" High School Musical" was released in 2006, which meant I spent the next six years anticipating my high school experience and hoping it would be just like Gabriella's.
Spoiler Alert: High school is nothing like "High School Musical," almost all of the events that take place in the movie, don't happen in real life high school.
1. New Year's Eve
Where else to begin than where it all started...
Troy and Gabriella first met when they were forced against their will to sing karaoke together at a "teen party" thrown at the super expensive ski resort they had stayed at over winter break. Realistically most high schoolers spend their New Year's Eve destroying someone's unfinished basement.
2. A high school athlete being so idolized
No matter how great of a player you are you will NEVER experience the praise Troy Bolton is given every day of his life. There's should be no surprise as to why he's deemed the best on the team, his dad is the coach!
3. No experience = lead role
In actual high school theatre, performers and directors believe in paying your dues. There is no way that two people who have never sung before would land the lead role in the school musical, especially when they're late to their audition and their competition is Ryan and Sharpay.
4. The last day of school ending like this
Yes, by the end of a long year everyone is itching to get out of there, but no one actually acts like this and if we did you can bet our teachers would make us stay later to clean up. In my experience, come the last couple weeks, students just stop showing up.
5. An entire friend group working at the same place over summer
Don't you just love it when you and your friends all get hired at the same extremely nice country club, I know I do. With the East High Wildcats being the only staff at this luxury summer destination, how could anything possibly go wrong?
6. Chad always carrying a basketball
It's totally acceptable for Chad to just ALWAYS be carrying a basketball. In class, at lunch, during detention, walking in the hallways and at graduation, he has a basketball in hand at all times and no one ever thinks to question him about it.
Why? Because he's Chad.
7. Conveniently come senior year everyone just so happen's to have a "mini-me"
Sharpay and Tiara
Troy and Jimmie "the rocket man"
8. Sharpay staying an extra year for the theatre
Sharpay decides to stay an extra year at East High just so she can be the star of another high school musical and beat out her "mini-me" turned enemy Tiara — OK, because people willingly stayed an extra year of high school. Right.
9. Prom
Prom with Zac Efron, a girl can only dream.
10. It's super normal to hang out in a junkyard
Chad, who continuously claims throughout all three movies how he doesn't dance, finally decides to let loose in a junkyard. Guess we all have that friend.
11. Everyone is best friends by graduation
This one is a great example of expectations vs. reality because if anything the closer it gets to graduation the more people can't wait to leave all their high school foes behind.
It's safe to say that actual high school was nothing like "High School Musical." After the let down of finding out no one has time to sing in dance in the hallways, my friends and I figured that the only way we were going to get through it, was as if "we were all in this together."
Now only if they could make college into a musical...
