Cheap Thrills
PODHORETZ, JOHN
Cheap Thrills It doesn't take much to enthrall the prepubescent audience. by John Podhoretz What are we to make of the fact that the most successful work of popular entertainment made in this...
...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...
...Every time the Disney Channel has aired a repeat of the movie in the 19 months since, its ratings have soared...
...of kids from California to Kathmandu...
...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...
...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...
...For decades, conservatives have decried the corrupting effect of popular culture—a sexualized, hyper-violent, 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...
...After all, the star of both movies, 19-year-old Zac Efron, does a splendid job playing a teen heartthrob in the...
...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...
...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...
...The routine dancing, choreographed by the egregious Ortega, would not pass muster in summer stock in Alaska...
...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...
...Certainly Disney didn't try very hard when it came to High School Musical...
...The soundtrack album was the best-selling CD of 2006...
...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...
...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...
...As the weeks ticked down toward the airing of the sequel, High School Musical 2, I began to feel optimistic again...
...More than 5 million DVDs have been sold...
...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...
...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...
...by John Podhoretz What are we to make of the fact that the most successful work of popular entertainment made in this decade for children between the ages of five and 12 is a profoundly inoffensive trifle about a jock boy and a brainiac girl who find themselves starring in their high school's musical...
...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 John Podhoretz, a columnist for the New York Post, is The Weekly Standard's movie critic...
...Disney has earned in excess of $70 million from a movie that it has aired, repeatedly, for free...
...I approached HSM with goodwill and exited with grave disappointment...
...High School Musical was a sensation from the moment it aired...
...Disney says High School Musical has been viewed 70 million times in the United States since its first broadcast...
...The makers and distributors of popular culture just haven't been trying hard enough to find something of appeal to these kids...
...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...
...And yet I was one of the few people in America to turn the television off that night...
...Or trying at all...
...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...
...Evidently, Barsocchini learned everything he knew about dialogue from Griffin's infamously inane exchanges with celebrity guests...
...The wretched numbers—written by no fewer than 12 people—evoke not Broadway show tunes but latter-day pop music...
...The script was written by Peter Barsocchini, whose prior claim to fame was that he helped produce the late Merv Griffin's talk show...
Vol. 12 • September 2007 • No. 47
