High School Musical Retrospective

What can I say about the High School Musical trilogy? I could begin by saying it came out when I was in my first year of college and ended sometime around graduation. Then there was the spin-off called Sharpay's Fabulous Adventure. Aside from the fact that this series gave rise to the show Glee (and even that's polarizing as well), what has it contributed to its audience and the public in general? Differing expectations, that's what.
At first we are treated to a look at high school that is very sectionalized - everyone had a certain interest and only hung out with people who shared that interest with no exceptions for additional ones that may clash with the primary one. While some try to break from their packs and/or stereotypes, everyone else seems to want to keep things the way they are with no celebration of diversity whatsoever. This wasn't exactly what high school was like for me - we had different groups, sure, but they mostly stuck together because whatever they were doing kept them so busy, like band or vocational agriculture. If they had friends outside the group, they didn't really have a chance to see or talk to them much. Some things did match up, however, like when adults placed limits on you based on their expectations of you. In the end, everyone makes up and accepts each other's differences as part of who they are. It would've been okay if it had ended right there, but there were sequels.
Really, this movie did not need a sequel, let alone two and one spin-off. In the beginning Sharpay seems to get rebooted to how she was in the first, even though the original had portrayed her as a changed person by the end of it - unless her glomping Zeke and asking him to bake more cookies for her was just his hallucination. The sequels are too formulaic from the first one, so aside from certain musical numbers they're not even that fun to watch. Sharpay is mean. Gabriella breaks up with Troy and they angst about it. Their best friends are possessive/protective of them. And Lucas Grabiel is Lucas Grabiel (my favorite moment from him is at the end of College Road Trip when Donnie Osmond tackles him). Rinse and repeat. Aside from this, Sharpay seems to be the one with the least amount of growth as a character (even Chad accepts that he and his best friend Troy are going to be competing against each other on rival college basketball teams).
Which brings me to the point of expectations for what life is really like. At the end of the third movie, Sharpay decides to remain behind to help out with the high school's drama club, if mostly to prevent the girl who upstaged her from rising too high. That's supposed to be retribution, but it comes across as more immature than anything. She leaves for New York in her spin-off movie and realizes that the real world isn't exactly welcoming her with open arms the way she thought it would and doesn't see her for the brilliant rising starlet she's aiming to be. That's what most of us realized in our first year of college, especially us honors students who were pushed to our respective breaking points while trying to keep our scholarships. While the movie ends well for her, the set-up being that she was meant for the role all along because the play was basically telling her life story, it just seems too easy. It's fantastic for her that things turned out all right in the end and her snobby idol-turned-nemesis defeated, but it's not realistic. I understand that Disney and Kenny Ortega told the story they wanted to, but for most people the movie would have ended with Sharpay going home and working some dead-end job to make ends barely meet in this economy (which of course Disney can't do because accurate portrayal of the current economic times is depressingly realistic and no one would watch it).
As long as high school kids graduate and expect great things to happen to them (which most already do anyway given what hopes and dreams got crushed during your freshman year of college and ended in the painful debt you might not even be able to pay back now), this series is a bit unrealistic. It's idealistic, something that all of us ultimately want out of life but for some reason or another can't seem to grasp due to lack of opportunities and financial hardship in this day and age. But that's Disney - a happy ending with wish fulfillment that lets the audience live vicariously through the characters.