On January 20, 2006, High School Musical aired on Disney Channel, and no one could have predicted the amount of success the franchise would have. By the time High School Musical 3 rolled out, girls were no longer squealing and singing in their bedrooms, but in a movie theater. Finally, everyone got what they wanted: close-ups of Zac Efron on a much larger screen.
Now, we’re less than two months away from the ten-year anniversary of High School Musical’s premiere, and I can’t believe how old I feel. How did something that I watched when I was eight years old stay so relevant in my life for so long?
There are of course several different movies that we all grew up watching over and over: Grease and Mean Girls, to name a few. These films showed us the ridiculous, hilarious, and sometimes ugly side of what it was like to be in high school. But High School Musical doesn’t really match the rest of these, with lines like “Hip hop is my passion. I love to pop, and lock, and jam, and break!” It aired on Disney Channel. There was nothing about sex, drinking, smoking or abuse, like there was in The Breakfast Club. We didn’t see any of the hardcore stuff, nor did we have any of the tough conversations. It’s about as unrealistic as it gets. So why do girls of my generation still go crazy over the cheesy musical, ten years later?
If you ask me, High School Musical represented individual struggle within teenage-dom like no other movie had done before. Through lame conversations and awful sports scenes, Gabriella Montez and Troy Bolton showed us what it was like to struggle with passion and identity. They mingled with people from different groups. They struggled with their families. They went through everyday life like most of us did in high school, trying to figure it out day by day, and eventually stumbled onto something new about themselves they couldn’t keep ignoring no matter how rigid the social norms.
Even the cliques that formed in High School Musical were entirely different from the movie’s predecessors. Instead of football idiots dating dumb cheerleaders, the queen of the school, Sharpay Evans, was a theater girl. Her status as queen wasn’t even completely valid, as the jocks didn’t particularly care for her. Theses jocks, in turn, were basketball players, who were dedicated to their team and their victory, willing to do anything to reach their goals. The math nerds weren’t looked down upon, nor were they all horrendous and wearing braces and glasses; they were pretty girls and normal dudes, doing their math thing, loving life just as much as anyone else.
Though the school did blow up when Troy and Gabriella began to sing, the setting already provided a much more comfortable acceptance of individuality and differences than Can’t Buy Me Love or The Breakfast Club had. Although these 80’s movies did a good job of highlighting some ugly truths about high school, High School Musical showed that not all math and theater kids hated their lives, and not all sports teams were full of losers. All the characters and cliques had passion right from the very beginning—they cared about real things, too, not just proms and lunch tables (although they did do a whole musical number at the lunch tables, so maybe I’m wrong on that last one).
High School Musical reached out to us because it made us admire people for what they were good at and what they loved to do. Troy cared about his team, his family, his singing and his girl. Gabriella was adorable, stubborn, never gave in to Sharpay, and was actually intelligent, something rarely found in the female star of a teenage movie.
We wanted to be like Troy and Gabriella because they were so passionate that it got the entire school to join them in yet another cheesy musical number with jocks and nerds clapping their hands alike. Even the kids who weren’t okay with it at the beginning were passionate about their own thing: no one was isolated, rejected, or a social outcast. We finally got to admire people for their characters, women for their intellect, and men for their dedication.
You could argue that these characters are hard to find in real life, but I believe that people eventually find their niches in high school based on who they admire, and who they admire is based on what their passions and interests are. Sometimes groups cross over, and people identify with the math geeks and the theater nerds, and sometimes even the cutest of basketball players love to sing. What better representation of that can you find than in Troy and Gabriella’s perfect world?
Can’t Buy Me Love and Mean Girls showed us how awful popularity is, and what it does to people who manage to infiltrate it. The Breakfast Club taught us in the most touching way possible not to judge a book by its cover. Grease taught us…that you need to get a perm to get the guy? Okay, so not totally sure about Grease.
These were all valuable lessons, but it was High School Musical that finally gave us role models who loved themselves, were happy with their interests and hobbies, and were simply finding a way to fit those into the rough social grid of high school. If you ask me, it doesn’t get better than that.
Not to mention the totally valuable knowledge it fed us about basketball, which especially came in handy here at Duke. If Troy Bolton can dance, so can you, Grayson Allen. Your Gabriellas are waiting.