What did you watch when you were a child? Was it strictly educational videos creating songs to help you learn the numbers and letters? Did you see fun cartoons depicting the silly adventures of various talking animals? Were there movies that you now realize were highly inappropriate for your 7-year-old self and are probably the reason why you have a strange fear of going swimming after dark? Personally, I watched a lot of Disney Channel Original Movies.

As I have grown older, something has remained appealing about these movies. They are simultaneously over and underacted and, 90 percent of the time, could barely pass for an "okay" film. Despite the underwhelming quality, there is an irrepressible fun that exudes from most of these movies.

This summer, my two closest friends and I decided that we were going back to watch our Disney Channel favorites. Sometime around mid-July, we revisited “High School Musical 3: Senior Year.” As I watched these characters graduate high school and move on with their lives, I thought back to my own high school graduation. I remember walking across the stage, taking my diploma, and thinking that I would never again feel the insecurities about myself and my future that had plagued me all throughout high school. Unfortunately, this was not true. The same insecurities followed me into college and still affected me in the same way they did back then. Anxieties that I grew out of were replaced with newer, more adult ones.

However, while watching these caricatures graduate, I could genuinely believe that these people were going to be fine. They were going to go to college, be successful, and live happy and full lives. As my friends and I watched the movies that had been childhood favorites and some new, soon-to-be favorites of the younger generation, I found myself wishing that this optimism could exist in the media made for adults. Why does cynicism have to be synonymous with adulthood? What remains as an element in both the older Disney Channel movies (i.e.“Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century”) and the newer (“Teen Beach Movie”) is an inherent optimism for the future. The characters in these films are always excited for what is to come in their lives, and it is so refreshing.

I appreciate the antiheroes present in today's entertainment. Walter White, Don Draper, and Lisbeth Salander have helped to boost character-quality in today's media. However, there no longer seems to be a place for optimism in our entertainment. Even sitcoms like "30 Rock" base their humor upon layers of sarcasm and hurt. In a world where so much value can be placed in the undoing of people's lives and society, should there not be an equal importance placed upon telling stories of a bright future ahead?

However, until those television shows and films are made, I'll stick to my Saturday nights spent with friends watching a Disney Channel Original Movie together.