#**dcoms

and honestly

considering the plotline is “teenage girl discovers that the corporate overlords who are funding a scientific research satellite decide that since the research doesn’t support their product, they’re going to covertly dismantle the satellite and kill everyone aboard in a way that looks like an accident; no one believes her, so she gets banished and has to decide whether to watch from afar as her parents are slow-burn murdered or try to make it back to space to save them despite the risk to her own life,”

Hahaha! I did, that wasn’t one of my Big Gay DCOM Experiences personally, but I can see how it would be.

I was The Most Gay for Kirsten Storms in middle school; it was painful. (Hence doing a book report in 6th grade on Zenon, where she runs around in head-to-toe spandex the whole time.) I also had a lot of confusing aroused feelings towards the entirety of Johnny Tsunami because Kirsten Storms AND Lee Thompson Young, whom I am still so, so sad about like at least once a week.

And GENIUS, which is another Criminally Underrated DCOM, imo. I was just telling Catie @harrythighles that I loved it despite being a Sports DCOM because it had Tiny Emmy Rossum On Ice Skates and there was nothing that middle school me did not love about that.

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!

To be fair, I already own 75 of them, but AMAZING. So much excellent late-90s and early 2000s fashion (“fashion”). Also, some early 2000s dcoms are LEGIT FILM MASTERPIECES AND SHOULD BE AIRED MORE FREQUENTLY INTO MY EYEBALLS.

Lemme tell you, I am 26 and have been watching the Disney Channel for 23 years and seeing it devolve for 15.  NORMALLY, I love Disney Channel stuff (although the last 5-7 years have been seriously Testing Me; the last show they had that I enjoyed was Sonny with a Chance and/or JONAS). 

While the choreography was, as always, very impressive, I didn’t think TBM held up AT ALL compared to their other musical TV movies — or even musical episodes of some of their sitcoms (the Even Stevens musical episode is outstanding, and pretty much the reason Disney started doing musicals, since it was the first musical they did not in conjunction with Wonderful World of Disney on ABC and not for Playhouse Disney pre-K programming). Both of the girl lead singers had extremely weak voices/ranges, which surprised me, and I felt like it had been scripted more like a musical revue than a musical — it was clear that ALL of the focus went into the choreography and very little into… anything else.  The costuming was cute, I guess.

I could tell that TBM was meant, on some level, to be satire and to critique the heteronormative attitudes in ’60s teen beach musicals, but b) DISNEY LITERALLY MADE THOSE TOO, SO THEY OBVIOUSLY AREN’T GOING TO ACTUALLY CRITIQUE THEM VERY HARD and b) a heteronormative white people love story is not a great criticism of heteronormative white people love stories.  It just isn’t.  It can be utilized well, but this did not.

I appreciated that in the end, the female-female friendship was the ~most important one~ and that everyone had their requisite epiphanies about self-determination, but without actually seeing them GET THERE, which is usually DCOMs’ strong suit — like in Rip Girls, another surfing movie they did that was actually about female-female friendships and self-determination, or even High School Musical — it felt too hollow and almost like those realizations were what they were actually mocking.