Perhaps it was my daughters singing along with Hannah Montana—“Get up, get loud, we’re pumping up the party now!”—eight times in a row that morning. Or maybe it was the 16 times I overheard High School Musical and High School Musical 2 playing on the television in the living room, or the several hundred dollars my wife and I spend on Disney tween products—aimed at nine- to 14-year-old girls—every year. Or the fact that a magazine (thankfully, not this one) asked me to profile a Disney tween star and then, almost before I could ask “Who?,” told me that another publication had beaten them to it. Finally, after my eight-year-old daughter pointed to a picture of Hillary Clinton and said she was supporting her for president “because she’s named Hillary, like Hilary Duff,” I decided I had to know: Who is doing this to me?

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And indeed, that was proving true. Disney’s vaunted animation businesses were failing with tweens, and its young-adult franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean were slicing over the pony­tailed heads of that huge audience. Not anymore. As the peppy lyrics coming from my daughters’ bedroom can attest, the synergy is back, and it’s smacking the sweet spot that Disney had been missing. That squeak you hear is Mickey getting squashed under the wheels of the Disney Channel marketing machine as it pushes Hannah Montana, the Jonas Brothers, High School Musical, and a host of other tween products into our living rooms, if not down our throats.

Credit for this astounding turnaround goes to Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group since 2004, who joined the company after a stint as chairwoman and C.E.O. of FX Networks. “We found there was this huge demo that was too old for Nickelodeon and too young for MTV. We realized this was an opportunity for Disney to establish itself in the lives of these kids.”

Sweeney has done more than that. She has made the Disney Channel the major profit driver in the company. Ten years ago, it was a stagnating pay-TV service that programmed for the kindergarten crowd in the morning and adults at night. Nickelodeon was closing in. But in 2007, Disney’s cable networks, including ESPN and the Disney Channel (a tween powerhouse), were the fastest-growing division in the House of Mouse, boosting the company’s ­media-division revenue 12 percent over the previous year, to more than $9 billion, and increasing income during the same period by an astonishing 19 percent, to $3.6 billion. (And those numbers don’t include the huge ancillary revenues that the franchises generate in the $2.3 billion consumer-products division.) The Disney Channel has been adding a million viewers a month—every month—for the past five years.