There's been two sequels (and reportedly they're considering making High School Musical 4), a stage show, an ice show, chart-topping soundtrack CDs, karaoke CDs, slippers, pillowcases, even hairbrushes covered with HSM pictures. I even saw a book at Lifeway entitled Wildcats in the House: Spiritual Stuff You Can Get From High School Musical. I can only vaguely remember the little I read in it, but I seem to remember it containing such gems as, "The Bible tells us to be unified. In 'We're All In This Together...'" Wow. Pretty cheesy, huh? I thought that was the worst it could get.
I was wrong.
Almost two months ago, I was in a Christian bookstore in DC looking for a DVD to watch when I saw it.
Yeah, you're seeing that right. It's called Sunday School Musical. Strangely enough, it's not made by a church in hopes of drawing in some of High School Musical's fans. Apparently it's made by Faith Films, a small division of Warner Brothers. Yes, Warner Brothers is putting out this kind of movie. The director, Rachel Lee Goldenberg, has directed or assisted with several other weak imitations of popular movies. If the title wasn't enough, the cover's similarity to any one of the High School Musical DVD covers should convince you. Except that the stage curtains are green instead of red, and the characters are wearing choir robes instead of HSM 3's graduation robes, it looks almost identical to the HSM DVDs.
When I saw the DVD, I couldn't stop laughing. I took a picture of the cover with my cell phone and texted it to some friends who would find it funny. My friends Chelsea and Marefia found it just as funny as I did, and we talked about renting it and watching it just for laughs. I looked it up online, and the Blockbuster a few miles from my house had two copies of it. So we rented it, and Monday morning, because the public schools had the day off for a teacher workday, we watched it.
It was just as funny as we expected it to be. The main character, a guy named Zach (which sounds a little too close to Zac, as in Zac Efron, for me) likes to sing on the rooftop of his old apartment building. He and his church school's choir are going to the state competition (pronounced "the states competition by the actors) with their song-and-dance version of "This Little Light of Mine." Because the third choir couldn't make it to the regional competition, their out-of-tune, supposedly uncool rivals, the Crossroads Christian School choir, advance to the finals as well.
But when Zach goes home for dinner that night, his mom surprises him with the news that she's lost her job and they'll have to move in with his aunt to save money. Surprise, surprise, the school he ends up going to is Crossroads Christian. To make a long story short, he helps Crossroads Christian's choir improve, and then when Hawthorne (his old school) closes down so his old choir can't go to state, he combines the two choirs into one, making all dissension disappear with a song and a dance. In the end, they don't win the competition because of an unfair dismissal, but the winners give up their prize to the "real" winners.
There were several moments that made us roll on the floor laughing. For example, when Zach walks into the classroom of Crossroads Christian School for the first time, the glasses-wearing geek (honestly, what else do you call a guy who is overeager to present an hour-long presentation on the painting of The Last Supper and then has to be stopped after that amount of time by the teacher, even though he was "just getting started.") turns around, slides his glasses down his nose just enough so that he can look over them at Zach in a wanna-be threatening look, and says, "I'm onto you." What he was supposedly onto was Zach's "plan" to spy on their choir. He seems to really like the glasses-slide-down-threatening-look thing, which he repeats numerous times throughout the movie.
The way that the characters go from boring students to expert dancers is almost laughable. There's a character named Margaret who always has her nose in a book, even hiding it in her choir folder and reading when she's supposed to be singing. Her excuse for not singing? "Hello, I'm shy!" By the end of the movie, she's dancing and singing enthusiastically with the rest.
My personal favorite song was the one called "You're Not the Boss." Savannah, Zach's love interest, and Miles, the geek of "I'm onto you" fame, have a sing-off at the lunch tables, dancing and jumping from table to table in the midst of kids sitting there doing homework apparently oblivious to Savannah and Miles singing and dancing almost on top of their textbooks.
But the cheesiest moment started at home between Savannah and her dad. She tells him that she's not overwhelmed with all the stuff she's doing - yet. "Well, if you ever do, you can always do what your mother did," her dad tells her. "What's that?" she asks. "Well, she'd take a piece of bubble gum, and she'd blow a big bubble. And then she'd say a little prayer that went something like this, 'Dear God, make this bubble take my trouble.' Then she'd pop it - and all her trouble would be gone." During a stress-filled moment near the end of the movie, Savannah steps out of the room and blows a bubble, smiling up at the sky after it pops. Don't you wish stress could be relieved that easily?
The movie ends with an awkward kiss between Zach and Savannah, cutting upward for a happily-ever-after feel. But their try at a happy ending doesn't take away from the so-bad-it's-funny rest of the movie.
If you ever need a laugh, go watch Sunday School Musical. :)
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