High School Musical took all the grownups by surprise. It became a phenomenon because the kids couldn't get enough of it.

The kids most likely to be fans are in fifth through eighth grades. These are still children, though they have aspirations of more sophisticated behavior. Very little popular entertainment focuses on this age group's combination of naivete and need to look forward to growing up, which in their case means high school. When I put the sound track of HSM on at work, we had spontaneous dancing in the round room where we have story time.

The magazines most likely to be checked out are the ones with the HSM stars featured on the cover. The novelizations of both movies, and of the jumprope movie starring HSM's Corbin Bleu, have hit the NYT Bestseller list. Children are reading, folks.

The high school kids are after meatier stuff in their musicals. They're all going to see Hairspray, which, not by coincidence, features Zac Ephron of HSM to bring in the younger sibs.

HSM2? It was only an echo of the first one. I kind-of liked the baseball number.

HSM3 will not be coming to a cable channel near you. It's going directly to theaters. HSM4 is in the works. Overkill will destroy the phenom, but not before some preteen and early teen fans get some fun out of it.

Art, Gene Kelly's major fantasy ballet sequence in An American in Paris wasn't all that masculine in the American sense when compared to his work in, say, Singin' in the Rain or On the Town, but his audience liked it anyway. The audience determines whether something is worthwhile. You are not HSM's audience. To compare HSM to anything with Gene Kelly in it is rather like comparing Casper the Friendly Ghost to Ghostbusters anyway: the range of talent and the concept differentials are just too great.

And SDAI, as much as I love West Side Story, may I remind you that its positive male role models are either ineffectual adults or teenagers who kill each other? WSS is musical tragedy, far more likely, with its knife-fight ballets, to appeal to emo kids than HSM.

When the first HSM came out, the old Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney musicals occurred to me immediately. Those, too, were charming bits of fluff, harmless family entertainment. We remember them today only because of who the stars eventually became. I'm pleased to see that some of the commentators also see the similarity.