The Mutated IP of the Mean Girls Reboot

Culture Study Podcast

Arts, Society & Culture

4.5 • 789 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.Show Notes:THE TRAILER IN QUESTION:Some context about studios shying away from marketing musicals as suchRevisiting Queen Bees and WannabesI misremembered how Drive Me Crazy is integrated into the movie — it’s more like the movie is integrated into the video for the Britney song???Julia Stiles’ unforgettable modern dance routine at the end of Save the Last Dance:Mean Girls 2 did in fact existJust in case you forgot Laura Dern’s style from Jurassic ParkRe: the Barbie Marketing Campaign (via Variety)The piece I wrote back at BuzzFeed News after seeing Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: “It’s Time to Stop Apologizing for Tina Fey”All about Michelle Cyca!!!Follow Melody on Instagram and follow the show on Instagram!We’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:SITTING. Is it that bad? How do you feel about how much you sit? Do you do anything to sit more or less?The cultural force that is/was Contemporary Christian MusicMoms for LibertyThe appeal of the ACOTAR seriesGoodreads (what has made it so bad, a particular trend you’ve observed, should you go to Storygraph, you can take this anywhere you want)Very Contemporary Architecture Trends (like ‘modern farmhouse’) and/or wtf is going on with Chip & Joanna Gaines these days, why is their new show so banalWhatever Bradley Cooper’s deal isYou can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here (and here’s the subscriber-only priority form)Would love to hear your thoughts on the Mean Girls trailer (and the movie if you see it) — come join us in the comments!

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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