High School Musical

Release Date: January 20, 2006

Watch Date: April 1, 2023

 

    The story of the star-crossed lovers, Basketball Guy and Science Girl.

    I mean, this entire movie is meant to show that we are more than just the labels people give us, that we are complete people with varied interests, desires and passions. But Troy spends a lot of time referring to himself as a “basketball guy” and now Bob has decided he will only call Zac Efron “Basketball Guy” for the rest of time and it’s kind of become a whole thing and here we are.

    This movie is cheesy, and sweet, and stupid and fun. The songs are catchy, but they are the bare minimum. They’re meant to be earworms. But they’re performed fairly well and people remember that “we’re all in this together” almost twenty years later so clearly it did something right.

    The reality that this movie presents though, that in high school you can only be one thing and there will be a revolution throughout your entire school if you try to break away from that is a little bit crazy. I don’t particularly remember any time I cared much about what anyone outside my friend group was doing. But I didn’t go to American high school. Bob assures me that American high school is nothing like this musical, but growing up I really wanted American high school to be exactly like this musical, so I struggle to believe that. Sometimes it’s nicer to live in the fantasy world.

    Gabriella and Troy’s friends are actually pretty terrible people, all things considered. I have never met a group of teenagers that don’t seem to understand the concept of a crush. Nor have I ever met a teenage girl who didn’t encourage her friend to go out with the hot nice guy, especially when the guy showed a genuine interest in her. Troy is a jock, so he must be dumb. But these kids don’t interact with one another so how would any of them ever know that. And to go to the lengths of setting up an immaculately timed video call in order to hopefully catch Troy saying that he’d rather play basketball, a sport he dedicated his entire life too…seems a bit over the top. The fact that Gabriella decided immediately that this meant she had been betrayed? Also a little bit over the top.

    This movie is a fun throwback to childhood, to what would become the glory days of the made for television Disney movie – and as a result of it’s success we have Zac Efron’s career, so we should at least be grateful to “High School Musical” for that, if nothing else.