Word: disneying
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...face it, though, High School Musical 3 was not made for you. The good folks at Disney could give two figs for what you think of it. (Collecting his two figs after the jump is TIME's film critic Richard Corliss, with his review.) But what about the target audience? How did it play to them? We asked two kids, Zoe Descoteaux, 8, and Ginger Edmiston, 7, of New York City to talk about the movie afterward. Here, with some prompting from mom, are their thoughts...
...lights snap off at the Empire Theatre on Times Square and a piercing chorus of girls' squeals instantly fills the room, zero to sixty in a half-second, like audio-electroshock therapy or the first jolt of Beatlemania. It's a release of energy the Disney marketeers have savvily built up since High School Musical made its debut on the Disney Channel in Jan. 2006. The TV movie broke ratings records, and so did its spinoff CD, which was the year's top-selling album in the U.S. Last year's High School Musical 2, also on the Disney Channel...
...That a 5ft. 9in. white kid would be seen as a hoops savior is just one cue that the HSM movies dwell in a Disney fantasyland. Another is the obsessively color-coordinated outfits the kids wear to school, and touches of extravagant decor, like Troy's tree house, as big as an Astaire-Rogers Deco suite, redecorated in retro-rustic. (The roof opens too, apparently at voice command.) The biggest leap of make-believe is that the high school experience is wunnnnnderful - though this view is no less reductive than the one, in so many comedies and horror movies, that...
...there's not a drop of danger in Sharpay or any other character here. The friction between Danny the hood and Sandy the prom girl in Greaseis psychodrama compared to Troy and Gab. They're really the musical soulmates of old MGM's Mickey and Judy, or maybe old Disney's Mickey and Minnie...
...final half-hour. (Hey, guys, you're going off to college, not Iraq.) The climactic gravity is meant to threaten the kids that their beloved franchise may be no more. Yet we know that a fourth High School Musical is already in the works? And can Disney's theatrical arm possibly resist sending their golden goose to Broadway? After all, Mary Poppins is playing just down the block from the Empire Theatre...