Our latest blog comes from student volunteer Ella Marston, who looks at the phenomenal success of the High School Musical franchise, as represented through the merchandise held in the museum collections.
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Since February, I have enjoyed volunteering at the museum. I have mainly been working on archiving materials from the Cambridge Arts Cinema Collection which include an extensive collection of press release documents and publicity material related to movies from a wide range of genres. From May to July, I also had the opportunity to work as a Wellbeing Activities intern at the museum. My work focused on utilizing the range of materials held in the museum archives as well as the gallery spaces to create several activities open to students which would encourage mindfulness and boost wellbeing. Many of the sessions involved students enjoying materials linked to their favourite movie or TV franchises such as James Bond, Doctor Who, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings. While working in the archives and the wellbeing sessions, it became clear that the media which inspired the most nostalgia was Disney related. This led me to reflect on the development of Disney’s merchandise marketing as displayed in the galleries (The Bill Douglas Cinema Museum holds the largest collection of Disney materials in the country). I wanted to focus on the marketing techniques used during Disney’s successful shift from cartoon to live-action media on the Disney TV channel. In particular, I analysed materials from the archives linked to the record-breaking High School Musical franchise.
In December 2006, the Disney channel released an original movie musical that would change children’s screen entertainment forever. High School Musical, written and directed by Kenny Ortega exploded onto the small screen, being seen by 7.7 million viewers in the US on its premiere broadcast and gaining unprecedented momentum in the months and years following, with later titles receiving a thetarical release. It established a new wave in movie musical theatre. It represented a diverse range of dance and music genres such as jazz, hip-hop, salsa, samba, and contemporary alongside strong moral messages linked to individualism. Its far-reaching success claimed back musical theatre as a popular form of mainstream entertainment for the twenty-first century, but crucially, it made a record-breaking profit by identifying a newly recognized demographic – the tween audience.
Generally defined as children between the ages of 8 and 12 years, tweens had historically been categorized as older children who represented the maturer end of the Disney animation fanbase, but were too young for adult, live-action entertainment. However, during the early 2000s, Disney Channel began to offer a range of live-action television series aimed at pre-teens alongside classic cartoons. Shows like Hannah Montana, Lizzie McGuire, and That’s So Raven provided the tween audience with entertainment that recognized both their interest in the lifestyle of teenagers and the need to provide child-friendly content for family viewing. Storylines mostly depicted teenage characters as they navigated traditional American high schools, careers, and child-friendly romance. While these elements were years beyond the experience of their viewers (estimated to be predominantly between six and twelve years), the shows offered an enjoyably optimistic portrayal of teenage life which gained them immense popularity.
The High School Musical movies embodied this fantastical teenage lifestyle to the maximum, showcasing characters who worked summer jobs and drove their own cars. Ingvild Kvale Sørenssen says, “The High School Musical trilogy is about teenagers as they attend high school, while it is the younger age group, tweens, who are the main target audience. Implicitly, this tells us that the Disney text configures its audience as aspiring teenagers. Thus, these movies can be seen as Disney providing scripts for the tween’s anticipatory socialization. Through the media texts we can observe that tweens are configured as being in a liminal stage or a place of limbo between adolescence and childhood, between family and peers. As a potential source for anticipatory socialization Disney, through this trilogy, scripts difficult parent-child relationships and peer-relationships as normal for teenagers. Hence, the narrative can be seen as an invitation to imitate or prepare for things to come.” Adam Storm says in the Empire article attached, “the teen musical has, of course, been a staple pretty much since the coming of sound. But what is new is the age of the target audience. Disney claims a nine-to-12ish target demographic […] it’s that nine-to-12 target audience that’s the key: for this is a phenomenon occurring in the shadowy world of the tween.” And while it is true that High School Musical was likened to a child-friendly Grease, its core message that following your own talents and desires will lead you to ultimate success (social and academic) meant it achieved international approval from tweens, and importantly, parents.
As quoted in the article, by the release of the third film, High School Musical had been seen by 250 million people worldwide, the soundtrack held a Guinness World Record for the first ever TV-movie soundtrack to reach nine concurrent singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, nearly half a million copies of the novelization had been sold and nearly 50% of America’s children tuned in to watch the TV premiere of High School Musical 2. While the first film cost just over four million dollars to make, it made more than one billion dollars in profit. In addition, the American tween audience had an estimated “$50 billion worth of direct spending power” (Storm). Disney’s marketeers could then take advantage of this ultimate spending power.
Disney’s ability to capitalize on the distribution of transmedia linked to its films means it is hard to imagine a time when it didn’t dominate the merchandise market. In the archives, I found High School Musical lunchboxes, pencil cases, postcards, CDs, board games, card games, mugs, hairbands, novels, behind-the-scenes books and more. As well as selling the franchise in almost every form of media, Disney were able to recycle the broadcast of the movie, generating permanent fan interest. As highlighted on a High School Musical postcard I found in the archives, the channel broadcast at least five different TV events for High School Musical 2 on the Disney channel following its original release. They included the singalong version, the dance-along version, and the extended version.
Storm says, “Hollywood has been surprisingly slow off the mark to grab its slice of the tween pie. Disney Channel’s marketing of High School Musical, however, brilliantly eschewed the standard model (posters/TV spots), instead corralling the tweens where they lived: at home and in school. Radio Disney blared out the soundtrack; two versions of the stageplay were written for end-of-term shows; there were national tours, and a High School Musical On Ice extravaganza. The sharpest move was the release of the karaoke version.”
Disney also chose to capitalize on the romance element of the movies when designing merchandise. Zac Efron, eighteen years old during the making of the first High School Musical film, became one of the most desirable male actors in the world during the peak of the franchise. Although popular teen films such as Back to the Future, Dirty Dancing, and Grease had led their marketing with the image of their respective male actors, marketing a children’s film using a male romantic interest was not common practice. However, through recognizing that the tween market aspired to live every aspect of the traditional American teenage lifestyle, including romance, Disney began to release products that encouraged young audiences to think of Zac Efron and his character ‘Troy’ as an object of desire. For example, I found a hair accessory in the archives that displays a picture of Efron accompanied by the words “I love Troy.”
Most significantly, Efron began appearing on the cover of adult magazines such as Rolling Stone (seen in the photo of the 2008 Empire article), inviting a much older audience to share the interest. With this tactic, Disney was able to sell a fictional romantic interest to be enjoyed vicariously through purchasing items that showcase his image. Ultimately, this was the key to leading a new marketing strategy in tween movie culture. While franchises like Harry Potter and Star Wars did not sell their male stars as romantic icons, Disney saw an opportunity to expand the demographic of the fandom, securing more money. The marketing strategy has since been used for other franchises directed at tweens such as The Twilight Saga, which saw its fanbase compete within itself to represent their devotion to either one of the two male leads.
Anna Potter says, “the key to Disney’s ability to maximize High School Musical’s popularity and profitability is not so much the made-for-TV movie’s low budget but rather Disney’s distribution and merchandizing practices.” Ultimately then, the High School Musical franchise highlights Disney’s ability to identify specific target audiences and their aspirations and then to maximize the opportunity of their spending power by providing an extensive range of viewing opportunities and transmedia to consume.
The history of Disney merchandise is well-documented in the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum and the High School Musical items are available to book via the website.
Articles quoted:
Empire December 2008.
Potter, Anna. “It’s a Small World after All: New Media Constellations and Disney’s Rising Star – the Global Success of High School Musical.” International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2012, pp. 117–30, https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877911416889.
Sørenssen, Ingvild Kvale. “Disney’s High School Musical and the Construction of the Tween Audience.” Global Studies of Childhood, vol. 8, no. 3, 2018, pp. 213–24, https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610618796722.
You can find details of the museum's High School Musical holdings at https://www.bdcmuseum.org.uk/explore/search/?q=high+school+musical