The Mutated IP of the Mean Girls Reboot

Culture Study Podcast

Anne Helen Petersen

Fashion & Beauty, Society & Culture, Arts

4.6 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2024

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week I’m joined by Michelle Cyca to talk about the trailer for the Mean Girls reboot. You might think: wow, that’s a very small thing to focus on, what could you possibly talk about for 45 minutes… but just you wait. WHY are they hiding that it’s a musical? WHO do they think is the actual audience for this movie? What happens when millennial content is rebooted for Gen-Z audiences without context? And why is Tina Fey apparently uncancellable? We cover it all.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	How can we describe this for viewers who might not have seen it?
0:04.8	I think for viewers who've seen the original Mean Girls movie, imagine if you fed that movie
0:11.2	to an AI and asked it to like rewrite the movie with 2023 jokes in it for like Zoomer kids. And also like aesthetic choices.
0:24.6	And I'm not just talking about fashion more like there's a couple different places where
0:28.6	it's obvious that people are making like TikToks about the events that have transpired.
0:34.4	Which I think is a really fascinating choice because one of the things about the original
0:38.9	Mean Girls movie that's so striking if you watch it now is it came out in 2004. So it predated
0:44.1	social media almost entirely. I think Facebook had been around for like two months when that
0:48.7	movie came out. Yeah. And so in the movie, this like burn book is so crucial because, you know, that was like
0:57.0	literally how people recorded rumors in this pre-social media age. But now with TikTok, it's like,
1:03.4	how are we meshing these digital and analog forms of bullying together in a way that's going to make
1:09.2	sense to kids today. Right.
1:11.4	And so the other thing about the trailer, it's like all the different characters have
1:15.6	been updated in some capacity.
1:18.1	But Tina Fey is still there.
1:20.0	Yep.
1:20.4	And how would you describe what Tina Fey looks like?
1:23.3	Tina Fey looks like she did in the first movie.
1:26.3	She's, I think, wearing the same outfits.
1:28.9	And she has the same lines.
1:31.2	Like, they could have just stitched in scenes from the first movie for Tina Faye.
1:36.5	She didn't update her wardrobe or her character or her dialogue.
	...

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