High School Musical Pool Party
Kids today are bombarded with more images of paradise than ever before. The trend towards advertising everything to children with an ideal warm place—i.e., usually not home—got a pretty good start with Kool-Aid, but now they’re everywhere. You can’t walk past a kids’ clothing store in the mall without being drawn in to the surf jungles. On many levels, it teaches kids that the best places are those that we don’t live in (unless you happen to live in a surf jungle).
With the huge success of High School Musical and High School Musical 2, I couldn’t help but think that there would be images of escape lingering around. Look no farther than the Disney HSM2 website. The theme is dripping with shiny blue pool water everywhere you look. The kids are jumping out of the water with their best summer gear on. The fancy Flash downloads section has the typical inflatable pool raft that slides underneath the freebie options: wallpaper, fan (which is shaped like a Popsicle), and poster options. Click to expand the image.
If you head to the actors’ “dressing rooms,” you get to see little pieces of their lives and things that apparently matter to them. In all but one of these actors’ pages, you can read or see references to beaches, surfing, butterflies, palm trees, and sailboats. I’ve clipped out some of them here (click to expand):
These icons of paradise have become so pervasive in everything that kids see that they are forgetting, or perhaps rarely ever notice, what the actual places in which they live look like. The marketers have realized that these images make kids long to see more and more of them because they are places and people that most of them cannot be, have or visit. The Hollywood machine churns on. Disney’s shareholders must certainly be happy.
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Posted on September 6, 2007
Filed Under Growing Up, Pools |
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