OKAY YOU ASKED FOR IT I’M POSTING THIS I’m warning you though this is a really long and self-important essay about a perfectly charming Disney movie and should not be taken seriously
Disney’s movie Sky High is is one of my favorite movies ever. X-Men meets Harry Potter, with that good ol’ Disney Channel Original Movie feel to it and special effects that wouldn’t be out of place in a Power Rangers episode. I’ve seen this movie approximately 1,000 times since I was 14 and I still enjoy it every time. It’s about a flying high school for superpowered teenagers - and, being me, I am now going to talk for a really long time about why said high school is a completely corrupt institution.
Now, Sky High isn’t just a school FOR children with powers - it’s a school specifically designed to prepare children with powers to be superheroes. Upon graduation, they choose their superhero names, costumes, and are assigned a sidekick from sidekick class. Heroes and sidekicks are separated from each other during the first day of freshman year, where they display their powers, and the gym teacher decides if their powers are lame (sidekick) or awesome (hero). He shows a clear preference for destructive powers. A boy with super projectile spit is labelled as “sidekick,” until the spit turns out to be acid, and he’s updated to hero. Another boy who can turn into a puddle of gooey liquid - an INTENSELY USEFUL POWER - is stuck in sidekick class. Not only that, but sidekicks and heroes are kept separate, not only by the kids themselves - the losers versus the popular kids - but by the school as well. Sidekicks have entirely separate classes, and at one point a PA announcement asks that the sidekicks “please stop ordering hero sandwiches.” It’s a throwaway joke, but still. The sidekicks are barred from EATING THE SAME FOOD as the heroes.
Now, my question is: what is Sky High doing to prevent supervillains developing at Sky High right alongside the heroes? Chances are disgruntled sidekicks are likely to go rogue, considering how they’re treated by the school, but maybe since their powers are lame they’re not considered a threat. But it’s actually happened before - the main villain of the story had a power that no one understood, was stuck in sidekick class, and then turned out to be way more powerful than anyone thought. At least one other villain is stated to have come out of Sky High. How, in a school that is specifically for training superheroes, do they justify the production of villains?
Some of these high schoolers actually end up going bad before the end of the movie. For - you know, some reason that’s never really explained, except that they are Bad Eggs. The two main Bad Eggs are named Speed and Lash, and their superpowers are superspeed and super-stretchiness, respectively - not particularly villainous powers. They are in the hero class, and are also bullies because this movie is about high schoolers. During a training exercise in which the students are learning how to use their powers to save civilian lives, the coach asks them if they’d rather be heroes or villains in the scenario. “Villains!” they reply gleefully, and the coach shrugs and says “There’s a surprise!” C’mon man. At a school where you are literally training kids to be heroes, HOW DO YOU NOT SEE A RED FLAG HERE?
The answer is that Sky High focuses more on the destructive nature of the student’s powers - fighting, basically - than it does on teaching the students to actually care about civilian lives. The teachers themselves don’t seem to care about civilian lives. The training exercise, called “Save the Citizen,” involves a mannequin being lowered on a rope towards a pit of whirring spikes. The “heroes” must defeat the “villains” and retrieve the mannequin before it’s ripped apart by the spikes. While observing the game, two teachers remark, “Ah, remember when we used to use real citizens?” Again, a throwaway joke, but…eesh. They’re not teaching these kids to be compassionate heroes genuinely devoted to doing good - they’re teaching them to be fighters. And who do they fight? Why, the other students - the ones who received the same training, go bad, and become villains.
Sure, of course you can argue that Harry Potter produced its share of dark wizards, and Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters produced its share of bad mutants - because all uniquely powerful children end up at these institutions regardless of their inherent goodness or badness. But Sky High is different. It is literally training its students for ONE CAREER - to be heroes. Their reaction to students acting out is to stick them in a room that neutralizes their powers and leave them there, unsupervised. The students that go villain at the end get thrown straight into jail. Why isn’t Sky High keeping an eye out for these potential villains and seeking to mentor them? The answer as I see it is: SKY HIGH KNOWS IT IS PRODUCING VILLAINS, and doesn’t care. Supervillains are PART of a hero’s status quo - and without a villain, heroes would not look half so heroic in comparison.
The protagonist of the movie, Will Stronghold, on his first day of school, encounters another boy, Warren Peace (yep), who is the son of a supervillain who was thrown into jail by Will’s dad. Upon noticing Warren glaring at him and learning of the connection between their parents, Will states, “Great. First day of Sky High, and I already have an archenemy.” The speed at which he jumps to this conclusion is remarkable, as the two have yet to even speak to each other. Is this normal behavior? Do students of Sky High choose not only their names, costumes and sidekicks before they graduate, but also their archnemeses? Will and Warren’s dads were incidentally part of the same graduating class, and the rivalry between them when they were still in school is brought up in the dialogue during one part of the movie. HMMMMMMM.
Throughout the course of the entire movie, Layla - Will’s hippie best friend - is the only person (besides the villain) to call out the corrupt nature of the school. “Seems fascist,” she says, upon learning that they will be demonstrating their powers in front of the class and then being divided into hero and sidekick classes. No one seems to take her very seriously - not even herself. She refuses to use her powers for violence, but before the end of the movie, does just that. The theme of the movie is sidekicks becoming the heroes - but doing so by learning to use their “lame” powers for destructive purposes. The boy who can turn into a puddle of goo, Ethan, is a tiny nerd, and so constantly gets swirlies from the bullies, but by the end of the movie uses his gooiness to trick one of the bullies (the stretchy one) into getting his head SUCKED DOWN THE TOILET and probably drowns him I dunno. Right after that, he turns into a puddle and makes another bully slip on him and crash into a wall. The only non-powered character in the whole movie, Ron Wilson (bus driver), is portrayed as a sad loser who is constantly around heroes but can never be one. He steps up too, during the finale - but as a kicker, in the epilogue he falls into a vat of toxic waste, gains powers, and is able to grow to an enormous size in order to fight giant robots.
So really, the ending is all about sticking to the status quo. At no point is the sidekick/hero dichotomy abolished. The sidekicks are given a pat on the head and a kiss on the cheek as a reward for saving the day, but nothing changes. Sky High will continue to produce countless flashy world-savers, and at least as many threats to humanity at the same time.
There’s one line of dialogue early in the movie that is particularly telling. Upon learning that one of his classmates can control technology with her mind, Will Stronghold responds, “Wow. All I can do is punch stuff.” At this point their mad scientist teacher wanders past and remarks, “And yet you’ll be the one on the cereal boxes. Show me the justice in that.”