Sky High (2005 film)

Sky High
Theatrical release poster (L-R: Kelly Vitz, Winstead, Angarano, Russell, Preston, Strait, Panabaker)
Directed by	Mike Mitchell
Produced by	Andrew Gunn Brian Grazer Ron Howard
Written by	Paul Hernandez Bob Schooley Mark McCorkle
Starring	Michael Angarano Danielle Panabaker Kelly Preston Mary Elizabeth Winstead Steven Strait Lynda Carter Bruce Campbell Cloris Leachman Dave Foley Kevin McDonald Kurt Russel
Music by	Michael Giacchino
Cinematography	Shelly Johnson
Editing by	Peter Amundson
Studio	Gunn Films Max Stronghold Productions Inc.
Distributed by	Walt Disney Pictures
Release date(s)	July 29, 2005 (2005-07-29)
Running time	100 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$35 million
Box office	$86,369,815

Sky High is a 2005 American comedic superhero family film about an airborne school for teenage superheroes. It was directed by Mike Mitchell and written by Paul Hernandez, Robert Schooley, and Mark McCorkle. The starring cast includes Michael Angarano as Will, an incoming freshman at the school; Danielle Panabaker as his best friend; Kurt Russell and Kelly Preston as his parents; Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a popular senior; Steven Strait as Will's rival; and Lynda Carter as the principal. Andrew Gunn, Brian Grazer and Ron Howard produced the film for Walt Disney Pictures.

Plot

The story describes the beginning of the freshman year for Will Stronghold (Michael Angarano) at Sky High School, a school for young superheroes that floats in the sky. Will's parents pose as suburban real-estate agents Steve and Josie Stronghold, but they are really The Commander (Kurt Russell) and Jetstream (Kelly Preston), the two most famous and powerful superheroes. The Commander has superhuman strength, and Jetstream is able to fly. Will's best friend is Layla (Danielle Panabaker), a pretty supergirl who can manipulate plant life.

The students at Sky High include Speed (Will Harris), a bully who can run faster than the human eye can see; Lash (Jake Sandvig), a bully who can stretch his body; Penny (Malika and Khadijah Haqq), a cheerleader who can make copies of herself; and Warren Peace (Steven Strait), the brooding, fire-throwing son of a supervillain and a superhero, who are currently at war. Warren's father was sent to prison by the Commander, and will be released after his third life. As the school year begins, Will is the only student who has not yet developed any superpowers. Students with great powers are taught to be heroes, while less capable youngsters are designated as "hero support" and derisively referred to as "sidekicks". The abilities of the sidekicks include melting, glowing, and turning into a guinea pig. Will is put into the sidekick program due to his lack of powers, and Layla is made a sidekick after she protests the two tiered schooling by refusing to demonstrate her powers.

At the end of Will's first day at Sky High, the Commander shows him the Stronghold family's underground control center, the Secret Sanctum, which holds souvenirs from past battles. One souvenir is a weapon called a "Pacifier", which the Commander took from his arch-enemy, a supervillain named Royal Pain, fifteen years ago. Another is the eyeball of a robot the Commander recently defeated. As the Commander and Will chat, Royal Pain remotely spies on them through a camera hidden in the eyeball.

Will initially makes friends with the sidekicks, but he is transferred to the Hero program after he discovers his latent super-strength inherited from his father during a fight with Warren. He also attracts the attention of Gwen Grayson (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a beautiful "technopath" who controls machines with her mind. Will makes a date with Layla to prove he still likes her, but he forgets about it and has dinner with Gwen and his parents, so Layla tries to make him jealous by getting Warren to go with her to the Sky High homecoming dance.

On the day before the dance, Gwen tricks Will into throwing a party at his house, and Speed steals the Pacifier when she seduces Will into showing her the Secret Sanctum. She also convinces Layla that Will no longer likes her, but Will rejects Gwen's snobbishness and refuses to go to the dance with her, even though his parents have promised to attend as honorary guests. After his parents leave for the dance, Will reads the Commander's school yearbook, which contains a photograph of a girl who looks just like Gwen. When he sees a picture of the girl holding a pacifier, he guesses that the girl is Royal Pain and Gwen is her daughter, sees that the Pacifier is missing, and concludes that Gwen must be avenging herself on the Commander for defeating her mother. Will contacts the Sky High bus driver (Kevin Heffernan), who rushes him to the dance.

Meanwhile, Gwen reveals to the dance participants that she is Royal Pain herself, who was formerly a brilliant schoolgirl who invented the pacifier, but despite that and her powers, she was underestimated by the school and therefore made a sidekick. Outraged, she hatched a plan to destroy Sky High and replace it with her own school for supervillains, with the intention of turning everyone into babies with the Pacifier and raising them into villains. Only Warren and the sidekicks escape.

When Will arrives at school, he apologizes to Layla and teams up with Warren and the sidekicks to defeat Gwen, Speed, Lash, and Penny. He discovers he has also inherited his mother's flying ability when Gwen throws him off Sky High's floating platform, and he helps to hold the school in the air as the sidekicks reactivate its sabotaged antigravity device. The babies are returned to their original state, Will and Layla kiss, and the dance resumes while Royal Pain and her gang are held in the detention room where their superpowers are neutralized. Afterward, the villains are sent to prison, Warren becomes Will's best friend, Layla becomes Will's girlfriend, and the bus driver becomes a superhero after falling into a vat of toxic waste.

Cast

• Michael Angarano as William Theodore "Will" Stronghold, a freshman at Sky High. His parents are the two most famous superheroes — Commander and Jetstream — as well as Maxville's top real estate agents in their secret identities. He has both super strength and flight.
• Danielle Panabaker as Layla Williams. Will's best friend since childhood. She is a pacifist, vegetarian, and feminist, and is able to animate and control plant life. Her mother's abilities are said to allow her to talk to animals, and her father is a normal human.
• Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Gwendolyn "Gwen" Grayson/Royal Pain/Sue Tenny, a senior at Sky High whom Will has a crush on. Her power is technopathy. Winstead said of her role, "I bounced around. I was either the hero of the sidekicks or the sidekick to the heroes." While in her Royal Pain suit, Patrick Warburton provides the vocal effects.
• Steven Strait as Warren Peace (a pun on the novel War and Peace), the son of an unnamed superheroine and a supervillain known as Barron Battle, a homophone off barren battle (who in jail with four life sentences). He is pyrokinetic, meaning he can control and manipulate fire.
• Dee Jay Daniels as Ethan, a sidekick who is friends with Will, he can melt into a small orange puddle (which earned him the nickname "Popsicle"). His color code is mostly red, orange and yellow. In the end, he gets notified as a hero because after he melted, he made Lash fall into a toilet, stopping him from doing anything else that might destroy the school.
• Kelly Vitz as Magenta/Maj, Will's friend whose ability is to shapeshift into a guinea pig complete with purple highlights/streaks in her fur. In the end, Maj gets notified as a hero because without her ability to transform and Zach's ability to glow in the dark, they wouldn't be able to crawl through the vent system and stop Sky High from being destroyed.
• Nicholas Braun as Zachary "Zach" Braun/Zack Attack, Will's spacey childhood friend, who has the latent ability to glow in the dark.
• Malika and Khadijah Haqq as Penny Lent, Gwen's best friend, who can duplicate herself and is naturally athletic.
• Jake Sandvig and Will Harris as Lash and Speed, the resident bullies at Sky High; Lash is skinny, and has elasticity and can stretch his body parts far, while Speed is large yet can run at super speed.
• Kurt Russell as Steve Stronghold/The Commander, Will's father. As the Commander, he is one of the world's strongest superheroes, displaying superhuman strength and invulnerability, and is a successful businessman in his secret identity.
• Kelly Preston as Josie DeMarco-Stronghold/Jetstream, Will's mother. She is a successful real estate agent. As Jetstream, she has the power of supersonic flight; she is also touted as being an expert in hand-to-hand combat.
• Lynda Carter as Principal Powers, the principal of Sky High. She appears to have the power to transform into a comet and back at will. She mainly uses her power as a form of transportation.
• Bruce Campbell as Tommy Boomowski/Coach Boomer/Sonic Boom, the gym teacher at Sky High, also known as Sonic Boom due to his ability to release sonic waves from his vocal cords. His power is known as sonic screaming. His real name is Tommy Boomowski as seen in the Commander's Sky High Yearbook.
• Kevin Heffernan as Ron Wilson, the Sky High bus driver/pilot. Ron is the son of two superheroes but does not have any powers himself. He feels a great sense of pride in driving the "superheroes of tomorrow" to school.
• Cloris Leachman as Nurse Spex, a kind and eccentric elderly lady that serves as Sky High's single known nurse, with the ability of X-ray vision.
• Jim Rash as Mr. Grayson/Stitches, Royal Pain's bumbling sidekick. He raised her as his daughter after she was turned into a baby by the Pacifier.
• Dave Foley as Jonathan Boy/All-American Boy, the Commander's old sidekick. He now works as Hero Support teacher at Sky High.
• Kevin McDonald as Professor Medulla, the Mad Science teacher, with a hyper-advanced (and oversized) brain, which grants him advanced intelligence, creativity and a multitude of genius-level skills – so much that even when he is reduced to a baby by the Pacifier, he still possesses an intellect greater than the average adult.
• Kim Rhodes as Elastic Girl/Professor Jeannie Elast, who has the talent to twist her body into anything she wants.
• Tom Kenny and Jill Talley as Mr. and Mrs. Chester Timmerman, who make a small cameo in the movie.

Production

Oviatt Library at CSU Northridge

Exterior shots of the Sky High school were filmed at the Oviatt Library at California State University in Northridge.

According to scifi.com, Disney was attracted by the "original concept" of "children of superheroes going to high school", originally conceived by screenwriter Paul Hernandez in the 1990s. After recruiting comedy writers Mark McCorkle and Bob Schooley for polishing Hernandez's script, Disney hired several comedians like Kevin McDonald, Dave Foley, and Kevin Heffernan for supporting roles. For the main roles, the casting was a mix of established and new teenager actors: while Michael Angarano and Mary Elizabeth Winstead were already successful, Danielle Panabaker was little-known and Steven Strait (a former model) was hired after his first audition ever.

Producer Mike Mitchell said that Sky High functions on two premises: "the adults are all insane" and "the girls are smarter than the boys": Therefore, all the adults portrayed in the film tend to be caricatured, while the teenage girls are written as more assertive and powerful than the boys. For the treatment of the teenage actors, Mitchell also stated that the actors all had their own trailer and were generally kept separated, because "we did not want them to date after the second week and break up after the fourth", which would have made filming difficult.

Mitchell, a science fiction fan, admitted that this project "was a dream", because it brought him together with four of his favorite SF cult heroes: namely Wonder Woman (popularized in the eponymous 1970s series by actress Lynda Carter), Snake Plissken (portrayed by Kurt Russell), Ash Williams (from Evil Dead, played by Bruce Campbell) and Cloris Leachman, who earned fame as Frau Blücher in Young Frankenstein.

Notes about the movie

• It is one of the first theatrical film movies (along with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) to be only released on DVD and never released on VHS.
• It was released in summer 2005, a year before Zoom, a Tim Allen film that explores similar territory.

Reception and box office figures

Sky High received generally favorable reviews. Based on review aggregrator Rotten Tomatoes, the film earned a "fresh" rating of 72% positive reviews (85 positive, 33 negative). Critics on this website were generally favorable on the firmly tongue-in-cheek nature of the film, which knowingly spoofed comic clichés, but others found it too cheesy. Commercially it was a success: on an estimated budget of US$35 million, it earned just under $64 million in the US alone, and another $22 million internationally, bringing the total to just over $86 million.

Soundtrack

Sky High (Original Soundtrack)
Soundtrack album by Various Artists
Released	July 26, 2005
Genre	Soundtrack
Label	Hollywood Records
Singles from Sky High (Original Soundtrack)
"I Melt with You" Released: 2005

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic

The Sky High Original Soundtrack was released by Hollywood Records on July 26, 2005, and is composed of covers of songs from the 1980s.

Track listing

1. "I Melt with You" – Bowling for Soup (Originally by: Modern English)
2. "Through Being Cool" – They Might Be Giants (Originally by: Devo)
3. "Save It for Later" – Flashlight Brown (Originally by: The Beat)
4. "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" – Christian Burns (Originally by: Tears for Fears)
5. "One Thing Leads to Another" – Steven Strait (Originally by: The Fixx)
6. "Lies" – The Click Five (Originally by: Thompson Twins)
7. "Voices Carry" – Vitamin C (Originally by: 'Til Tuesday)
8. "Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want" – Elefant (Originally by: The Smiths)
9. "True" – Cary Brothers (Originally by: Spandau Ballet)
10. "Just What I Needed" – Caleigh Peters (Originally by: The Cars)
11. "Can't Stop the World" – Ginger Sling (Originally by: The Go-Go's)
12. "And She Was" – Keaton Simons (Originally by: Talking Heads)
13. "Twist and Crawl" – Skindred (Originally by: The Beat)

See also

• PS 238

External links

• Official website
• Sky High at the Internet Movie Database
• Sky High at AllRovi