They need to stop remaking Escape to Witch Mountain. The first one was boring and not very good (and man did I feel stupid for tuning in after thinking it looked exciting), it sure as hell didn't deserve two sequels
and two remakes.
When I was young I always looked forward to Disney's Halloween Treat/A Disney Halloween. The only real difference between the two is A Disney Halloween included a villain showcase hosted by the Wicked Queen's magic mirror that was made, oddly, to promote the first Rescuers movie. The quality isn't good but it's been uploaded to YouTube (the upload title is wrong).
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vdN3nAAfg3Q
There's also a similar Christmas themed special, but I can't recall the name of it, and unlike the above there wasn't really a lot of clips/shorts relevant to Christmas in it. I'll talk about it more closer to Christmas.
No, Disney Channel of the late 90's was
much different from the early years of the channel (which even now I'm still surprised my parents splurged to get that particular channel for me, although they refused to do the same with Toon Disney when it launched after the regular Disney Channel became included with standard cable). Until around the mid 90's they had entire blocks based around classic cartoons and various movies (including non-Disney ones) as well as some TV shows as well. Commercial free, even! It was a bit of a mixed bag mind you (I tuned into Escape to Witch Mountain on Triple Feature Friday because the commercials for it looked exciting, for example), but I saw plenty of good stuff to make up for the bad.
It wasn't toddler and preteen dominated back then either, that didn't really happen until the mid 90's when they decided to be more like Nick. I mean, there were toddler shows, but they occupied the late morning-early afternoon hours (basically the hours of morning and afternoon kindergarten), not all morning and half the afternoon. I don't recall there being preteen shows then either.
Another thing classic Disney Channel did was show clips of random movies (usually if not always musical numbers) inbetween shows as well as straight up music videos. There are some from the early days I'm pretty sure are lost (I've only ever found the one for the spaghetti song on YouTube), but they also had ones for The Lion King and others for sure, but unsurprisingly I only remember the Lion King ones. My personal favorite was the one for Can You Feel the Love Tonight.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=KjgWWjkNbhU(I can't believe this has an official upload!)