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High School Musical

It was a tale that almost tore an entire high school apart. One boy, an all-star jock, and one girl, a beautiful genius, joined forces to revolutionize a student body that was so stuck in stereotypes they couldn’t see anything outside of their clique. A change so drastic and outlandish could only happen in one place … a Disney Channel Original Movie. In High School Musical, to be exact.

High School Musical originally aired in 2006 and starred at the time an unknown to the masses Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens (who were most recently in raunchy films Paper Dreams and Spring Breakers, respectively, a stark change from their Disney Channel pasts). It might have been my repressed love for campy showtunes or my secret celebrity crush on Zac Efron, but from the moment I saw High School Musical, I felt irrationally attached to it. This isn’t something you want to admit when you’re a high schooler who is trying to play it cool. But apparently I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed the film — it went on to spawn two other films, one that even made it to the big screen, along with a concert tour, an ice show and infinite paraphernalia (thank you tweens of America!).

HSM begins at an unidentified ski resort, when Troy Bolton and Gabriella Montez were both forced by there parents to attend an extremely awkward-looking teen party for the impending New Year. By a twist of fate, Troy and Gabriella are forced to perform karaoke together, and what do you know! They both have amazing voices. Their meeting is cut short, though, when Gabriella scampers off to meet her mother before the two can kiss (it is a Disney movie after all). But, another twist: Gabriela just transferred to Troy’s high school, which is unlike any other high school in the country.

East High School is a place where basketball rules all, and no one is allowed to stray from their specific group. But as soon as Gabriella arrives at the school, life at East High starts to get crazy. Although she technically fits in with the overachieving geek crowd, she decides to break some boundaries by signing up for the school musical and convincing Troy to act as her duet partner. This is much to the dismay of siblings Ryan and Sharpay Evans, who run the school’s drama clique, as well as Troy’s enthusiastic basketball bros. The drama culminates in a song where students confess their secret interests (the math girl loves hip hop dancing! The skater dude loves the cello!) while the rest of the school sings that you have to “stick to the status quo”.

This idea of sticking to the status quo almost prevails as Troy and Gabriella’s relationship begins to fall apart due to the disgust of their peers. But alas, love and music conquer all, and in the end Troy and Gabriella perform for the entire school, snag the roles they were trying out for and win the big basketball game and the scholastic decathlon. All is well that ends well – it is a Disney Channel Original Movie after all. There is also a lot of singing, dancing and questionable acting.

In its entirety, High School Musical is a delightfully ridiculous piece of film that doesn’t really accurately represent high school but does offer as many laughs (intentional or not) as it does heart-warming moments. In my opinion, it is a standout film in the Disney Channel Original Movie oeuvre despite its immense cheesiness. And if anything, you get to look at young Zac Efron’s adorable face for an hour or two.

–Emily Thompson

The Color of Friendship

When I was 5 years old, I dropped out of kindergarten — but not because I couldn’t say my ABCs.

Even then, I was a voracious reader, jumping from the Little House series to Nancy Drew to books on bizarre subjects such as lighthouses or the Amish. The other girls in my class mocked me incessantly for it, and I couldn’t take their taunts. Yes, I was a total nerd — I later taught my third grade art class how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism — but I didn’t care. Knowledge was my prized possession, especially when it involved culture and history.

So imagine my delight in 2000 when Disney Channel premiered my seemingly ideal made-for-TV movie, The Color of Friendship. In the film, Mahree Bok, a white girl who lives in South Africa, heads off to Washington to spend time as an exchange student with the Dellumses, a black family. Problem is, the film is set in 1977, when apartheid was the norm in South Africa. Problem is, Mahree expects to live with a white family. Problem is, the Dellumses — particularly Piper, who is Mahree’s age — expect to host a black girl. Drama predictably ensues.

Even more complicated is that Piper’s father is Congressman Ron Dellums, whose pet project is working to end the apartheid policies in South Africa, while Mahree’s father is a policeman who took part in capturing Stephen Biko, the chief anti-apartheid activist at the time. Whoops.

Unsurprisingly, the girls eventually learn that they’re more alike than they expected, which teaches children to not judge a book by its cover — or, more importantly, a person by their skin color.

Yet this anti-racism moral is more intricate than it sounds. On the surface, it wasn’t why I loved The Color of Friendship as an 8-year-old, and it’s not completely why I continue to proclaim the film as the best Disney Channel Original Movie today.

Other DCOMs dealt with light, fun subjects such as life in outer space (Zenon 1, 2 and 3). In contrast, The Color of Friendship was based off a true story — the real Congressman Dellums helped to pass the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986 — and contained allusions to classic works such as Roots and Cry the Beloved Country. Amnesty International is cited as the source when Congressman Dellums confirms that Biko did not commit suicide, but instead died of injuries from police beatings while in captivity.

Yes, the film does contain fun scenes involving shopping and the obligatory montage of Mahree and Piper bonding. Yet the majority of its content is serious and heavy. As much as kids like space and aliens, they also understand a lot more than we adults think they do — and they appreciate when we entrust them with important, real information.

The Color of Friendship does this successfully by educating in a clear, relatable fashion. Piper and her friend Daniel explain the meaning of apartheid to Piper’s brothers as “[thinking] of the word ‘apart’.” The metaphor throughout the film is the weaver bird, which lives in one large nest with unrelated bird families of all different colors — red, black, yellow, white — that never fight. The script is also full of poignant puns: When Piper brings Mahree a chocolate milkshake, she asks, “You do drink chocolate, don’t you? Or maybe you only like vanilla.”

It’s funny how well my movie tastes as a child predicted my future actions. I took a South African art history class my freshman year. I now volunteer as an Amnesty International organizer. I work as a journalist, writing about diverse people. I like to think that The Color of Friendship gave me my first taste of what was truly possible — instead of assuming that I would stay young and naïve forever.

–Mary Clare Fischer