The same old song and dance

Disney's "High School Musical" DVD has hijacked my children's lives. Its shallow plot and saccharine songs should inspire cynicism. So why can't I stop singing along?

By Eilene Zimmerman

Read more: Disney, Arts & Entertainment, Life

Jan. 22, 2007 | For the holidays, my kids begged me for the "High School Musical" DVD. In my ignorance about what fifth graders who don't live in my house watch on television, I dismissed it. I didn't know what it was (and I am pretty sure they didn't either). But something was brewing. In late November, a live version of the film, performed for thousands at our local sports arena, completely hijacked the attention of my daughter's classmates, and those who had seen it became briefly popular.

A few weeks later, the holidays were upon us, and in the enormous brown boxes that arrived from my husband's family in Buffalo came the revered DVD. A crowd of good-looking kids jumped up and down on the cover. "You haven't seen it yet?" Uncle Steve asked over the telephone. My daughter looked at me, her hand over the mouthpiece, as though her uncle might see her rolling her eyes. "No," she moaned, disgusted. "You gotta be kidding," he said. I stood there, feeling foolish.

We hadn't seen it, but then we did. Not once, not twice, but three times in the course of two days. If you aren't the parent of a child between the ages of, say, 5 and 15, you may not know what "High School Musical" is. Here's a two-second summary: It's a dramedy about two high school kids -- Gabriella Montez, who is new to the school, and Troy Bolton, one of the most popular students and star of the basketball team -- who want to sing in the school's winter musical, but are too embarrassed to admit it. Especially Troy, who has everything at stake: the big game, the big reputation and his relationship with his father, who just happens to be the basketball team's coach.

The plot is so predictable, the characters so one-dimensional and the songs so ... so ... Disney, it's laughable. I should have been making cynical jokes about it. Instead I was up until 2 a.m. after the second day of nonstop viewing because I couldn't get the songs out of my head. I dreamed of Troy holding the microphone while the camera circled him, his blond, feathery hair reminiscent of my first true crush: David Cassidy. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's why I keep watching it, surreptitiously, with my children. I stand at the sink -- luckily we have the kind of open floor plan that allows me to wash dishes and watch television at the same time -- and hum along to the songs. There's Keith Partridge, the 17-year-old lead singer of the Partridge Family -- no, wait, no, right, it's Troy Bolton, but does it matter? It's 1973 and I'm 10 years old again and writing to the Partridge Family Fan Club. "Dear Keith," I pen in my very best cursive, lounging on the shag rug of the upstairs bedroom I share with my younger sister, who can't possibly understand the depth of my feelings. "I love you."

"The Partridge Family Album" was the first record I ever owned. I went half with my older sister -- she was 12 and I was 10 -- and we walked three blocks to Town & Country Records, where she paid with quarters. When we got home, I gave her my half: 200 pennies. And I immediately put on the show's hit song, "I Think I Love You," and fantasized that Keith, in his weird fluffy white performance shirt and vest, was singing to me. Fast-forward 30 years. Like hundreds of thousands of other tween fans, my daughter and son -- immediately after their first viewing of "High School Musical" -- log onto iTunes and use their holiday gift cards to buy five songs off the soundtrack. Then both of them sit, slack-jawed, eyes glazed, and watch the DVD again, so stoned on the music they don't respond to my calls of, "Look! I just baked brownies! Who wants a brownie? They're chewy! They're chewy, for god's sake!"

A few days after the DVD's arrival, my daughter refused to get dressed in the morning -- they were watching "HSM" again -- and her punishment was expulsion from the family room, the room with the television. (Her brother was lying on the carpet engrossed in the scene where Troy and Gabriella meet secretly in the science club hangout -- none of Troy's narrow-minded basketball buddies would ever think to look for him there!) My daughter actually became hysterical. She ran to her room and let out the kind of bloodcurdling scream that will, in time, bring the police to your door. She sobbed, hard. All because I told her she had to get dressed before watching any more of the video. Our lives can't stop because the cast is singing "Get Your Head in the Game." We have to run errands. I needed milk, eggs, snacks for school lunchboxes. By the time she pulled herself together and dressed, however, the damage had been done. She'd missed the important science club scene as well as a crucial scene of betrayal. (I won't go into details here, but suffice it to say, everyone learns a valuable lesson about friendship.) She stomped over to the tube, sullen, brow-furrowed. "I'd been waiting a week to see this," she said, spitting out the words with venom. (No matter that she had already seen it three times.) "And now you've ruined it."

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What is it about Disney music and movies that is so addictive? From my unscientific study of an 8- and a 10-year-old viewer, it's not just the idiotic plot or attractive stars that gets them, but the songs too. When we sit around listening to music, my children beg for Radio Disney. (And I think: Why on earth did we have to get Direct TV with its wide variety of satellite radio stations?) Who are these singing children? Aly & A.J.? Jesse McCartney? This can't just be about music, it's mind control! The soundtrack to "High School Musical" has gone triple-platinum -- more than 3 million have been sold worldwide, making it the top-selling CD in 2006. "It's really the first tween Disney product that has reached around the world. And it's still growing," Damon Whiteside, V.P. of marketing for Walt Disney Records, told Reuters in December. Music Theatre International, which sells the licensed stage adaptation to "HSM," predicts that by year's end more than 2,000 schools will have produced their own stage version of the show, with more than 60,000 students participating. Nine of the soundtrack songs made it to the Billboard Hot 100 in 2006. "Breaking Free," which tortures me nightly ("There's not a star in heaven that we can't reach, if we try ... yeah we're breaking free. Ooooooooh."), reached No. 4.

It's all a little scary. Too much Disney pop, too many songs from teenagers I've never heard of with names that sound suspiciously manufactured -- Corbin Bleu? Hannah Montana? -- and my kids become dazed; they lie around looking at the ceiling, singing lyrics to vacuous songs they literally just heard. (But should they forget any of the cloying lyrics, both the "High School Musical" two-disc, special edition soundtrack and the "High School Musical Remix" include karaoke versions.)

When they were denied further viewings of the DVD (defeated, I have since relented), my kids resorted to round-the-clock soundtrack playing. It was music-as-narcotic, and their addiction made me suspect something subliminal in all of it, a "White Album" kind of thing. (Although I'm pretty certain you can't play a CD backward.) My suspicions remain unconfirmed, as I couldn't find a musicologist or psychologist willing to go to bat for my theory. The experts I asked believe instead that the music's success, as well as the movie's, were a result of marketing and promotion at its most obscene. Watch anything on the Disney Channel -- and it's the rare American child who doesn't -- and it's a nonstop commercial for its other shows, for Radio Disney and for the teen singing stars it produces. But Disney is also pandering to a market that has been -- believe it or not -- underserved. Not by me, of course; I shove cultural experiences down my children's throats in the hopes of enriching them. But by the music, film and television industries.

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