School Gate: Are these the 20 best high school musicals ever?

You don't like High School Musical, do you? In as much as you've heard of it, that is. You might, after all, have spent the last two years on the Moon; or have been held captive in a cellar by terrorists. Or have lost both your eyes, and your ears, in a terrible bicycle crash. Great personal suffering might have prevented you from having seen even a second of High School Musical, High School Music 2 or trailers for High School Musical 3: Senior Year, released in cinemas on October 22.

And if this is the case, there are many who would say that you are lucky. That you do not know you are born. For while nearly every child between the ages of 4 and 14 loves High School Musical, adults tend to hate it with a passion. It is Disney at its most calculating and saccharine, they say. It's a musical where a demographically representative bunch of kids learn to love and respect each other, through a series of up-tempo song-and-dance routines. In other words, another bloodless, assembled-by-committee piece of Disney marketeering. It's like a full-length Benetton ad.

By the lord Harry, the two central characters of the musical - Troy and Gabriella - don't even get to kiss until the end of the second film, after 190 minutes of screen time, so that the movie can be flogged to India, Pakistan and the Middle East with the minimum of editing.

“Come on, Disney!” you might scream. “Your 21st-century musicals make The Sound of Music look like Betty Blue! At least Rodgers and Hammerstein were juggling horny nuns, Liesl in her wet chiffon dress and the Nazis! By contrast, High School Musical's edgiest moment is when one of the basketball team admits that he really wants to learn how to cook crème brûlée. And that's literally true; and not even me exaggerating!”

The problem is that anyone who despises High School Musical is as Reepicheep, C.S. Lewis's spunky mouse-warrior, bravely but futilely attacking dragons with a needle-sized rapier. The franchise is huge. The DVDs of High School Musical sold 1.2million copies in its first week of release. Now High School Musical 3 has been given a worldwide cinema release and broken advance-ticket sales set by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. We are living in a High School Musical era. Your kids are High School Musical kids. You need to Get Your Head In The Game. What Time Is It? It's probably five minutes from another screening on the Disney Channel. Whether you like it or not, We're All In This [watching High School Musical, possibly against your will] Together.

I, however, demur from all the eschewing. I am proud to say that I love High School Musical. I love it like I love Jeeves and Wooster or a pot of tea. Rather than being, as critics would claim, a bloodless bastardisation of the once-proud musical genre, the films' forebear is clearly the Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney Babes in Arms franchise. It's a bunch of bright, well-meaning kids who overcome small, photogenic obstacles to put on a musical, right here. Again.

The only difference is that Disney in 2008 - unlike MGM in 1939 - actually has some cultural awareness, and doesn't get the cast to black up and do minstrel numbers as Garland and Rooney did.

Indeed, one of the most cheering aspects of High School Musical - and 2008's other Disney musical, the extremely similar Camp Rock - is just how much emphasis is put on inclusivity and tolerance. The interesting, quirky, creative outsiders always triumph. The fat kids can really bust a move. Grown-ups, and people who live outside Idaho, will form almost immediate conclusions about the future sexual predilections of Ryan - a demon dancer, habitually clad in pink trousers. Viewers under 10, however, will grow up fully accepting that some boys, when asked to play baseball, will just want to dance around the pitch wearing a pink trilby instead.

And anyway, my misty fondness for subversively tolerant light entertainment aside (see also Doctor Who), the films are genuinely pleasurable. I have downloaded many of their upbeat yet yearning power ballads on to my iPod, to listen to even when the children aren't around. I have had guiltily impassioned conversations with other parents about how the films' star, Zac Efron - a man with a name that sounds like a newly discovered particle at CERN - is a gigantic talent. I think about his future career a great deal. I want to see him in a remake of Grease. I want to see him in a series of increasingly dark musicals that highlight his peerless ability to look confused, stupid and incredibly handsome. I want to see him singing Hakuna Matata from The Lion King, naked; but that's by the by.

So yes. This may well be a High School Musical world - but you have nothing to fear from it. Be happy for your children. Buying them tickets to see High School Musical 3 is just another part of responsible parenting - like putting them in Clark's school shoes, or giving them Heinz beans.

Also, FYI, mums: Zac Efron has a topless locker scene in it. Just, you know, FYI.

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