Society shifted in 2006. Jack Dorsey launched Twitter with ambitions for the platform to be nothing more than a lighthearted microblog. Facebook opened to the public for the first time. YouTube exploded and was bought up by Google for a billion dollars. In many ways, 2006 is considered to be the last “normal year” before culture transferred online. Viral moments were shared by everyone rather than by personalised algorithms, music charts really mattered, and people still watched live TV programmes in their multi-millions; at the time shows were scheduled, without a second screen.
Which is how I wound up cross-legged on the floor of my rich friend Jodie’s bedroom, staring up at her TV screen with the eager anticipation of, well, a 10-year-old girl who was about to see Zac Efron sing and dance in a slinky basketball jersey for the first time. Jodie had Sky TV at her house, which meant she had Disney Channel: the home of Kenny Ortega’s High School Musical. After years of Disney sitcoms like Lizzie McGuire and That’s So Raven, this was the first film aimed directly at pre-teens. So, here we were, at our artfully scheduled sleepover, dying for a glimpse of fantastical teenagedom and romance.
Twenty years ago, before there was Justin Bieber, there was Efron’s Troy Bolton. Tanned and symmetrical with a huge sideswept fringe, he is the basketball captain of East High School’s Wildcats team in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We meet him, clad in a very middle-aged brown blazer, while on a ski vacation over Christmas break with his parents, when his mum tears him away from shooting hoops and towards the “young adults” New Year’s Eve party in the basement of the resort. Here, he is dragged on stage for karaoke alongside Gabriella Montez (Vanessa Hudgens), a bookish math and science whiz, who – unbeknownst to Troy – was about to transfer to East High from a school in San Diego the very next term. “Some days you guys might thank me for this,” the party’s host laughs – Efron and Hudgens certainly did, anyway.
High School Musical propelled the duo – romantically involved both on screen and in real life – to stratospheric fame among tween fans. Much like Jodie and I, who were wide-eyed and giddy at the notion of being plucked from obscurity on New Year’s Eve and propelled into the life of a hot guy who can sing, almost two million others tuned in for HSM’s initial Disney showings. “I still think about it every day,” Efron said at his Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony 17 years later. “I still sing the songs in the shower,” he added, stirring up hysteria with a yell of “Go Wildcats!”
These numbers, combined with an audience of 7.7 million viewers in the US, made the film the most-watched Disney Channel Original Movie ever. In the days that followed, just as many people tuned in to see the second and third screenings, which took place almost exactly two decades ago this week. With every peppy, auto-tuned rendition, the pop earworms (“Breaking Free”, “Bop to the Top”, Get’cha Head in the Game”) burrowed deeper into our brains. “It’s a phenomenon because there’s something there you want to return to over and over,” Ortega assessed at the time.
This transferred to official HSM soundtrack CD sales, too, which I begged my mum to buy me from Woolworths, then tormented her with on every car journey to school, clutching the lyric booklet and singing along at eardrum-altering volumes. This only stopped when the disc mysteriously vanished. The sugary soundtrack reached number one on the Billboard 200 chart (where it remained in the chart for 61 weeks and eventually went multi-platinum) – a rare achievement for a TV movie and replicated in the Noughties only by Hannah Montana and, if you can believe it, High School Musical 2.
None of this is to say that High School Musical is, cinematically, good. Like a syrupy Panda Pop at a kid’s party, the film would almost certainly liven you enough to dance – but it wasn’t winning any awards (aside from Teen Choice gongs). If you are to watch it back two decades later, some moments delivered in earnest (Troy climbing onto Gabriella’s balcony to sing an acoustic rendition of “Start of Something New”, for instance) that left me weak at the knees aged 10 make me physically recoil now. “It’s difficult to imagine even the most die hard fan of musicals finding anything here worth embracing,” one critic spat out in 2006. “A schmaltzy little piece of obvious fluff,” said another, despite Ortega’s past successes choreographing Dirty Dancing and Newsies.
But it didn’t matter, because Disney was on a roll. It was releasing T-shirts, memorabilia, spinoff concert tour tickets and figurines, which were all selling at the speed of Troy’s 350 windmill dunk. By the time High School Musical 2 was set for release just a year later, the New York Times had dubbed the franchise “a new religion”. Simply, Disney didn’t need critics when it had hoards of teenage girls. It was Grease for a new generation, without the pearl-clutching illusions to sex and cigarettes. Screenwriter Peter Barsocchini admitted he based the script on his young daughter and her friends.
“I wouldn’t use the word traditional, I’d use the word familiar,” said Rich Ross, the then-president of Disney Channel Worldwide when confronted by The Guardian on the matter. “The idea of putting on a show goes on in every school around the world. It’s not the story of kids having a rough time with divorced parents or having a drug addiction. Not every story about school has to be about the darker side of the school experience. Parents think it’s wholesome, but kids think it’s about being unable to express themselves because of what their parents want and what other kids will allow them to do,” he argued. Frustratingly for my younger self, Troy and Gabriella don’t even kiss until they graduate.
Notably, not all cast members became unilaterally famous. While Efron got a Rolling Stone profile and subsequent roles in hits including The Greatest Showman and Sean Durkin’s The Iron Claw, Hudgens was forced to apologise for the leak of her less-than-teen-friendly nude photos in 2007, before booking roles in the 2013 party film Spring Breakers and Netflix’s Princess Switch franchise in 2018.
Meanwhile, the most notable thing done since by Ashley Tisdale, who played diva villain (or aspirational girl boss, depending on your perspective) Sharpay Evans – is write an open letter about her “toxic” celebrity mom group chat (rumoured to contain Hilary Duff and Mandy Moore). Bored? Perhaps.
Even less starry cast members have done little of note in the last two decades, passing the time with minor TV roles and voice artist work. Still, the High School Musical meal ticket could keep you fed for a while. By the time HSM 2 aired in 2007, Disney had recruited over 17 million viewers – the highest ratings numbers for an original TV movie in history. A year later, the conclusion, High School Musical 3: Senior Year, premiered in cinemas, grossing $293m (£213.6) worldwide in its opening weekend.
“For me, I started High School Musical with the hopes that by directing and choreographing an original movie for television, it might pull the drapes back once again, for me and my life, and offer me an opportunity to direct for the big screen,” Ortega admitted of his motivations to launch the franchise. “Hardly did I imagine that it would be High School Musical itself that would be my chance to do that once again.”
The impact was unavoidable. After High School Musical 2, Disney Channel movies were marketed to launch the careers of up and coming pop stars – think Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers in 2008’s Camp Rock, or Selena Gomez in 2009’s Wizards of Waverly Place film. More than that, though, High School Musical had demonstrated to investors that musicals could be popular, profitable and cool again: Hairspray (also starring Efron) arrived in 2007, Disney’s Enchanted the same year and Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd in 2008. Les Misérables, Into the Woods and Steven Spielberg’s take on West Side Story all followed. On the small screen, we got Glee, which is like High School Musical if drugs and pregnancy were allowed.
While, 20 years on, I may not have found High School Musical as riveting on a return watch, the lyrics are still embedded in my brain, my dopamine receptors still triggered by Troy’s melodramatic anguish, Sharpay’s unwavering jazz-handed entitlement and drama teacher Ms Darbus’s overall disdain for basketball (an almost identical inverse of Glee’s musical-hating Sue Sylvester, by the way). This franchise changed the movie landscape forever. Just look at the success of, say, last year’s Netflix smash KPop Demon Hunters. Hollywood executives would be silly to ever underestimate the power of 12-year-old girls again.
