With the release of High School Musical 3 today, I think it’s timely that we discuss yet another important tool that you can use to further your EffTD training. While music unto itself is a great tool, it spawns several tools as well. Lessons, clubbing and “iPodding” are some of these. Watching music-based programming like MTV, MuchMusic and the like used to be considered as well, but they no longer play music videos as a major part of their programming. These channels had already succeeded in their missions of killing the careers of less TV-friendly faces like Christopher Cross and countless others (that I cannot remember as I can’t put faces ot the names), so there is really no need for them to continue doing what they did. Now they can just fill the void left by the absence of Robin Leach and show off celebrity homes (known as “cribs”) and leave music programming up to reality television.
The musical is one of the other “children” of music, with the “al” substituting for the less pronunciation-friendly “jr.” Musicjr just doesn’t roll off the tongue. And while the musical was once incredibly popular in the days of such luminaries as George Gershon (father of scintillating actress Gina Gershon), Nat King Cole Porter (who also invented the beer and vocation attributed to his namesake) and Mr. Rogers and Rammstein, after its heyday it became more of an orphaned child. Even though the great musical Grease made an attempt to breathe new life into the genre, it quickly killed it again with Grease 2 – which was forgettable by the few who saw it.
Then another valiant effort to relaunch the musical came about with Moulin Rouge by some Australian guy. It starred Tom Cruise’s ex-wife and Obi-Wan Kenobi as lovers who could never be – even though she was divorced he had already devoted himself to The Jedi Order. I won’t spoil the ending for you when she dies, but I will say that it rocked me to my very core…and I occasionally watch it regularly. Especially the dandy rendition of Like A Virgin. They were so not virgins.
Moulin Rouge begat Glitter…which it promptly ran over with its Peugeot. So it started begatting again with Chicago, which begat A Mighty Wind, which begat The Phantom Of The Opera, which begat Rent, which begat High School Musical, which begat High School Musical 2, which begat Camp Rock. Then High School Musical went out and had another kid with High School Musical 3. Which also proves that even pregnancy amongst high school movies is on the rise.
Why are musicals an essential tool? Well, you had to know I’d eventually get to that…Part Two explores that on Episode 10 of Effing The Dog: The Podcast.
And I’ll do so in song.
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