Say you pull Beauty and the Beast out of your personal Disney vault and spend an afternoon re-immersing yourself in the French fairy tale. You’d never catch Belle and her Beast going at it during one of their lovestruck duets, right? (“Parental discretion is advised” isn’t exactly part of the Disney vernacular.) But what about the actors playing the HSM kids — namely, Efron and Hudgens, who finally ’fessed up about being an off-screen couple?
Not quite yet, though Efron seems to have broken out of an excessively earnest mold, as have most Disney idols. Nobody wants to predict the day of their own death, but some stars do plan the sort of antics that release them from Disney’s stifling embrace. He’s not going to be in the mainstream public eye for long without some kind of discrediting humiliation inked on his report card. The pretty, raven-haired Hudgens also appears as though she’s never so much as uttered a curse word, which could suggest one of two things: a) she stays a Disney darling until some rock critic insults her music for being too vapid (see: Duff), or b) somewhere around the making of HSM 3, she gets photographed stumbling out of club Hyde at 2 am, spitting on the paparazzi, and passing out in the back seat of her car. A DUI and some coke-induced misadventures are, shall we say, optional.
“Oh,” Disney execs must weep quietly to themselves, “wouldn’t it be so much easier if — like Mickey, Donald, and Goofy — our human stars could lay quietly on a collectible cel when the cameras are turned off?”
But the Disnoids troupe only seems to be able to tow the line for so long. For now, Hudgens demurely sports a promise ring Efron gave her instead of flashing her panty-less cha-cha for TMZ. At the end of HSM, she and her boy-toy don’t even get to first base.
Disney Channel’s Healy says that the reason kids have connected so well with HSM has to do with the fact that “this was a musical in which the kids were real leads — it wasn’t like Grease, where there were older people playing kids. But this was kids in real high-school settings, and I think it really struck a nerve with our audience.”
“In real life,” counters Radar’s Gray, Hudgens and Efron would “be, like, trying to hook up in a three-way. That’s what would happen in real high school — score acid and hook up in a three-way.”
It can’t be easy for Disney to cross-promote the HSM stars’ pop-icon identities (currently, Hudgens, Tisdale, and Bleu have debut solo albums out with Disney-owned labels), while simultaneously expecting them to behave as role models for five year olds.
“We hope that they’re going to be responsible, and they have been up until now,” says Healy. “But I’m glad to say it’s really important to the Disney company and to Disney in general that parents feel very protected with what they see on Disney Channel. I think the kids respect that and they know that this is not the time to act up radically. But they know that themselves without us ever having to tell them that.”
In the week leading up to HSM 2’s release, no member of the cast has had to redeem himself for any wayward behavior. Needless to say, they’re all still under contract. It remains to be seen what kind of debauchery — if any — they’ll embrace once HSM 3 is behind them and they fully vet the notion that the same company that turned them into household names caters to a subculture that rocks HSM underwear without a hint of irony. As Gray points out, “The tighter the grip that Mickey has, the more his minions squirm when they’re set free.” Disney’s masterminds are nothing if not accomplished cultural anthropologists, and the power of the imagination really does seem limitless when they find a sweet spot in the Zeitgeist and suck it dry. At times, however, the most pervasive movements are those engineered out of rebellion. In the case of Disney’s latest magic act, when hormones and the natural toxins of fame are concerned, even a private riot seems par for the course.
Surprisingly, Disney has tested the waters of quite a few lifestyle brands, including a couture collection of adult clothing and a line of exclusive wedding dresses based on the gowns inspired by several Disney princesses. As infatuated as some adults are with Disney, most aspiring fashionistas would rather buy their couture (if they’re buying it all) from Paris and their wedding gowns from Vera Wang. Marketing experiments are one thing, but it shouldn’t come as a shocker that the tween merchandising is where Disney has concentrated its energy. They’re set to unload a torrent of products that coincide perfectly with HSM 2’s release and the start of a new school year. Thanks to an exclusive merchandising deal signed with Wal-Mart, your back-to-school shopping can revolve around HSM if you like: backpacks, notebooks, pencils — even your after-school snacks, because currently, a HSM-themed Fruit ’n’ Nut Mix is on the market.
