I watched the Disney Channel produciton High School Musical 2, the most hyped entertainment event on cable TV since the CNN/YouTube Presidential debate. The frothy, bombastic, hyper-squeaky-clean TV movie bears only a passing resemblance to the corny but human-scale live-action Disney sitcom movies of my own youth.

At minute 41, the precise difference hit me: This is a Bollywood movie that happened to have been made in Hollywood (well, actually filmed in Utah). All your Mumbai-musical elements are there–the gleeful overacting, the sudden breaking into song-and-dance at unpredictable intervals, the almost-but-not-quite-kissing moves in the flirtation dances, the overwrought farce, the family/tribal bonding elements, and especially the X-treme “wholesomeness” turned up to fetish/kink levels.

Elsewhere in East-Meets-West-land, I present the absolute weirdest thing South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have ever made. It’s a series of totally-sincere online animation shorts, done in standard SP style, based on brief snippets of speeches by the late philosopher/guru Alan Watts. Really.