How Mean Girls made ‘fetch’ happen
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Twenty years after Mean Girls introduced Regina George and her pink-clad Plastics to cinema screens, the high-school Queen Bee is back in a new musical film and a West End stage musical. So why is a film for teenage girls still so popular two decades later? And what did it expose about the complicated politics of girl world?
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Guest: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, pop culture historian and author of So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It).
Host: Manveen Rana.
Clips: Mean Girls (2004)/Paramount Pictures, CBS Sunday Morning, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Conan O’Brien/NBC, The Breakfast Club/Universal Pictures, Clueless/Paramount Pictures, Rosalind Wiseman/The Empower Program, Mean Girls (2024)/Paramount Pictures, Apex Predator/Barrett Wilbert Weed, Erika Henningsen/Mean Girls (Original Broadway Cast Recording).
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You match with Maya on Tinder, you agree you don't fancy each other, but she makes you laugh till it hurts. |
| 0:05.3 | She dragged you to a mate house on the outskirts of the city, and you actually have a great time. |
| 0:10.0 | You connect with some new people, like Isaac, and decide to go to the gallery in the city centre, |
| 0:15.8 | where you bond over your shared appreciation of silence. |
| 0:19.2 | And bit by bit, the world starts to feel so full of possibilities and you think what if I hadn't |
| 0:25.7 | met Maya on tinder it starts with a swipe download the app now. |
| 0:30.0 | Matt Chorley politics without Without the Boring Bits. |
| 0:34.0 | Do you like the Red Box Podcast? |
| 0:36.0 | Well, you'll love the brand new Politics Without the Boring Bits Podcast. |
| 0:41.0 | It's exactly the same, but with a new name, a new logo and even fewer |
| 0:45.2 | boring bits. If you miss my show live, catch up every day. With the columnist and the big |
| 0:50.9 | thing, download the all- new politics without the boring bits wherever you get |
| 0:55.8 | your podcasts. If you haven't watched Mean Girls, don't worry. Your pop culture credentials are still intact, because chances are you probably |
| 1:17.4 | have heard some of its most iconic lines. |
| 1:21.2 | On Wednesdays we were a pink. That is so fetch. |
| 1:25.0 | It's been 20 years since Regina George and her pink-clad plastics |
| 1:30.0 | first roamed their high school corridors and unleashed a wave of internet memes and parodies |
| 1:37.6 | by Ariana Grande, Chris Kardashian and even Barack Obama. |
| 1:45.0 | But look past the one-line singers and you'll find a fascinating insight into the complicated politics |
| 1:55.1 | and social hierarchies of teenage girls. This tricky time which now begins in like third grade sometimes and sometimes |
| 2:05.0 | doesn't end until you're 60. You don't know how to relax and trust other women |
| 2:11.8 | until you do and for some people it goes their whole life. |
... |
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