Word: teens
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...year-olds, so will a franchise called High School Musical reach tweens for whom high school is only an enticing and terrifying eventuality. Like the original, High School Musical 2 (Aug. 17, 8 p.m. E.T.) gives them high school with training wheels: romance without sexual pressure, G-rated teen pop (Justin Timberlake before he brought sexy back). It's a raging bacchanal of hand holding, milk drinking and explicit thespianism! Obviously, this is escapism for parents too. Even the kids' rebellions--baking crème brûlée, angry dance numbers--would look good on a college application...
What happened to the coarsening of our culture? By now, to be a teen heartthrob, you should have done time in rehab, videotaped yourself having sex or been shot in the face at least once. But instead we've gone backward, from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to Leonardo DiCaprio to Justin Timberlake to Zac Efron. By 2020, 12-year-old girls will be decorating their lockers with photos of the surgeon general...
...Past teen idols often got famous for delivering slightly gritty entertainment: a hip swivel, a risqué rock song, having sex on a sinking ship. But now that there are enough cable stations, websites and radio stations to give tweens their own swath of broadband, the kids have chosen to be on the far right of all right. For their generation's defining piece of art they overwhelmingly chose last year's High School Musical, a song-and-dance movie made for the Disney Channel that is so wholesome the Amish community playhouse could...
Efron isn't surprised that wholesomeness is what kids want since, growing up in a small town near the small town of San Luis Obispo, Calif., he didn't think teen movies were very realistic. "Not everyone is an alcoholic in high school," says Efron. "You go to high school and some kids haven't hit puberty yet." In fact, though he's 19 years old, Efron's voice still has a squeak to it, which fits in with his appeal as the anti-rehab kid. Though paparazzi follow him, especially after his supporting role in last month's Hairspray...
...music. Sinatra, whose bobbysoxer fans squealed as ecstatically in World War II as Elvis' would in the Cold War days, added a knowing sexuality to his exquisite reading of a lyric. His voice knew all the angles to any emotion. Sinatra was the citywise predecessor to Presley's Southern teen, hotrodding to the cathouse for the promise of dirty...