why traditional animators shy away. It's unique and that's always a hard sell to the establishment. Some have even called it "the 'Citizen Kane' of 'toons." Of course "Citizen Kane" was virtually ignored at the Oscars in 1941, winning only screenplay. Writers get it sometimes when no one else does.

Because of its unusual pedigree, "Wall-E" now has the opportunity to make Oscar history and be the first animated feature to win BIG outside the best animated film and music categories (plus one win for "The Incredibles" in 2004 for Sound Editing when there were only three nominees in the category and two were animated). Sure, three of its six nods come for the usual areas (music score, song, animated film)), but it has a real shot in the other three categories in which it's competing:  sound editing, sound mixing and, particularly, best original screenplay. It has a decent chance to rack up at least four wins if the Oscar gods are on its side but Original Screenplay is the nomination co-writer/director Andrew Stanton told me he is happiest about.

"I am prouder to be in writing more than anything else. At Pixar we say 'story, story, story.' It's the root of everything," he says. "It's the biggest pat on the back I can think of. We put ourselves fully into every aspect but it's all in service of the story."

It could be a tough sell to the overall academy (every branch votes on the final screenplay award) as a lot of members just don't understand how a virtually silent movie, in which the main characters speak their own language, could possibly have been "written."  But Stanton says it's no different than the process any other writer would go through.

"How you tell a story is just as important as what the story is. In my mind these characters were gonna speak. They just weren't gonna speak in a language you and I knew. When they spoke and why they spoke was just as important as if you could understand their language," he says.

Key to all this was the contribution by the sound team led by Ben Burtt whom Stanton calls his most important cast member.

"I needed someone who could make language out of sound and convey intention and emotion through  sound," he says. The sound branch must agree since it has awarded Burtt and company two nominations , and it certainly is the most unique work in a category where the winner usually is the loudest movie (again, all branches get to vote for the final winner here, and they often don't get subtlety).

This is the fifth time an animated film has been nominated in the original screenplay category, and they all belong to Pixar ("Shrek" had a nomination in the Adapted category in 2001). Stanton has been named for original screenplay three times, starting with the breakthrough first nomination in 1995's "Toy Story," in which he was part of a team of writers. They lost to "The Usual Suspects." He was also named for "Finding Nemo" in 2004  but the award went to "Lost in Translation," which also had the advantage of being a best picture nominee, an honor none of the Pixar flicks have enjoyed. Disney's 1991 musical, "Beauty and the Beast," is the only film to defeat the odds and gain a mention in Oscar's golden circle. Since its own category was established it would seem especially hard for any animated film to break out of the 'toon ghetto, although many thought "Ratatouille" would last year. Disney/Pixar mounted a campaign for "Wall-E" this year, but it didn't happen.

This year Stanton's main competition in original screenplay is "Milk," which has the advantage of being the only best picture nominee in the category. That can be a MAJOR plus as it often indicates overall academy support,  but surprisingly not as much as you'd think. Since 1991, seven films NOT nominated for best picture ("Thelma And Louise," "The Usual Suspects," "Sling Blade," "Gods and Monsters," "Almost Famous," "Talk To Her," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") have prevailed over a screenplay from a best picture nominee.

If writing Oscars were awarded for popularity, "Wall-E" would have it in the bag. "Wall-E's" domestic gross alone is more than six times the COMBINED take of its fellow nominees in the category --  "Happy-Go-Lucky," "Frozen River," "In Bruges" and "Milk" have made a collective $40 million. Interestingly, "Milk," which won the Writers Guild of America original screenplay award last weekend, is facing all-new competition at the Oscars as none of the above films, including "Wall-E," were even nominated for a WGA award, a highly unusual and perhaps unprecedented occurrence. The consensus is it's really a two-horse race with the edge given to "Milk."

Whether "Wall-E" can defy the odds and pull this off is a big "if" but clearly the academy at large has fallen in love with this robot. For the first nine months of the year it was virtually the only film you heard mentioned when Oscar buzz came up among members  (at least those I talked to). The danger is Oscar voters may think  giving it best animated film is reward enough. The movie's ardent supporters would argue otherwise. They say "Wall-E" has a message that is just as important as any of the loftier nominees.

Like "Milk" and its uncanny timeliness in regard to Proposition 8, "Wall-E" is being celebrated for its social consciousness and environmental concerns, but Stanton is blatantly honest in his original intention.

"I am very honored it is being associated with issues of the planet, but I would be lying if I said that was my agenda. It wasn't. It's not about global warming.  I wanted to show the last robot on earth, and I  wanted to show the loneliness so I could have the most potent love story imaginable," he says. "Anything I chose environment-wise was a selfish choice in order to make the love story work."

So can this lovestruck "Hello Dolly"-loving tin 'toon actually turn the tide and make Oscar history by prevailing in some categories, primarily in Writing, where animated films are strangers to the winners circle? Certainly it would be a popular win with the audience, but the academy may be just too set in its ways to go for the unexpected.

For Andrew Stanton, what counts is the experience of getting to make this very different concept come to life; everything else is gravy.

But the staff of Walt Disney Animation Studios is looking to the future, not the past, as Rotten Tomatoes is invited to tour the studios. In April 2006, Pixar's Ed Catmull and John Lasseter were respectively appointed President and Chief Creative Officer of the studios with a clear goal front of mind: to return the studios to their place as a factory of feature film classics.

Bolt is their first release in charge of the studios, and its Certified Fresh Tomatometer suggests they're well on their way to achieving that goal. Join us as we find out how the Pixar effect is rubbing off inside Walt Disney Animation Studios.

The building's unusual architecture continues into the bright lobby, where artwork from Bolt dominates the walls, and marketing materials colour the reception area. So far so Pixar, at least in the studio's approach to promoting their current release with striking visuals. A collage at the back of the lobby, including a frame on a particularly recognisable white glove, reminds you you're at Disney, though, and around the corner the WDAS screening room - shockingly bereft of 3D projection - is decorated with the familiar mouse ears logo.

As you ascend into the production areas you start to get a sense of how important it is that all this art is on display. Internally, the building is pretty drab, like any other office building. Storyboards and concept sketches from productions in progress - predominantly from Bolt but plenty from The Princess and the Frog and Rapunzel - make the artists feel at home and warm the environment. But for us the greatest sight is original pencils and cels from classics of Disney past, as far back as Snow White, which turn the entire building into an art gallery.

The Pixar building has been constructed so that the lobby atrium contains all lunch facilities and encourages staff from all departments to mix and socialise at lunch and break times in a free-flowing creative environment. It's a philosophy Lasseter has tried to recreate with the Caffeine Patch at WDAS - centrally located, there's comfortable sofas dotted around, art from all working productions and, of course, free-flowing coffee. The "Pods" - self-contained offices decorated by productions to house their artists - seed straight to this area.

In most corporate buildings you'd imagine the boss's office would be pretty hard to find. Not so John Lasseter's office at WDAS - his glass cube is right off the Caffeine patch, and full of art from his favourite Disney animations and Pixar projects. He and Catmull split their time between WDAS in Burbank and Pixar further north in San Francisco, and by all accounts seem pretty accessible to their staff - more than once we caught Lasseter milling in the Caffeine Patch chatting to animators. And giant hamsters.

Disney to Unfurl 'Bedtime Stories' as Blu-ray/DVD Combo

High-Def Digest - Disney has announced early details for 'Bedtime Stories,' which is coming to high-def this April as a Blu-ray/DVD combo edition with Digital Copy.

Showing a softer, more family-friendly side of Adam Sandler (who produces as well as stars), the live action-animation hybrid will arrive on Blu-ray April 5 (day-and-date with the standard DVD).

Full specs have yet to be revealed, but Disney has confirmed so far that the Blu-ray will be a three-disc set that includes a BD-50 dual-layer disc with the main feature, plus two additional platters with standard DVD and Digital Copy versions.

We'll keep you posted as final specs and bonus features are confirmed.

The site, DisneyXD.com, launches on the same day as Disney's new Disney XD channel, which is focusing on the same audience. The channel and Web site concentrate on themes like adventure, sports and accomplishment. They were formed through a partnership between Disney Channels Worldwide, Disney Online and ABC Cable Networks Group's digital media team.

The Web site is supported by online advertising.

'Up' with Pixar: 'WALL-E' makers offer sneak peek

AP - With such smash hits as "WALL-E," "Ratatouille" and "The Incredibles" behind them, the master storytellers at Pixar Animation figured they had nowhere to go but "Up."

That's the simple, two-letter title of the 10th cartoon creation from Pixar. The makers of "Up" offered a sneak peek of the comedy adventure to Hollywood reporters who were so enchanted they groaned in disappointment when the preview ended halfway through the film.

"Up," with Edward Asner providing the voice of a 78-year-old curmudgeon flying to South America in a house rigged with 10,000 helium balloons, promises to continue the impeccable track record of Pixar, whose releases all have been critical and commercial triumphs.

"People always ask, `When are you going to release a dud?'" "Up" director Pete Docter said in an interview after showing the first 46 minutes of the movie Tuesday night at Pixar's parent studio, the Walt Disney Co. "Every film at one point is a complete disaster, but we allow ourselves time to fix it."

The Pixar gang has brought a sense of human emotion to fantastical settings and characters with tales of playthings (the "Toy Story" movies), vehicles ("Cars"), insects ("A Bug's Life"), beasties ("Monsters, Inc.") and underwater creatures ("Finding Nemo").

With "Up," Pixar brings the fantastical to a story set in the human world. The movie opens with a heartbreaking montage laying out the joyous little lives of balloon peddler Carl Fredricksen (Asner) and the childhood sweetheart with whom he passed his decades.

Facing exile to a retirement home, widower Carl launches his house on a journey to Paradise Falls, a mythical South American land where he and his wife always dreamed of going.

Carl picks up unwanted companions along the way: a zealous 9-year-old Wilderness Scout who accidentally stows away on his porch; a giant bird with grand plumage and a sweet tooth; and a canine who's part of a gang of dogs outfitted with devices that hilariously translate their thoughts into English.

Asner offered the ideal mix of warmth and crankiness, Docter said.

"We needed a grouch, but underneath, someone you really felt for and really cared about," Docter said of Asner, best-known as a lovable grump on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "Lou Grant."

Due in theaters May 29, "Up" is the first Pixar film that will be released both in two-dimensional and three-dimensional versions. Computer-animated films are created in 3-D virtual worlds to begin with, so Pixar and distributor Disney are taking advantage of new projection systems that allow theaters to show movies in digital 3-D format.

While Docter and his collaborators are in the final rush to finish "Up," he also is dealing with a pleasant distraction resulting from Pixar's last movie, the sci-fi romance "WALL-E."

That film is the front-runner for the feature-length animation category at the Feb. 22 Academy Awards, and Docter also shares an original-screenplay nomination for co-writing the story for "WALL-E."

He has had to juggle his time between working on "Up" and attending such functions as last week's Oscar nominees luncheon.

Woman wants Miley Cyrus to pay $4,000 to every Asian in L.A.

Orlando Sentinel - Remember that photo on TMZ of Miley Cyrus apparently doing the Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees, Look at These?

In any case, that photo has caused one Los Angeles woman to file a class-action suit against the Hannah Montana star on behalf of the city's entire Asian Pacific Islander population.

The woman, Lucie J. Kim, says in her lawsuit that she and her coplaintiffs, roughly 1 million in the city of Angels, are each entitled to $4,000 in damages.

Now Miley has said it was just a funny face, and she's apologized.

"I really wanted to stress how sorry I am if the photo of me with my friends offended anyone," she wrote Monday on her blog.

Not enough, according to Kim's suit.

Disney’s Doorway to Dreams will showcase the accommodations at Disney Vacation Club resort hotels, which are spacious and offer numerous home-like amenities. These vacation villas provide families with a place to relax and spend quality time together either at Disney destinations worldwide or at more than 500 other popular vacation locations around the world. This convenient mall location will give them a glimpse of the choices they have, from a magical stay at the Walt Disney World Resort or a relaxing cruise aboard a Disney Cruise Line ship to a family-friendly, interactive Adventures by Disney trip or an exotic jaunt to South America.

“Our first Disney’s Doorway to Dreams location has been very popular and a great way for Chicago-area residents and visitors to learn more about the family vacation experiences available through Disney Vacation Club,” said Disney Vacation Club President Jim Lewis. “Now, we are delighted to bring Disney’s Doorway to Dreams to New York, which is one the top markets for our rapidly growing membership base, so that more people can discover all that Disney Vacation Club has to offer.”

To help families envision just what those vacations will entail, Disney’s Doorway to Dreams, located at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, NY, will feature a full-scale, two-bedroom model of the vacation home accommodations Disney Vacation Club members and their families can expect to find at Disney Vacation Club resort hotels.

 “Disney has always been a unique and innovative leader in the timeshare industry,” said Howard C. Nusbaum, chief executive officer of the American Resort Development Association (ARDA). “Now, Disney’s Doorway to Dreams allows New York-area families the chance to experience how a timeshare ownership can help ensure years and years of memorable family vacations.”                                                         

Designed to create a fun and immersive experience, Disney’s Doorway to Dreams is planned to go beyond featuring model accommodations to offer an interactive family vacation discovery zone, comfortable discussion areas and a supervised children’s play area within its approximately 6,900 square feet of retail space.

Celebrating more than 50 years of offering more choices, Roosevelt Field is located at the intersection of Old Country Road and the Meadowbrook Parkway in Garden City and is managed by Simon Property Group, Inc., headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.  The mall offers unparalleled customer service with amenities including Simon Giftcards, good everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted and Simon American Express Giftcards, which can be used everywhere American Express cards are welcomed; Ticketmaster at Simon Guest Services, valet parking; complimentary wheelchairs; strollers and a post office.  It is anchored by Nordstrom, Macy’s, JC Penney, Bloomingdale’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods and has more than 270 specialty stores.  For more information, please go to www.simon.com.

Walt Disney Studios said Monday it will handle distribution and marketing for six live action DreamWorks films a year under its Touchstone Pictures brand beginning in 2010. The company did not disclose any financial details of the agreement.

With backing from Reliance Big Entertainment of India, DreamWorks announced in September that it would leave Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Pictures. But the rapidly deteriorating credit markets have complicated the move.

Reliance said it would match loans raised made by JPMorgan Chase & Co. totaling $550 million to finance new movies over the next 7 years. But JPMorgan's fundraising has been delayed and the bank now plans to raise $325 million by the end of next month.

The network announced the field of 13 celebrity competitors Sunday. "Dancing with the Stars" returns for its eighth season March 9 with a two-hour episode.

ABC says pop star Jewel will compete for "bragging rights" in the dance contest against Murray, her champion bull-rider spouse.

The rest of the field: singers Belinda Carlisle, Chuck Wicks and Lil' Kim; actors Denise Richards, David Alan Grier and Gilles Marini; Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson; Steve-O of MTV's "Wildboyz" and TV host Nancy O'Dell.

It didn't come to terms with preferred partner Universal Studios, and the distribution deal expected to be announced today with Disney should end a period of limbo for the vaunted mini-studio that Steven Spielberg and pals set up 15 years ago. But for Disney, this is an atypical deal that underscores a lot of fundamental changes at the House of Mouse of late.

First off, though, let's agree that the biggest reason for Disney or anyone else to be in business with DreamWorks is to secure a relationship with Spielberg - duh, he's the most successful director in history and no slouch as a producer.

That, more than anything else, answers why Disney would want to do a deal like this under which it takes an expected 8% fee for distributing DreamWorks releases but also is expected to provide some debt financing to supplement the company's new Bollywood backers.

But as I discovered in my recent story on the renaissance of Disney and its chief executive Bob Iger, the way the company thinks about its film business has changed significantly. Disney was among the first of the studios to significantly reduce the number of films it releases this year.

But in doing so, Iger and Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook also decided to refocus the company around the Disney brand - ergo, family entertainment - while significantly cutting the output and investment in films under the company's Touchstone and Miramax labels.

The mantra at Disney these days is to create cross-company franchises - everything from Pixar's "Toy Story" and "Cars" to Disney Channel hits "Hannah Montana" and "High School Musical" - that can spawn offshoots in other businesses and around the world.

"I don't care if a Touchstone movie does $100 million on $30 million of cost," Iger told me three months ago. "Its success doesn't breed any other success in the company."

That's a bit of a harsh quote - I imagine Iger does just care a little - but the context was the poor reception for recent Touchstone releases like the Spike Lee-directed "Miracle at St. Ana" and "Swing Vote," starring Kevin Costner.

Partly because of misses, partly because of the timing of releases and largely because of a decline in DVD sales in the past quarter, Disney's studio segment reported revenue down 26% and operating income off 64%, to $187 million, in the quarter ended December 27, 2008. More worryingly, Sanford Bernstein estimated (before reports of the DreamWorks alliance surfaced last week) that it expects operating income at the studio division to decline to $619 million in 2012 from nearly $1.1 billion last year .

Out of Disney's four main reporting segments - cable and TV networks, theme parks, consumer products and the studio - the latter is the only one expected to decline in both revenue and profitability terms over that period. In an interview with me last fall, Disney Studios' Cook said that getting smaller or winning fewer awards - Disney has never won a "best picture" Oscar, though of course Miramax has - did not trouble him.

Declining margins, though, are problematic - and if DreamWorks pans out, it could help both in that regard and, in theory at least, in new material that can be pumped through Disney's vast consumer products and cross-media machinery. (The DreamWorks news also surfaced speculation about Disney looking to sell Miramax, but a Disney insider says now is not a great time to be selling anything.)

More broadly, like all the media conglomerates, Disney (DIS, Fortune 500) could use all the help it can get in exciting investors about its growth prospects in these gloomy times. Its stock price had a nice run and until recently held up much better than other media conglomerates'. But it has dropped nearly 40% over the past six months, hitting levels last seen in 2003.

Even Disney's long-held position as the world's largest media conglomerate by market value has come into jeopardy: It stood at $36 billion on Friday, while Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500) was nearly $35 billion. (In any event Time Warner's value will shrink accordingly in a few weeks once it splits off its Time Warner Cable (TWC) unit into a separate public company.)

DreamWorks (DWA) is not exactly what it once was either: Conceived as a full-scale studio, it was most recently aligned with Paramount and is now essentially a shingle for Spielberg and DreamWorks CEO Stacy Snyder to own a big piece of their own projects, which includes the upcoming "Transformers" sequel and a Spielberg production of the Belgian cartoon "Tintin." (A lesser rationale for the deal, two insiders said, is a desire by Spielberg to produce more family fare than he has in recent years.)

There's plenty of irony in this pairing, given that former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg was one of DreamWorks' co-founders, along with David Geffen, who is no longer actively involved. Katzenberg, of course, now heads up spun-out DreamWorks Animation, which in many ways is Pixar's chief rival. Indeed, Pixar is the only studio with which Disney recently had a similar distribution deal with - and it went so well that Disney ended up acquiring the company three years ago.

Duff, who starred in the highly-rated show “Lizzie McGuire,” was once the poster girl for adolescent purity and goodness. Her Disney-backed persona was so thoroughly synonymous with innocence that Miley Cyrus, Disney’s contemporary version of Duff, felt obliged to thank Duff in 2007 for “making it cool to be a good girl.” 

One year after making that statement, Miley Cyrus (“Hannah Montana”) begins a whirlwind series of very serious and very stupid PR mistakes that make her assertion that she is a “good girl” hypocritical, if not straight-up ridiculous.

If, for some unknown reason, one is not familiar with 2008 in the context of Miley Cyrus, Cyrus’s downfall began with her pulling her shirt down to expose her bra and then taking a picture of herself. She was fifteen. Later that year, she was involved in a Vanity Fair photo shoot in which she was wearing a bed sheet and nothing else, exposing only her back. This picture inspired thousands of angry letters to Disney and an apology from Cyrus to her fans. The year finished for Cyrus with an internet hacker leaking her personal photographs, including such gems as Cyrus in the shower wearing only a white T-shirt, as well as a seemingly endless series of her lifting up her shirt and taking pictures of her belly. 

The Disney Corporation has had a long and sordid history of young female stars becoming train wrecks, starting with Britney Spears and ending with the alleged self-mutilation of new star Demi Lovato. Therefore, a fairly reasonable conclusion is that Disney is, rather than a wholesome family channel, merely a well-connected, lollipop-fueled whore house. Some claim that Disney pimps out its young stars and sexualizes and then sexually represses its young properties, most notably the female ones. However, a case could be made that Disney simply has a chronic case of bad luck. 

Disney could never have predicted that Lindsay Lohan would start snorting coke, start skanking it up and then start dating Samantha Ronson. The blame for Lindsay Lohan falls squarely on her shoulders. Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus similarly self-destructed. Yet there remains this lingering feeling that the Disney Channel is somehow orchestrating these downfalls. The sheer number of young girls falling into compromising situations yields a natural suspicion of the corporation. After all, despite Miley Cyrus’s underage sexual hijinks, 2008 was also Cyrus’s most successful year-to-date. This begs the question of whether or not Disney is profiting from the sexual exploitation and expression of very young girls – which, of course, they are. 

But child stars going nuts by no means started with Disney. The Two Coreys (Feldman and Haim), Tatum O’Neal, Jodie Sweetin – all had their downfalls due to indulging in the excesses of stardom. The only difference contemporarily is that most young stars fall under the umbrella of the Disney Corporation. My guess is that being a celebrity at twelve, with all the money and responsibility that comes with that role, probably had more to do with hyper-sexualizing Miley Cyrus than a channel who caters to the tween set (and who consequently have a vested interest in keeping their stars drug- and sex-free).