Case in point: I was walking back to work from lunch yesterday, and I walked past a theater that was advertising the new High School Musical movie that’s opening on Friday. Now, my complaint with this isn’t that this is the third movie in the series (meaning, usually, that they’ve gone back to the well one too many times) – considering that it’s the first to actually be shown in a theater, that could be excused if not condoned.

My problem? The theater was advertising a midnight screening (of the Thursday night -> Friday morning variety) of the movie. We all know that the fanbase for this movie is the tween crowd, who on a Thursday morning should be in bed, early, to get ready for the tests that they’ll inevitably face at school the next morning. (At least during my school years, up until I reached high school, Friday was always test day. It was a very clever mechanism the teachers included to ensure that we all attended instead of sleeping in with faked cases of stomach flu.) For Disney to tacitly – if not openly – encourage children to stay up late on a school night, and inevitably skip school the next day after getting home after 2:00 AM, just so their pockets can be filled with a little more money, strikes me as very disingenuous and unthoughtful as to what we should be trying to teach the youth of the country.

Either that, or I can blame AMC and their lot. It’s more fun to blame Disney though.