TV & Movies
Keke Palmer Just Shared Clips Of An Unaired Disney Pilot With Vanessa Hudgens
Justice for Keke and Jamal.
Keke Palmer rose to stardom with her classic Nickelodeon show True Jackson, VP, but she was almost a Disney Channel star first, like many of her eventual peers. Keke Palmer revealed that she taped a Disney pilot with Vanessa Hudgens when she was only 10 years old. Taking to her Instagram on Tuesday, Aug. 11, the actor shared three short clips from the pilot of Keke & Jamal, which was not picked up by Disney Channel and has still not aired in its entirety.
The show, had a full season been ordered, would have focused on Keke, a 10-year-old girl with a "tight-knit family" big dreams of becoming an entertainer, a plot that Palmer says was loosely based on her own life. The clips were sent to her by co-star Andre Jamal Kinney, who played her brother Jamal in the pilot, which featured Hudgens as a classmate of theirs, and based on her attitude in the third clip, she may have had to get her mean girl claws out.
In the caption of her post, Palmer shared how the Disney pilot was made. "When I first moved to California I was introduced to Ralph Farquhar (one of the creators of The Proud Family, Moesha, The Parker’s etc)," she explained. "He took a chance on me and he landed me this pilot with Disney Channel that didn’t get picked up called Keke & Jamal lol... I was ten years old and I can remember it like it was yesterday."
The new clips don't reveal much about the episode's plot, other than a song that Keke was practicing for a Wizard of Oz audition — and Jamal making fun of it. But if it feels familiar to any big Disney Channel fans, that might be because the episode was filmed on the That's So Raven's living room set, which was simply redecorated for the pilot, as Palmer confirmed. "That was when I first met Raven Symone," she revealed. "True dream come true for me and like a fairytale." (Eagle-eyed fans might also recognized Patricia Belcher in the third clip, who went on to play Mrs. Dabney on Good Luck Charlie.)
She concluded her post with an encouraging note for fans who had no clue this was in the Disney archives (a.k.a. all of us). "I hope it makes you laugh like it has made me hahaha whew," she wrote. It definitely will, but you know what would make us laugh even more? The full pilot. Justice for Keke and Jamal.
