Cheap Thrills

According to some conservative critiques of popular culture, the astounding success of High School Musical and High School Musical 2 shouldn’t have been possible. For decades, conservatives have decried the corrupting effect of popular culture–a sexualized, hyperviolent, commercialized pop culture that dictates the clothing habits, speaking patterns, and behavior of impressionable young Americans who do not have the ability to resist its siren song. The central contention of those who make this argument is that these trends in popular culture mirror eating patterns: Just as the combination of sugar and carbs and transfats has created addictively tasty potions that are causing childhood obesity levels to spike, the sex-and-violence mash-up has an addictive allure that quashes all attempts to provide American youth with more acceptable, or at least more anodyne, entertainment.

So how, exactly, did the Disney Channel’s two little musicals aimed at prepubescent kids emerge squeaky-clean and jam-packed with wholesome goodness to capture the imaginations of kids from California to Kathmandu? The makers and distributors of popular culture just haven’t been trying hard enough to find something of appeal to these kids. Or trying at all.

Certainly Disney didn’t try very hard when it came to High School Musical. When the Disney Channel debuted the original movie in January 2006, it was merely one in a series of monthly movies made for the channel. Others in the series include a thing about a boy who discovers he’s part fish, a tale about a boy’s basketball team at a Jewish day school and its involvement with a homeless man, and the saga of a girl who wants to play hockey on a boy’s team. It’s clear from how amateurish these pictures are that no one at the channel or anywhere else gave much creative thought or attention to them. HSM was just another throwaway product, if a more elaborate one–as evidenced by the fact that Disney hired a man named Kenny Ortega to direct it. Disney would never have engaged Ortega to direct a project it considered significant, since it had made the disastrous mistake of giving Ortega the responsibility of helming two colossally bad musicals in the 1990s (Newsies and Hocus Pocus) that both tanked at the box office.

As it happens, I watched High School Musical on the evening of its premiere, since as a parent of a very young child I had seen a few preview commercials for it, thought it had an engaging premise, and wondered whether it might be an unexpected sleeper. After an hour or so, I shut off the TV. High School Musical is so cheaply made that its set designer barely even bothered to throw a little tinsel and lights around in its opening scene, supposedly set at a resort on New Year’s Eve. The whole movie is slapdash in this way, with an underpopulated high school setting and scenes so hurried and false that one can almost hear Ortega shouting offscreen, “Come on, people, we have to get this whole thing shot in 24 days.”

The wretched numbers–written by no fewer than 12 people–evoke not Broadway show tunes but latter-day pop music. But they are so generic and feeble they make songs like Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8ter Boi” and Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” sound like Vivaldi by comparison. The routine dancing, choreographed by the egregious Ortega, would not pass muster in summer stock in Alaska. The script was written by Peter Barsocchini, whose prior claim to fame was that he helped produce the late Merv Griffin’s talk show. Evidently, Barsocchini learned everything he knew about dialogue from Griffin’s infamously inane exchanges with celebrity guests.

I approached HSM with goodwill and exited with grave disappointment. And yet I was one of the few people in America to turn the television off that night. High School Musical was a sensation from the moment it aired. An estimated 8 million people watched it all the way through on the evening of its debut, making it not only the highest-rated program ever to air on the Disney Channel but one of the most highly-rated programs in the history of cable television. Every time the Disney Channel has aired a repeat of the movie in the 19 months since, its ratings have soared. Disney says High School Musical has been viewed 70 million times in the United States since its first broadcast. The soundtrack album was the best-selling CD of 2006. More than 5 million DVDs have been sold. Disney has earned in excess of $70 million from a movie that it has aired, repeatedly, for free.

As the weeks ticked down toward the airing of the sequel, High School Musical 2, I began to feel optimistic again. After all, the star of both movies, 19-year-old Zac Efron, does a splendid job playing a teen heartthrob in the big-screen version of the Broadway musical Hairspray. But once again, I could only last an hour. HSM 2 is, if anything, even worse than its predecessor. Set during summer vacation, the sequel tells the bland story of the jock boy’s temptation away from his hard-working girlfriend toward the rich country-club owner’s daughter–with the action culminating in a country-club amateur talent show.

Disney spent a few more dollars on the new one than on the last, and so the cinematography came out a little brighter and the settings better dressed. But everything else is as it was: horrible songs, lamentable choreography, and dreadful overacting from all concerned. But when the sequel debuted in the middle of August, it became the highest-rated program ever to air on cable television.

It’s not enough to explain away my critical reaction to the two HSMs by saying they were not intended for adult viewing. That’s certainly true; but most of my daughter’s picture books aren’t intended for me, either, and I am able to see what’s cute about them. No, the success of the High School Musicals is a mark not of their quality but of how starved little kids are for entertainments that don’t require them to assume a false affect of sophistication–a sophistication they do not possess, and whose assumption is both tiring and confusing to them.

High School Musical is a movie for little kids about teenagers. It’s a depiction of the high school years as a young child would wish them to be: Snazzy and colorful, playful and unthreatening. The cute couple never even exchanges a kiss in the first one, and there’s a running gag in the second one about how they keep getting interrupted in their efforts to smooch. The atmosphere is so desexualized that we are supposed to accept the idea that a brother and sister can play the leads in school musicals together–a virtual impossibility, as the leads in musicals are always romantically entwined.

This is an easy formula to duplicate. The fact that no one has duplicated it since January 2006, except for the Disney Channel in making High School Musical 2, is indicative of a massive blind spot in Hollywood. One always hears that Hollywood makes its choices based not on ideology or a set of fashionable ideas but on what will sell. Now we know that appealing to the presexual fantasies of prepubescent children about the easy and uncomplicated nature of life after puberty is the path to a guaranteed blockbuster. And nobody in Hollywood is making bank on it because, I think, they just can’t imagine it’s actually true.

John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.