¼
High School Musical, on Disney Channel
Disney Channel Wiki; Disney Movies; Disney Wiki; IMDb; TV Tango; TV Tropes; Wikia; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Disney+; Google Play; Vudu; YouTube
Caution: spoilers.
This first aired in 2006, and it became a huge hit, but I wasn't interested at the time. I finally decided to watch it in 2024, and... it wasn't bad. I wouldn't call it particularly good, but I got through it and didn't feel like I'd wasted my time. And I might even try watching the first sequel at some point. In any event, this movie helped revive musicals as a format on TV, so I owe it some thanks for its influence, without which there might not be some later DCOMs that I liked more than this. I also want to say that while watching it, it reminded me somewhat of Glee, which apparently might not have been greenlit without this movie's success. It also reminded me just a smidge of Grease.
Anyway, it starts out on New Year's Eve, at a ski lodge. Two strangers named Troy Bolton (Zac Efron) and Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens) are forced to sing a karaoke song together, and to both their surprises, they sound really good and have a lot of fun with it. Later they exchange phone numbers, but don't see each other again during their winter break. Troy goes home to Albuquerque, where he attends East High School, and is captain of the basketball team. His father is the coach. Meanwhile, Gabriella and her mom move to Albuquerque, having no idea Troy lives there. So of course, the two soon bump into each other and reconnect. They consider signing up for tryouts for the school musical, but both are kind of disinterested in it, as Troy has to focus on basketball and Gabriella just wants to get her bearings in her new school before joining any clubs or anything. Although she is a math whiz, so the captain of the school's academic club, Taylor McKessie, tries to convince her to join them and help compete in an upcoming decathlon. But both Troy and Gabriella keep thinking about the musical, and finally decide to try out for the director Ms. Darbus. While there, they befriend the musical's composer, Kelsi Nielsen (who is probably my favorite character in the movie, so I was disappointed she didn't get more screen time than she did).
When Troy's teammates find out about his trying out for the musical, they put pressure on him to drop it in favor of spending all his time on basketball. Especially Troy's best friend, Chad Danforth (Corbin Bleu). There's also a duo, Sharpay Evans (Ashley Tisdale) and her brother, Ryan, who always star together in the school's musicals. So they're upset to find they suddenly have competition, and try to sabotage Troy and Gabriella's chances of winning the roles. Eventually, Taylor and Chad also team up to try to put a stop to Troy and Gabriella working together. But when they see how disappointed the two have become, they feel bad about what they did and do a complete 180, trying to help them win the musical roles, while still taking part in the basketball championship game and the decathlon. Oh, and there's one member of the basketball team, Zeke Baylor, who apparently has a crush on Sharpay. He also enjoys baking, a fact that was introduced during a song in which several students revealed their secret passions, but he's the only one who turned out to be at all important to the plot. And it was still a fairly minor plotline.
Well, the movie never even gets to the musical itself, as it climaxes with the callback auditions. I did find it a bit interesting that while some of the songs make sense to be sung in-universe, others don't make sense, the way songs never do in proper musicals. I thought it was especially ironic for a bunch of students to sing about how Troy and Gabriella shouldn't... be singing in the school musical. I thought the songs were all okay. And the story was okay. You know, nothing spectacular, but just... okay. I certainly can't hold it against anyone if they liked or even loved the movie a lot more than I did. To each their own.