High School Musical 2 Premier: Gen Z’s Moon Landing
Ask any college aged person where they were when they watched the Disney Channel premiere of High School Musical 2, and they can rattle off in near comical detail exactly where they were. I recently asked my followers on twitter to tell me where they remember seeing this movie, and almost everyone I know has a distinct memory. My roommate remembers having a birthday party in her basement and eating a pasta dinner while watching the premiere, my best friend remembers everyone on her block watching it on a sheet in the back yard. I myself, remember watching it at my next door neighbor’s house, and have a distinct memory of going to a girl scout meeting the next day and every single one of the girls talking about the movie. This is the first experience that my generation has a collective memory of. Unlike generations prior to us, who can tell you where they watched the moon landing, heard about John F. Kennedy’s assassination, or watched the fall of the Berlin wall, our collective memory is not of a momentous political shift, but an insignificant pop culture moment. Why?
The original High School Musical movie premiered in 2006 on the tween cable network Disney Channel, and followed the love story between basketball star Troy Bolton, and shy mathlete Gabriella Montez. While the narrative of high school may seem to some critics as cliché, that is what exactly made it so iconic. It became Disney Channel’s most successful film, with more than 255 million people around the world seeing the first film. High School Musical absolutely took the world by storm, and created a generational pop culture phenomenon. And not just in the United States. For tweens all across the globe, High School Musical was a branded aesthetic, and everyone was obsessed.
By the end of the summer of 2007, Disney had created a whirlwind of press hype around the release of the sequel to the original hit film. The series was released at an intersectional time between the rise of internet, and the still complete domination of television in early teen culture.
High School Musical 2 premiered on August 14th 2007 to a record-breaking audience of 17.2 million people. The New York Times is quoted saying “the broadcast is now the most-watched single event among children aged 6 to 11, and it represents the channel’s most watched event among tweens aged 9 to 14.” It is really no surprise that everyone my age can tell you exactly where they were when they watched this iconic premiere. It was a media craze and acted as a defining pop culture moment for our generation, there is no question about that. But what I am interested in is why is it such a defining moment for us all?
The children who were the market audience for these filmsin the early 2000s— Generation Z— are now in their late teens and early twenties. Born between the mid 1990s and the mid 2000s, generations Z is now being accredited with new characteristics that differentiate them from the millennials above them. We are a defined as an incredibly diverse generation; according to Insights.com, generation Z “holds the largest percentage of Hispanics and non-Hispanic blacks, at 22% and 15% respectively.” We are also defined by our reliance on technology, having never been alive in a time before internet, but the most interesting characteristic given to our generation being that many define generation Z as a very sober and concerned generation. In Alex Williams New York Times piece “Move over Millennials, Here Comes Gen Z”, Williams says “Millennials, were raised during the boom times and relative peace of the 1990s, only to see their sunny world dashed by the Sept. 11 attacks and two economic crashes, in 2000 and 2008. Theirs is a story of innocence lost. Generation Z, by contrast, has had its eyes open from the beginning, coming along in the aftermath of those cataclysms in the era of the war on terror and the Great Recession.” Could this growing need for mindless escapism explain why Generation Z all link themselves culturally to a cliché tween movie premiere?
Despite growing up in an increasingly separate and bi-partisan country our whole lives, we have this massive assumption that we share this same cultural common ground. The High School Musical 2 premier is a perfect example of this wide-spread pop culture experience being a defining moment for us because it is something we all remember as important as a child, that now ties us together as adults. Pop culture is a better tie to each other than any other experience and it may be because we need the distraction.
The High School Musical franchise had a massive media and cultural impact on us in our pre-teen years, but more importantly, it also laid the groundwork for us to be a generation that feels so tied to each other through pop culture understanding. As young adults we now all feel bound by all sorts of pop culture events, but for most of us, this is the first time we understood that we all had experienced the same thing. All being able to trace exactly where we saw the premier for the second film the same way other generations can remember where the saw massive political events shows how important pop culture is to generation Z and the interdependent relationship we all have with culture and media.
We have by far the most complex and fast paced pop culture than any generation previous to us. With so many outlets for content to be created and shared on, there is an ever-changing flow of culture, humor and references for us to define ourselves with. But, with this intense subculture comes a deep rooted sense of community. Being a generation that has always known the internet, we have never lived in a world where we didn’t assume someone somewhere didn’t feel or understand the same things we did, and with so much media and culture to be absorbing, it is just assumed we all have experienced the same pop culture or understand each other’s jokes. Although we have this nuanced pop culture, there is just a general assumption we all are aware of the references.
This creates an interesting parallel seeing as we are inheriting such a separatist world. We are entering the workforce during the Trump Presidency, by far the most politically charged and bipartisan time in recent American history. We are forced to be politically aware and involved, but are also forced to choose sides, as the image of the moderate slowly disappears, and with it common ground across the aisle. And yet, despite our world view becoming more and more politically separate, we are finding increasing ground in menial pop culture. Go on twitter two months ago, and your timeline would be filled with heated and extreme viewpoints on the way the President was handling the crisis in Puerto Rico, as our generation takes more firm and extreme political stances. But intermixed with tweets shaming Donald Trump for idiotically throwing paper towels at hurricane victims are tweets reacting to the leaked news of various Kardashian pregnancies. Pop culture and politics both playing an important, and to an extent, equal, role in our generation’s worldview.
Being raised in a post 9/11 world, we have always been burdened with both fear and politics and a deep understand of that impact on the world we will inherit. We are defined as a sober and somber generation, but who could really blame us, from all angles we are told by generations prior that we are inheriting a mess. Maybe this rise in pop culture being such a link to each other is because we need a bit of escapism from the burning world we are growing up into. Maybe the reason pop culture and politics play roles of competing importance in our lives is because we need to distract ourselves sometimes.
And maybe this is why the High School Musical 2 premier is so memorable to us now as young adults, because pop culture has become so important to us as not only a link and subculture within our generation, but as a way to escape the world we are inheriting. So, to answer the question I posed in the beginning: why is a silly pop culture event the most memorable thing in our generation’s collective memory? Because there is so much else happening that we need it to be.