Raven-Symoné‘s body was allegedly made thinner with CGI on ‘That’s So Raven.”
The former Disney Channel star rose to fame as Raven Baxter in the early 2000s sitcom, having first landed the role at 15. Raven-Symoné stayed on the show for four years until its end in 2007.
When her weight fluctuated in her later teenage years, co-producer and writer Dava Savel has claimed show bosses “handled it in really bad ways.”
“Disney Channel was going crazy about it. And they handled it in really bad ways. But it was never to her face,” Sevel said in new book, Disney High: The Untold Story of the Rise and Fall of Disney Channel’s Tween Empire.
Sources in the book allege that one incident occurred in the Season Two episode of “That’s So Raven,” in which another model was picked for a runway show over Raven because of her slimmer frame.
The episode saw the character Raven try a range of diets before realizing she is perfect just as she is, and then she sends a message of body positivity when she walks the runway at the end.
However, the book’s author, Ashley Spencer, writes that “multiple people involved in the episode” claimed a Disney Channel executive told the visual effects team to make Raven-Symoné thinner in the closing scenes.
“It was shameful. I don’t know how they could look at themselves and do that. The very thing that she wanted to do a story about was literally done to her. It’s still a shocking thing to me that they were that tone-deaf,” producer Michael Feldman said.
Adam Bonnett, Disney Channel’s former head of original programming, insisted while it wasn’t something he “would have asked for,” he can recall the same technique being used later in the sitcom’s run.
“There was some stuff done to make Raven[‘s attire] look more flattering in certain scenes,” he added, remembering a school dance episode.
