Disney's High School Musical: ill it Be the One that Finally Brings Back the Classic Hollywood Genre so Long Overlooked?

If you think High School Musical is still merely a generic term that describes a certain level of dramatic proficiency, you obviously have not come in contact with school kids in the last few months. In fact, High School Musical is a Disney Channel exclusive that is an actual old-fashioned musical about, well, putting on a high school musical.

The charm of Disney’s High School Musical is that it harkens back to the earliest days of Hollywood musicals, the good old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney “hey, let’s put on a show” type of movie. The shame of this movie is the way it has been repackaged into a CD, then a special deluxe version CD, then a DVD and a special deluxe version DVD and repeated airings all in order to make a quick buck for Disney’s notoriously underpaid execs. The legacy of this movie may very well be the return of the classic musical.

It is really rather odd that musicals haven’t been able to stage a comeback in the last twenty or so years. And I’m not talking about musicals like Dirty Dancing where you basically just have a non-musical movie loaded with pop songs so that they can make an extra buck selling the soundtrack. I’m talking about classic Hollywood musicals where people who should not be singing nonetheles express themselves through song: people like cowboys and gangsters and Gibson Girls. What is odd is about it is that we now have a generation or two of young people raised on short form musicals.