I like the whole High School Musical franchise. There – I said it.

I liked High School Musical in spite of my general disdain for pop culture and particularly pop music and despite the fact that it meets my expectations of a plot-lite and predictable romp full of cliches and cardboard scenarios that you knew would all work out just like last week’s crime drama. My younger son got me into the music through the soundtrack even before we saw the movie and then when we finally saw it we all enjoyed it quite a bit. So naturally we were all excited about the inevitable sequel which came out in the middle of August. In just over a year it had gone from being the musical purview of one child to a full-on audio / visual / gaming event for the entire family.

That in itself is a major thing – while we love doing things together, we’re all individuals with our own tastes that seldom intersect fully. Certainly in this case we all had to give some ground – my wife is much more into the ‘alt-rock’ and my older son into darker themed movies and harder rock music, and my tastes run to the avant-garde, yet we could all manage to come together for this. We seemed to have the soundtrack everywhere – on CD in my wife’s car and on all four of our iPods, ready to listen whenever the mood struck. We never got the DVD, since it played frequently enough on the Disney Channel that we never felt like we missed out. Never let it be said that Disney didn’t know how to market things …

So when we got the iTunes alert at the beginning of August that the soundtrack would be available on the 14th in time to get thoroughly overplayed in time for the ‘world premiere’ of the movie on the 17th, you can probably guess that my younger son couldn’t type in the numbers for one of his iTunes gift cards fast enough to order it – and get the single ‘What Time Is It?’ at the same time. We burned the CD, copied to iPods and so on just as before. But with only three days between the CD release (yes, I still call it that even though we bought digital … gimme a break, at least I didn’t call it the ‘album release’), he was the only one who got to dig into the minutia of the songs.

Come Friday night we were ready. We had played the CD as a family, gotten everything cleaned up and assembled in the living room. This is probably archaic of me, but I really like watching things ‘in real time’ – it just seems more like an event than time-shifting and commercial-skipping. Again, this is one of those singular events that is all too rare – normally when we’re watching something it is a DVD or ‘On Demand’ or something else we can start when we want and pause and come back and whatever. For this one we all had to be ready, the dogs put out, gather our water, pillows, and so on, and get ready. I really loved how Disney ‘threw the party’ – it brought in the whole cast to a pool-side cookout and screening party and made you feel like part of the family. Sure it was completely scripted and highly produced, but it worked its’ magic completely – we would all stay for the ‘party’ and only leave on commercials. We even tuned in for the ‘pre-show’ the next night … but not for the whole movie.

So how was the movie? It was both better and worse than the original in various ways, but on the whole about the same – which is to say, much better than I expected. One thing is for sure – it was *HUGE*. The dance numbers from the very start were massive event pieces that eclipsed anything from the first movie. There was less small-scale energy, and some of the acting / lip-syncing / continuity was a bit dodgy, but it never derailed the massive outpouring of fun and joy. My older son, who resisted the pull of the first one harder than any of us, was fully given into the teen-angst feel of ‘Bet On It’, and my younger son was quit disappointed that HUMUHUMUNUKUNUKUAPUA’A wasn’t featured anywhere in the movie as he had already come up with a series of dance moves.

And that is why I think this works so well – it isn’t trying to be realistic about the life and times of teenagers. It is the reimagining of the ‘great American musical’ in the tradition of Grease and Busby Berkeley and the wonderful features with stars like Fred & Ginger and Gene Kelley and Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and so many others. These movies swept you into a reality that involved breaking into song when the mood struck in a manner parodied in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, but within the context of the films it works quite well. This is safe, high-energy, enthusiastic entertainment where you know everyone will end up okay and that you can watch with very young kids without worrying that they will come away with some new questionable expression that a 20-something writer thought would be oh-so-cool to drop into the middle of a kid’s show.

The same week as the movie was released, Disney released a High School Musical game for the Nintendo DS (microphone-based games for the Wii and PS2 are due in November). You can read my full review of this fun rhythm game in the style of Elite Beat Agents here, but you will be hard pressed to find many other opinions. In fact, there was only a single major site that covered the game, and even a month later there are only about four or five published reviews. Why is that? Why is it that a franchise that has sold 10’s of millions of CD’s and DVD’s and music downloads is getting scant attention in the gaming press. I could be cynical and say that the gaming sites consider themselves too cool for kid’s games and something as media-saturated as High School Musical is exactly what they don’t want to get pulled into. And certainly the terrible handling of kid’s games by the major sites in the past needs no introduction – heck, how would Andrew Bub have beeninspired to create GamerDad if these guys were doing even an adequate job?

Want to find elements to criticize about High School Musical? That is simple enough – the entirety is trite and fluffy, the acting is uneven and overly packaged, the singing is pedestrian, the music is the epitome of safe ‘product’ and the entire franchise reeks of ‘we like to print money’. But again, that misses the point – my kids don’t pretend that this is top quality in terms of polish or creativity. But in terms of energy and pure visceral fun? On those terms it is hard to match. Oh, I know … I have read the threads, I have seen the tirades of hordes of overwhelmingly twenty-something single male gamers ranting about High School Musical on any variety of levels, and I have some advice for them – your swaggering claims of how ‘kiddie’ it is and how you need ‘more mature’ content while simultaneously trolling threads wondering when Emma Watson ‘becomes legal’ says an awful lot more about you than you manage to say about the harmless fun millions are having with High School Musical.

Because being mature means that there are no guilty pleasures, just things you like; that your tastes are your own and not beholden to peer pressure; and, most importantly, that what you like was never made better by putting down what someone else likes or berating them for liking something you deem ‘not cool’. My younger son took a lot of crap last year for growing his hair to 10″ for “Locks of Love” (wigs for cancer patients), and we all learned a lot about him and about people in general during the process – people are insecure and looking to feel better through whatever means possible. During the teens and early adulthood that often involves showing how they are ‘too cool’ for whatever they liked last year; they are so mature that nothing someone a few years younger than them likes could hold any interest. They are just too cool … or so they believe.

But not me. I love High School Musical. My whole family loves High School Musical. My kids’ friends love High School Musical. The parents of my kids’ friends admit to enjoying High School Musical. This won’t last, I know that – Disney is almost 100% likely to over-play this franchise, and as I said I had expected it to happen with this second movie. Maybe the next movie will be terrible, or the one after that, or they might have the sense to stop making them before the franchise is rotten to the core. By then my kids will likely have moved on to something else, and my wife and I with them. But given that I have spent my life listening to music that people have called ‘noise’, ‘awful’, and ‘cruelty to saxophones’, I am impervious to worrying if people think it is silly for me to have these soundtracks on my iPod. So one day, when they’re in high school, I’ll pull up a song and they’ll be sure to sing along – just like they do now when I play stuff from my Veggie Tales playlist.

Tags: Misc