i can understand why the musical wanted to be more progressive, but why adapt a movie about the toxicity and misogyny between teen girls, when you're not even gonna let them slutshame each other. that still happens today and it's kinda weird to take that out, since the movie already made a point of how bad that behavior is.
Exactly! It kind of worked in Scream Queens, but that show was surreal as hell and the main focus was the campy horror rather than the social structure at play. Whereas watering Mean Girls down is just lame... I don't think anyone wanted that.
Agreed. The movie is so successful because it was willing to be honest about what slut shaming and body shaming and internalized misogyny looks like and does to people.
I absolutely hate when people interpret "progressive storytelling" to mean none of the characters can have any serious faults and nobody does anything particularly bad and everyone is holding hands and singing songs in the end. When actual progress is a BATTLE. progressive politics are in fact incredibly *confrontational*. It's about getting in society and the establishments face and saying "no this is BS". Its about challenging the audience in how they've perpetuated harm or who they've never given a second thought to before, and a call to action to do better. This isnt progressive storytelling. It's liberal elite storytelling. It's shallow, insincere, totally misses the heart of the movie, and is pretty unabashedly a cash grab. The point wasn't to be progressive. It was to avoid any and all potential scandal to maximize the number of people who would want to buy tickets
your theatre director renting an actual golf cart that was only used in two scenes and ended up costing the department most of its budget truly sums up the high school theatre experience
I'm doing legally blonde and we just have the parents stand to the side of the stage. My director also refuses to build the big sorority house set because we only need it for 2 scenes. We are using a rolling ladder instead
I’m very proud of myself because for my senior project I directed the adjacent middle school musical, we made BANK off that show. Off I was a senior so I never saw that money the next year lol
My high school theatre director made her dog, an actual, living, breathing, dog part of our production. Literally no reason, except I, as part of the crew, got to follow the dog around the theatre with a mop and anxiety :)
"Mean girls except the girls aren't mean" sounds like one of those meme edits where someone uploads a version of the movie with 90% of the scenes removed, so it just cuts between the few innocuous scenes of people talking without any insults or scheming and then rolls the credits...
God I LOVE Regina's one line in the bathroom scene "When I woke up in the street, all I could see was my mom's face and Gretchen looking down at me and they looked so surprised...not even sad, just surprised that I could be bleeding. Like they forgot I was a human person. I've been a human person this whole time."
The line really shines a bit of light on the concept of... I guess almost reverse-bullying? Like the idea that bullying is only bad if the victim is someone you like or agree with. Regina is a shitty person, but she is still a person. IRL, laughing at her being hit by a bus would be super shitty even if we felt like she morally deserved it because of her actions. When you cross the line of disdain and become vindictive towards the mean girl, you become the mean girl.
Because when you’re pretty, you’re dehumanized. When you’re ugly, you’re still dehumanized. I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum, nobody thinks you’re human unless you’re average.
I think a big issue with media or adaptations today is that they forget that a villain is allowed to be "problematic." We should have a reason to dislike the villain.
Yeah for example there is a joker graphic novel we’re he does something to a woman and the graphic novel was rated r and people got mad about it like he’s the joker he’s supposed to do messed up things
@@Tplwtch That's like the most well known comic book. I don't think that's really a good example. It's really loved generally and the problem people had with it had more to do with Batgirl than with Joker. People in general hate Batgirl and Batman as a couple because it's fucked up in most cases and makes Batman seem like a jackass father, a huge creep, and the worst friend ever also it makes Batgirl seem less heroic because it brings up the thought of 'did she become Batgirl because she wanted to impress Batman?' which is a valid thought since she was an impulsive teen. It's also a clear cut example of the women in the refrigerator trope that downplays Batgirl's character. I really don't think what Joker did was the main issue people had with the comic. Besides that though it's still generally a beloved comic book that people use as the defacto portrayal of Joker so I wouldn't say it was disliked much, people just didn't like those two things and they didn't make up much of the comic from what I remember.
I think Janis (and Damian!) were definitely supposed to mirror the Plastics. Damian and Regina both say joining the mathletes is social suicide, Janis insults Mrs. Norbury's outfit behind her back, and Janis and Gretchen BOTH say at some point to Cady: "it'll be our little secret".
Don’t forget the best part of all time - in the musical, Damian says to Cady that the plastics will ‘make fun of her name’ in his words exactly. This is basically what Janis does as she purposely mispronounces Cady’s name
Absolutely, Janis and Damian are also manipulating and using Cady all the while going 'oh we're your REAL friends!'. Janis may not be a Plastic but she is absolutely one of the Mean Girls.
as a recovering theatre kid, anyone who says “the lyrics are poorly written because high schoolers are bad at crafting metaphors” was also someone who said “i’m not practicing the choreography because my character is bad at dancing,” and no one likes that guy
@@witchingbrew3 Oh okay. Yeah I loved musicals before they were "trendy" and went to college for musical theatre. But I never got to be much of a "theatre kid" in high school cause the theatre department was awful. So I can't relate.
Yeah I had a character like that for a show but guess what you can still make good choreography from bad dancing, being bad at something in script is not an excuse for laziness.
can i also say i found it really weird that tina fey removed "fugly sl*t" and changed it to "fugly cow" and removed all the other "mean" stuff BUT changed the digs about janis being gay to the entire ensemble outright calling her a slur in chorus 😭
I feel like removing the slut shaming from the show made it weaker, because a large part of the story is how women and girls are pitted against each other so instead of seeking equality, we seek superiority over other girls. Cady's growth as a character is spurred on when she realizes this is what is happening during the scene in the gym, and when she shares her crown. I understand the desire to, I guess, sanitize it, but it shouldn't be at the detriment of the story.
yeah i always loved the line from tina fey's character where she tells the girls they have to stop calling each other sIuts and wh0res bc it just emboldens guys to do the same
The biggest crime committed by the Heathers musical was cutting the line right after "dead gay son" where J.D. whispers to Veronica, "How do you think he would've reacted to a son who had a limp wrist with a pulse?"
a ‘limp wrist’ is a common stereotype or indicator of a gay man. JD is asking “how do you think he would have reacted if he had a gay son that was alive?” rather than dead, aka with a pulse
@@nameless568 Lol! I totally see why that would throw off someone who was ESL. Now, I'm curious to know how they translated that line for foreign audiences.
@@CERTAIND00M I didn’t even know that phrase, and I’m not only a native English speaker, but a gay one at that lol. Maybe “pansy” would work better, it’s a more well know phrase plus it’s got some nice alliteration.
My main problem with the musical is that *no one* is as good at being a mean girl as Rachel mcadams. She’s not over the top or cartoony but she exudes power and it’s an incredible performance. I think it’s because she could be a real teenager at any high school. The Regina George’s I’ve seen from the musical feel like they come from Disney channel original movies where all queen bees are cartoon level villains
I feel like you're almost at the mark but just missed it. It's not that no one is as good as Rachel McAdams at playing a Mean Girl, it's that no one can play *Regina* like Rachel, and the musical is obsessed with trying to be the exact same as the movie, so new actresses just have to do the same as Rachel instead of attempting to put a new spin on the character. This issue spreads throughout the entirety of the show, with them repeating the exact same one liners that don't land the same way that they do on stage, instead just feeling like "HEY GUYS REMEMBER THE MOVIE? LAUGH NOW" (see the "she doesn't even go here" moment) I haven't finished the video, so maybe Sarah addressed this.
To be fair, Im not sure McAdams would have been able to do much better with Regina on stage. So much of what made the character iconic and believable were down to really subtle cues like a tensed mouth, etc. I don't know how you can convey to the audience that a smile is fake, or that Regina has just coldly eyed you up and down when you can't just zoom in on her face as she does it.
Huh, I always assumed Cady's generic "African" background was because her parents were scientists or whatever they were and they traveled around studying and doing research like the Wild Thornberrys so she never really had a single place to be from. Didn't she have a line in the movie about it? Something about the reason she was so fond of math was because even though language and culture changed when you moved from place to place, math was always constant.
also I always thought that was kind of the joke in the first place, the joke being the ignorance of the average American teen. The country Cady is from wasn’t specified bc the characters don’t really care to know or aren’t wondering about it. Like it’s playing on the fact that the average white American high school teen has little to no knowledge about Africa or has a bunch of misconceptions, such as thinking that Africa is a country (as some irl Americans do) or that there are no white people in Africa and that it would be racially insensitive to ask someone from Africa why they are the race that they are. Cady being “from Africa” and no one having any questions about it (other than why are you white) is kind of the joke, and if you don’t find it weird that the specific country is never said or aren’t wondering about it, it’s kind of making fun of you too.
That doesn't make sense though because if they were real biologist and not Hollywood biologists they'd be staying in the general area of whatever animal/plant species they're studying. Africa is not a one-biome place and Cady often compares things to the savannah.
the way mean girls the movie taught a feminist sort of lesson was by showing the awful misogynistic way some girls treated others, and showing that, if you crave to be like them, you're gonna lose both yourself and the people who genuine like you by taking away regina's open misogyny, you take away the core concept of the thing you're trying to adapt
Being a girl boss is still about cutthroat competition with everyone else and treating other women like they are beneath you. Late stage capitalism at work in pop culture. This is not real feminism because feminism is about equality, not about raising up a few women to oppress all the others.
i thought the point of the movie was that by the end, everyone except for damien had become a mean girl. the underlying misogyny was just a part of it. plus all the y2k vibes.
@@stonersirendamian was a mean girl too, in the way karen or gretchen were. he didnt take a lot of direct action himself but he helped with and was entertained by janis and cady's bullying behavior towards regina. (and gretchen, dont forget "none for gretchen wieners bye" lol)
@@vlad5042 that's the thing about characters like damien tho, they are not mean girls, they are intelligent enough to see through it all and are just entertained by it, like you said
It's kind of amazing how Beetlejuice the musical was able to have Lydia sing a song like "Dead Mom" with really clever lyrics and yet make it still sound like a teenager's real voice/manner of speaking. No disrespect to Mean Girls, but it is possible to write teenagers and still write clever lyrics.
My biggest complaint about the musical (and new movie adaptation) is that it completely absolves Janis. My favorite aspect of the original is that Janis is exactly like Regina. She sees people as commodities and is casually cruel and manipulative. There's an alternate timeline where the roles are reversed. It's only that Regina betrayed Janis first. In the musical, she's the hero. Her tempting and manipulating Cady is hinted in the beginning but is never resolved.
Exactly! This problem is *especially* bad in the party scene where Janis calls Cady out. Her saying “at least me and Regina George know we’re mean” is her directly acknowledging her behaviour and makes her a direct mirror of Regina. This being switched out with the song someone gets hurts reprise ruins her. All Janis does in that song is call Cady out for being plastic with no substance to her own behaviour. It’s more like a self-pity “oh woe is me” ballad instead of something that’s filled with rage. This is called back when she sings I’d rather be me, since she paints herself even *more* of a victim by saying “yeah, both of my best friends have turned out to be mean :( I can do better than them” is such a misunderstanding of her character. Janis is mean. Why is she having an emotional power ballad after manipulating Cady for a good chunk of the film? Besides, the lack of anger towards Regina in the movie makes her actions even worse, since it seems like she’s messing with Regina for giggles instead of it coming from a place of genuine anger. Smh
as an irish person i gasped when you inserted the screencap from our prime minister quoting mean girls while easing the coronavirus lockdown measures. had totally repressed that moment of horrific cringe
If you're going to make a musical called Mean Girls adapted from a film called Mean Girls that was full of mean girls, and you decide that actually you don't like it when the girls are mean, it begs the question of why. It just feels unreal and overpolished, in the end, like a bullying PSA or a Lifetime film - both of which expressly exist to reassure adults about teens, not to actually be relevant to them. Nobody would have watched the film if it was just Not Particularly Kind Girls.
Now that you've mentioned the songs and performances seem to have been toned down for the purpose of being good school musical fodder, it makes even more sense the edge has been filed off. People who are old enough to select school musicals will probably recognise this as The Film My Kids Talked About, will have a script stripped of any edge of substance that gives them no reason to dismiss it, and as typical will simply assume this is relatable to teens because why bother checking.
The thing that ruined Mean Girls is the fact that it has become too self aware. It KNOWS it’s iconic. It tries too hard to push its own cultural impact when it doesn’t need to.
i feel like oftentimes ppl try to make media more "progressive" and just end up with "no one can do anything bad ever even the villains" which doesn't really work. let your villains be evil and do bad things. they're villains. that's what they're supposed to do.
YES, I also feel like the push for diversity (which IS good) in shows like heathers and mean girls leads to the beta mean girls (never the alpha mean girl like Heather C or Regina) being women of color, which is kind of a weird thing bc the point is that the mean girls are usually rich, skinny, blinde white girls.
Mia M yeah ive noticed that too. i feel like thats one of a plethora of reasons why the heathers tv show fell flat. the people irl who would be the mean girls are still thin, conventionally attractive, and most likely white and cishet. having the heathers be a fat woman, a genderqueer character, and a black woman is something that wouldnt happen in a high school right now, or at least from what ive observed being in the US.
I really agree, it's an odd form of pandering when people think that the way to make a "progressive" show is to show no one causing any harm. Many people are bad, teen girls do say highly offensive things, you can show that without glamourizing it and allow your audience to use critical thinking.
Also not even villains but like...if you create characters who are not totally perfect or morally correct, it gives them room to grow. Also makes for way more interesting story and characters in general. Why would you create characters who just...don't do anything really? What's the point of writing a story without any sort of conflict?
Early 2000s homophobia was weird. Where I grew up, kids would be bullied mercilessly for being "gay" and the one of a couple times anyone actually came out, the bullying stopped immediatelly (at least from that angle). Like, being actually Gay was fine but Being "gay" was a social death sentence?
It’s an interesting slang phenomenon. “That’s so gay!” was a common expression of disappointment in my school years, with a meaning akin to ‘that sucks!’ or ‘that’s so annoying.’ It was basically universally used but divorced from people being gay, to the point where openly gay students used the phrase too. Although it is of course quite homophobic, it didn’t feel like homophobia, just generic slang, like how ‘bear’ meant ‘very/a lot/many’ and was nothing to do with a bear as in the animal. I think ‘that’s so gay’ has mostly died out now though as phrase, which is good of course, as kids have become more aware of such things. As an example of just how divorced slang can be from its direct denoted meaning, I witnessed something very weird happen in my year once. The popular kids of the year were in a particular set/group for science and had a lesson on states of matter. This resulted somehow in ‘solids’, ‘liquids’ and ‘gases’ becoming a ranking system of insults for a week afterwards. Being a solid was fine and average, but I overheard on several occasions stuff like ‘can you tell Georgia she’s a f***ing liquid’ or ‘she is such a gas’. Totally blew my mind how quickly this happened and then it disappeared and everyone forgot about it. Perhaps in that class the coolest kids were solids and the group had extrapolated the ranks from there? But in this example, the actual slang used was meaningless. They weren’t interested in changes of states of matter, only the words required to be pejorative. It’s a lot like the ‘that’s so gay’ example, which is something so damaging, rude, homophobic and hurtful to say, but it was actually basically only meant neutrally and weirdly wasn’t at all related to sexuality and everyone seemed to understand this. Sorry long comment, but I honestly find the development of slang quite interesting.
@@richardbourton4523 I still don't buy the argument that kids in the 70s and 80s used gay exclusively as a pejorative against homosexual individuals. I find it much more reasonable that most teens who used gay in the negative sense did so sarcastically. We have to remember that gay used to mean happy, joyous, or enjoyable. I can easily imagine a kid sarcastically saying, "Oh, that party was a gay time," and then rolling their eyes. It definitely picks up homophobic intent later, but being used as a synonym for lame is pretty explainable without resorting to latent homophobia in a society that barely called homosexuals "gay people."
The Lebanse thing is actually genious when you think about HOW CRUEL TEENS ACTUALLY ARE. It's deadass the most realistic shit in high school. Someone using Lebanese, and making fun of Lesbians. it's easy humour for bullying.
Yeah I deeply want Janis to be a lesbian and also I love that. Like especially cause they were still in middle school when their friendship destruction happened, so I can see it being genuine confusion but also intentional bullying.
Real talk, I went to middle school/high school with a girl who was from Lebanon and emigrated to the states as a kid and I swear those jokes were thrown around when we were 13 in 2009/10 because lol gay joke in the mid-2000s
yes exactly, and it's just so easy for something like that to be misconstrued (especially in elementary/middle school when they were friends) and the whole "she's supposed to be lesbian" headcanon criticism really doesn't get the point of the entire movie, to not judge a book by its cover (THIS IS LITERALLY THE MOVIE WITH THE BURN BOOK IN IT). it only serves the themes for the girl you as a viewer (and the entire school as an extension) assume to be a lesbian for the whole movie actually being straight. it's not "queer baiting," people just want their headcanons to be true, and justify it with moral grandstanding when it isn't.
Yep. If teens want to bully you, they won’t necessarily bother to pick something that’s true. They’ll just find something that sticks and just use that.
Yeah, I understand why people would like for her to be canonically a lesbian, but the movie Janice was never actually presented as a lesbian. It was always about highlighting the fact teens will find anything about you, literally anything, and morph it into ridicule. The fact that Lebanese sounds like lesbian may be ham-fisted, but degrading people is not always clever, if you can stab two points in a person's identity at once, that's enough.
The way they made Karen act like a toddler was really annoying to me 😭 let women be stupid without making them act like a literal child it’s weird asf. It’s the flanderization of cat valentine all over again
YEAH!!! Like,, this girl is supposed to be seventeen-eighteen, isn't she? Why is she simultaneously the most sexualized character while also being the most infantilized? It's so creepy
Does she? I’ve seen that movie a million times and I don’t remember the mum mentioning anything about Mombasa. She says they’re going to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo, perhaps you’re thinking of that? They’re a South African group, so that combined with the fertility vase of the Ndebele tribe made me think they had been living in South Africa.
So, I was listening to mean girls the musical, and I thought it was alright. But! What immediately turned me off was the way that they make teens talk. It basically sounds like a parody of what middle aged people think teens say. The one that really stood out to me was when Kady was trying to make friends and she goes up to this one girl who says “un subscribed” as an insult Who? Whom? Whomst? Find me literally one person who has said that not trying to either make fun of teens or what people thought teens are like. Yeah, that’s just something that bothered me, it’s not that big of a deal though, but writing this made me feel better.
Yeah I agree. The musical doesn't feel like mean girls at all but the biggest problem with this musical in my opinion is how they totally got rid of the themes and moral of the movie by making it PC instead. The whole point of mean girls was showing how mean girls can be to each other. So by taking out some of the meanest lines about s*** shaming you are really down playing how it's girls who sl** shame each other the most and are the most cruel to one another. Even if you were trying to go from a "feminist" angle in this you are doing a disservice to feminism by completely ignoring the fact, that was in the original movie, which was how the "patriarchy" doesn't need to be propped up by men anymore it's women upholding the "patriarchy". They made mean girls far too PC which is a major f****** problem and major mistake because why are girls who are cruel to one another going to be PC????!!!! They might as well call this musical the PC girls then. Mean girls is beloved by so many people of all genders races and orientations and by changing anything from the script to make it less mean and less offensive you are throwing the whole point of mean girls and the whole moral of the movie out the f****** window. This musical truly was a disaster
I kinda felt this way about the original movie. Like, especially at the age I was when I watched it. I hadn’t heard any teenager or young person sound like that. Maybe it’s because the movie is very American, but I just did not relate to the “teenager” aspect of the movie.
@@pykenotpike it wasn’t as obvious with the original movie because it was a completely satirical film in all regards, but the musical didn’t play up the absurd nature of the movie and so it felt tone death.
You briefly touched on Janis not being goth, but another thing I disliked about the musical was the production side of things. As someone who is studying theatre design, the costume design for a lot of characters was not it AT ALL. For supposedly being an updated musical, the costumes felt absolutely dated. It was more tacky than real, if anything. The screen type set also irked me to no end for how lazy it was. I get that they wanted to incorporate social media, but like the lyrics, it was clearly done in a way that was more reminiscent of a 40 year olds perspective than of a teenager. It had absolutely no bite or relevance other than saving money.
interestingly enough, the tour recently updated a lot of the costumes to keep up with modern trends. im not sure if broadway also did this, but i think its an interesting way to handle things. the broadway version came out a few years ago when most of the clothing was considered passable if not completely on trend, though now its entirely outdated
Same! Especially the pics of the accidentally exposed ass with that specific early 2010s text meme format, like teenagers haven’t done that shit in a decade.
Mean Girls is one of the most iconic references of y2k fashion and a big part of the resurgence now. So the costuming is wildly disappointing and ugly and most of it isn't flattering on the actors.
something I noticed immediately was that costume-wise the musical lost what made the movie’s style so on-brand and smart. I suggest watching ModernGurl’s video on her style analysis but it’s so clear they just stuck them in pink and what they thought was trendy which is such an injustice to the careful craftsmanship of the movie :(
I cringe everytime I think about the musicals costumes. Karen looked like a ten year old, Reginas were just so over the top, Gretchen dressed like a 40 year old and Cadys actually weren't horrible. They clearly had no idea what teens wore
@@All-ze9clyou have to think about the unique needs of musical costumes. You have 1-2 minutes to get into them, maybe a bit more for some costume changes and they need to be able to be danced in. They also need to convey their message of what exactly they are about for people much farther away.
@@zachw566 that is true, theater is different from movies, but I feel like Karen’s did not need the stupid rainbow necklace or little kiddie colors, it just felt unnecessary. But I see what you mean
fun fact - the book it was based on was based on my school! the author was a teacher there. our student ambassadors even have a set response in case touring students ask about it
The Janice thing I personally always liked, surprisingly. When going to an all girls catholic high school I already knew I was gay but no one suspected. My best friend, who’s straight, was often bullied tho because other girls assumed she was a lesbian. I think it fit the theme of the movie, how kids the truth doesn’t matter in high school, just the other kids perception of what’s true. Idk how to word this but yeah
I was the one being homophobically bullied, and my bullies did see through me, but I actually liked that Janice wasn't what the rumors said she was. Maybe it just was my own homophobia talking, but it felt like a big fuck you to the people who thought they could tell and used it to harm me. Also I like that her storyline wasn't resolved by magically granting her a gf as though it's like, a common thing for gay teens to find.
I liked that they turned out to be wrong. I really don't think that Janis is actually gay. Although, as others have said, I do think that it would've been cool if Regina was written to be bi or gay and in the closet. She showed a lot more signs than Janis ever did. I think it good that the message of that side plot is that you can't judge someone's sexuality based on what they wear or what they do (that isn't related to romance of any kind). I think it would've been cooler if while Janis is revealed to actually be straight, there would be a twist where Regina is revealed to be the actual closeted lesbian, who was projecting her insecurities on Janis, so that no one suspects that Regina was the gay one the whole time. It would've showed that you really can't judge someone's sexuality based on how feminine they act, while also giving some more representation to the LGBTQ community.
@@mynameisreallycool1 yeah but it would have fed into the damaging trope in Western media that homophobic bullies are all just insecure gay people, which then allows people to blame homophobia on gay people when in reality the vast majority of the time it really is just straight people who are being homophobic. while it can happen in real life, i think we should retire that trope because it's really not helping anyone. also, the movie kind of reinforce that being gay is something to be ashamed of - whilst i don't think janis needed or should have been shown to be a lesbian, the movie's need to prove that she wasn't actually gay (because that would be 'bad', in 2004) by setting her up with a random guy doesn't work as a great message either. that's just my opinion, though!
I thought that was genuinely a clever line about the hypocritical simultaneous expectation of girls having to constantly be performing femininity while also insisting that sexism is over, and also hilarious.
I like it better when I change the word “expect” to “intend” in my head. To me, the word “expect” makes it seem like we’re supposed to think she’s stupid for wanting to do that, and should aim lower. “Intend” has more punch.
It was funny to me realizing that a big problem of Dear Evan Hansen is that one paper Evan is a villain because he is doing such awful things, but the show doesn't really treat him like the villain his actions make him. Meanwhile the mean girls musical says that the plastics and Caty are villains, but doesn't really back it up with their actions.
Fun fact: I'm not terribly familiar with the show or the movie, but my friend sent me "Stupid With Love" and I learned it & added it to my audition book, _fully unaware that Cady's the protagonist of the show._ By the sound & lyrics of the song alone, I thought she was the cute/quirky sidekick character, pretty much right up until I watched this video, and I think that really speaks to your point about her personality & character arc suffering in the transition from screen to stage.
It feels like a parody of the Teen Broadway Musical. Also Mean Girls does NOT work as a modern take. High school doesn't operate like it did in 2004. This should have been a period piece like Heathers the musical was of the 80s.
i think the issue is that they yassified Regina a little much. she didn't have that fake-nice attitude and was way more seductive and over flanderized. world burn is a fantastic song, but it doesn't capture how weak she is deep inside, she just kinda #girlbossed her way into making everyone mad rather than throwing a fit and acting impulsively.
Over a year late so idk if you or anyone else will see it, but I have something to add to this. Mean Girls is basically just a PG version of the movie Heathers, which coincidentally was written by the brother of the guy who directed Mean Girls. The character of Regina George is more or less inspired directly by Heather Chandler, the original "mean girl" in high school movies. She ruled Westerburg with an iron fist and could make or break people on a whim. But during the scene where she takes Veronica to the college party, she gets coerced into giving a guy a blowjob. We cut away when it starts and when we cut back, she's washing her mouth out in the bathroom. And the camera lingers on her face in the mirror. She looks so disgusted with herself and so broken and sad, but she spits the water out in a fit of rage and forces herself to suck it up because THIS is how she will fit in once she isn't the queen of high school anymore. It is arguably my favorite shot of the entire movie and says so much without saying anything in the span of ~10 seconds. Regina George is such a flawed person with a really sad life who projects this image of being perfect in every way while simultaneously masking her insecurities through the blonde-haired blue-eyes image that people project onto her. She's a lot more subtle and backstabby than Heather Chandler, who could get away with openly harassing people because she kept a semblance of order in the school, but she also isn't afraid to flex her muscles every now and then just to remind people she's in charge. What I'm trying to say is they really did a bad job of portraying the subtle aspect of the character and we don't get moments like her fake-smiles or Heather Chandler spitting water at the mirror and it really hurts the finished product.
@@All-ze9clShe does actually scream and yell when she realises she was lied to about the Kalteen bar (her mom called out why she's trying to eat kalteen bars when she's trying to lose weight.) This scene takes place before Cady's party, and world burns starts IMMEDIATELY after Janis and Cady's altercation. it shows Regina had a few GOOD hours of crying and grieving before finally taking revenge.
Re: Janis' sexuality in the movie. What I always took away from her origin story with Regina, was that Janis expected her best friend to actually respect her time and attention (ie not ditching her for a boy, calling her back when she said she would) and that Regina was so self-centered and shallow and so unwilling to accept any blame or responsibility, that she categorized Janis' quite rational emotional responses as Janis being "obsessed/in love with her." Janis being called a lesbian throughout the movie wasn't because she actually was (it didn't seem to matter to anyone what the truth was), but because of the staying power of Regina's rumors. Also in 2004, high school kids loved to use "gay" as an insult. Made it particularly difficult for my bullies when I came out and made it clear they weren't insulting me by saying that, but just stating a fact. Did Janis need to be paired up with a boy in the end? No. But I'd argue Janis didn't need to be paired up with anyone, really.
Yeah, just let Janice be Ace. It would actually have been pretty cool to make her canonically Ace, because the joke would’ve worked even better. All this time Regina thought Janice was a lesbian and romantically interested in her (with Caty later making a similar accusation) when Janice wasn’t romantically interested in anyone. Her reactions to questions about her sexuality and the angry refusal of being gay actually really reminded me of my own experiences. The defensiveness and frustration when people refuse to accept you don’t want to date anyone, and the annoyance at having labels pushed. Might just be wishful thinking, though. Edit: I know the difference between aromantic and asexual. I am pretty certain I’m both, so sometimes I refer to them together based on my own experience. I apologize for the confusion.
When the movie came out, accusing girls you didn't like of being lesbians was very much a thing. The movie was based on real high school hierarchies, and straight girls being called lesbians just because they weren't popular was extremely common.
@@samkathryn4825 The concept of asexuality wasn't really common in 2004. The overwhelming majority of teens at the time would nave have even heard of asexuality in the context of sexual orientation.
and when regina is telling the story of how she had her first boyfriend and janis was "jealous", they;re in 8th grade, it's literally the most typical shit to have younger teenage girls who are close friends be broken off because of a boy and attention.
That last part gave me a flashback to a bully at school shouting muff diver at me across a crowded hallway and I was just like “yeah? Aren’t you?” He said “fair point we’re sound, nobody bully her again” 💀 they’ve got no comeback to yes I am indeed a gay.
Do goths even exist anymore? I feel like that was only a thing when I was a kid. Art/band kids are definitely still a thing, I had a bunch dog pile me when I bitched about Lin manual Miranda's corny ass.
@@Isaaxz123 i mean i listen to old school goth like the cure, joy division, and depeche mode. But mainly nowadays kids are just watered down "alt" kids who think theyre edgy
Musical Janis always gave me the vibe of those teenage girl characters from Nickelodeon who were all edgy and punk and wore clothes that made no sense, and were not like the other girls, etc.
If the musical was written with licencing it to high schools in mind, that could also explain the defanging of the writing/characters/plot. It’s an easier sell to parents/staff/etc if it isn’t at all risqué.
I feel like if they played into internalized misogyny and feminism, they could have kept and expanded on the slut-shaming, body-shaming, and overall bitchiness. I think it would have worked better.
The first time I listened to Rather Be Me, i remember getting all emotional and my first thought just being, “god, middle school me would’ve loved this, I wish it came out then.” But that’s… kinda the exact problem, isn’t it? You hit the nail right on the head, it’s a song written to market to sad kids but not an actual working piece of the musical. Also the older I get the more I hate the lyrics lmao. I hope they’re helping some twelve year old somewhere, but uh… yeah. That’s maybe the best and only nice thing I can say about it.
Yeah when I was in 8th grade I loved this musical and was obsessed with that song especially. I even almost sang it for my talent show. Now I hate it lmao
I was 14 when I became obsessed with the musical and loved this particular song, I was genuinely on the verge of tears when I saw the musical, now I can't listen to the song lmao
I thought the same about primarily early high school for me. I realize now I think I've established a natural bias towards it because I needed it in high school.
Did everyone forget the whole point of Mean Girls?? The film featured mean slut-shaming, not to *endorse* that kind of behavior, but because *it’s a thing teen girls experience & can relate to.* It’s a story about MEAN GIRLS lmao. It’s in the title for christ’s sake
I actually like Karen's "modern feminism" line in Sexy. A bit outdated maybe, but I think it's a dig at the 'girl boss' style of feminism that is marketed to young women and girls. Like girls are encouraged to be sexy 'for themselves' at its a bit weird. Kind of like the CXG song Put Yourself First. What gives me the ick about the song is that it's a 30 year old woman, pretending to be 16 and singing about being sexy
imo it's also kinda weird to make it a dig at "modern feminism" when its a dig at a very specific brand of feminism that's actually fallen out of favor recently. it just ends up showing how out of touch w modern movements tina fey and the writers are that they think that's all modern feminism is
@@butterknifepatten4455 I do agree with you, but the musical was written sometime around 2016 I think, so I think it probably wasn't as cringey then as it comes across now.
Okay but I gotta say, the horrible lyrics made it so much funnier to me, like they didn't even bother to revise it and just spit every single thought as they came.
Yeah this musical is a guilty pleasure of mine now both because of how dumb the music is and that I thought it was super deep as like a 13 year old so its funny to relive that cringe lol
Wait, they toned down Regina's bodyshaming? I mean, I get that sometimes even having a bad guy do a thing normalizes it, but you have to balance that against the fact that never portraying a thing stops you from commenting on that thing at all. Regina is a criticism of a young woman who cuts down other young women by using sexist double standards, and toning down bodyshaming from that is like making a film about war where nobody fires any bullets. I... I have to admit I haven't seen the show but that makes no sense to me.
Well, it is not explored as much as it is in the movie, but in the show Regina is dieting and Cady gives her the kalteen bars. There’s even a scene where she wears a fat suit so I don’t agree that the body shaming is totally absent from it.
@@Alek.17 Got it. I almost feel like that's the worst part of the bodyshaming, though. It's framed as something that the "good guys" do as revenge while you are kind of rooting for them, rather than a shitty thing the villain does that is framed as a reason to dislike her. I'd have kept Regina's dialog and changed the revenge plan, personally.
@@Alek.17 A fat suit doesn't work in this at all? Regina isn't supposed to be "fat" at that point, she's not even supposed to be chubby. She's supposed to go from a 0 to an 8? I had to check it and it's a medium. That's the point: that she's still thin, yet not THIN ENOUGH. It's there to show how they're just looking for excuses to treat someone like trash and that a size difference is enough to exclude her from the group.
@@LaneMaxfield And I agree partially with how it being revenge is terrible? But I also feel like it was SUPPOSED to be a horrible thing, since pretty much everything they do to Regina isn't just "mean", instead it's kinda evil. Even that part could get dangerous, since they're giving her bars that make you gain a lot of weight verry quickly. It could EASILY mess up her health?
@@thecolourfulpill I mean it's not a full body fat suit if I remember correctly and it's not like an XXL thing or anything. The scene goes with them at Regina's room putting on their Christmas costumes for the show and Regina's skirt doesn't fit, and later while they are performing, her skirt falls off or something??? And her butt is exposed and like,,, that's supposed to be funny I guess. It's more like butt padding like the one Rachel McAdams wears in the movie in the scene they tell regina she can't sit with them bc she's wearing a tracksuit. My point was that the bodyshaming aspect wasn't absent from the musical like Sarah said at some point in the video I think. But it still doesn't make it better lol
Just watched this with my girlfriend (who was in the Broadway ensemble for the entire run). We laughed SO HARD when you kept noting how the bootlegs keep zooming in on that one ensemble member (she’s INCREDIBLY popular with the fans and we’ve noticed before how much the bootlegs focus on her)
@@liyre4189 she is probably becca petersen, an understudy from the original broadway production, the mean girls fandom always loved the understudies and people from the ensemble i already heard that some people took a last time flight just to catch her performing on the tour! musical theatre fandom is very dedicated when they want
One of the original teen musicals is West Side Story. And no one can make the case that the lyrics didn't elevate the story. And it was perfectly authentic. "It's for teens so it doesn't matter if it's actually good" is the same argument people use to excuse poorly written YA books.
i think karen's moment in stop is supposed to emulate the darker moments of 'turn it off' in book of mormon. it just works a lot better in a show that had already established these darker themes as opposed to mean girls which never did
Totally agree. The musical weirdly tries to go more subdue and literal instead of playing up. And it lacks the edge. Mean Girls IS a really edgy movie. Characters need to be over the top and wrong because they're teens. And Mean Teens. It feels flat biteless. It feels a lot like the Legally Blond musical, but Legally Blond is fun and fluffy so it works there.
regarding bad lyrics, i think you also solved the issue of why karen is so infantilized in the show- so much of the show is simple and kind of awkward lyrics that they need to make it doubly so for karen for it to seem like she's actually Less Smart than the rest of the cast...
I watched an interview where Tina Fey jokingly admitted she was only interested in doing a musical bc of all the money she could milk from school field trips and that told me all I needed to know
my bigger issue with the OG meangirls and LGBTQ+ stuff is less around janice and more about how damien's sexuality is literally JUST treated as a joke. For a guy who's "too gay to function" he doesn't even have a crush, let alone an actual love interest. His sexuality is like an accessory and punchline. His "gayness" is completely severed from romantic or sexual attraction and instead defined solely by his gender presentation, afectation, and interests. this movie came out when I was a kid, and at the time, I honestly didn't know what "gay" was. I thought it was like a trend/thing for fashionable white men (I'm neither white nor a man), because that was what I saw on TV and movies. As far as it being "a different time," when I think of the LGBTQ+ rep (and racial issues!) from Mean Girls, I can't help but also think about Clueless, which came out 10 years earlier, and featured way better representation for characters of color as well as a gay character who wasn't ostracized or teased for being gay. It wasn't even his defining charchteristic. W/o spoiling Clueless, I'll say that at the end, the main character reflects on all of her friends and her take away from Christian, said queer character, is that he loves art and strives to see the beauty in everything. (yes I know damien is an art kid but his art isn't really explored. i get that it's a teen comedy, it's not that deep and wasn't TRYING to be that deep, it just is kind of :/ that the teen comedy from 1994 has less racist and homophobic elements/undertones than the one from 2004.
I always saw Mean Girls as a parody of teen movies in the same vein as Scream was for slashers. Like it treated itself as a unique idea and concept but heavily leaned into the tropes and stereotypes of the genre to be referential.
The idea of a gay man being viewed as "basically a woman" by women and the narrative is reinforcing this idea absolutely sucks. Like he's a gay man but he's really not (allowed to be) gay and the story doesn't treat him as a man.
@@ahhh4117 This, absolutely this. So often in both media and real life, gay men are just simply not treated as men, I'm glad someone else noticed this...
@@kitnal4143 I would say scream and mean girls arnt parody’s there are self aware they both are still a teen movie and a horror film just ones that are confident in there selfs as a horror fan the original scream is honestly a great horror movie
@@Hecateofcrossroads you can function as a seminal piece of media in a genre whilst also satirising said genre- something both Mean Girls and Scream does effectively.
Something that annoys me so much in this musical is the clothing, like yeah it's not supposed to be the 2000s anymore but the movie does SUCH and amazing job telling the story through the clothing, and the musical was such a disappointment, mostly Janis like wtf goth aren't extinct
the way that the musical was released in 2018ish and the fits all look like theyre from 2014.....,..why is cady wearing wedge sneakers and a giant denim belt, why is there an infinity scarf, why is regina's meet the plastics outfit 2 colors?? if regina saw the musical, let's be honest, she'd have like a section of the burn book dedicated to it
I honestly don’t know how I never realized just how out of character and bizarre I’d Rather Be Me is. I mean, scream singing the song in my car while recovering from a toxic friendship was super cathartic to me but still. Damn.
@@caitlingill I fully believed it was Cady's song the first time I heard it on a playlist, in fact I stil sometimes confuse the casting because in my brain that's Cady's song. But also I can't accept that that's not like, an ironic song, because it's so contrarian to Janis
I think the whole Janice sexuality mess makes a lot of sense if you’ve watched Tina Feys show thirty rock. Her self insert character was presumed to be a lesbian in her childhood but is fully straight. Maybe Tina Fey was bullied for being perceived as gay as a kid and just hasn’t let go of that hang up
From what I’ve seen (granted I went to catholic school) kids when they bully don’t really care what your sexuality actually is, just what they think it is. I’m gay but didn’t get bullied in high school until I was outed, while a straight friend of mine who fit the “lesbian stereotypes” was terribly bullied. Idk I actually kinda liked how they treated Janice
This was always my take on it. I know it's a fairly personal opinion but I had an extremely similar experience in high school so Janice getting with a guy at the dance seemed perfectly standard to me. Even if she *was* lesbian or bisexual, expecting her to conform and openly 'come out' just for the sake of a school dance seems extremely opposite from my experiences with high school, lol, and unfair on a teenaged girl. When I was in school in the 90s/early 00s in some back-end city in the UK, openly dating same sex just wasn't a thing that happened, and I don't think it's fair to put that pressure on teens even now. I've always been an exceptionally masculine girl, and throughout my high school years especially I was consistently bullied for not only acting/looking like a boy, but also got called every gay slur under the sun because everyone joked that I was a lesbian. I was so insecure that I didn't even accept or explore that as a possibility (but I also wasn't very interested in boys either). I still had a boy date for our dances, and the few times I did date, it was happily with boys. At the time I considered myself fully straight, still did into my 20s, and I don't think that was anything to do with lying to myself. Sexuality changes. Tl;dr; I was a straight teen who was heavily bullied about being perceived a lesbian. Janice's arc and end seemed fine to me, even if she *was* actually gay, there's nothing shameful about taking a boy to prom.
@@lenah9027 People can be named after things and not be a direct copy of thair namesake. Even a character who is an homage or parody of another name doesn't need to be identical. Janis in Mean Girls wasn't a 70's singer songwriter, for instance, so why should her sexuality factor in?
@@Spamhard I’m not saying that needs to be the case, but it’s pretty much the only thing your average person would know about Janis Ian the singer, so it’s odd if it wasn’t intentional
I’ve always found it smart for a movie or a show not to point out every “bad” thing. Like yes, Regina does have eating disorder and it is horrible that Janice chooses to make her gain weight knowing that. We don’t need a character to point that out. We don’t need someone to stand and say: wow, that’s really bad. I also find it funny that everybody just “moves on” after Karen says about nude pics. There are those awkward moments when someone suddenly overshares like “yeah, my dad used to beat me and my mom and then he got into jail for burning our neighbor’s house right before Christmas, so my family doesn’t really celebrate it”. I’ve been in these situations and believe me, everybody just stands in shock and then tries to continue conversation, so this was on point in the show.
i think the reason not addressing it kinda sticks out for some people is that oftentimes eating disorders are trivialized or played for jokes rather than taken seriously, and so even in edgy comedies like mean girls there's this worry from the audience that the subject matter isn't being taken seriously. that's not to say i think they should have addressed it, but i understand why people would want them to. also the karen thing sticks out to me because in media, generally if you introduce something about the character that would have impacted them that much, there's a reason for it. it's not meant to characterize her as an oversharer, or really characterize her at all in any way that matters, it mostly seems like they added it because what happened to her is a common issue and they wanted to shoehorn in their two cents about it.
Re: OP and the comment above me: I'm definitely biased because I myself didn't think about Regina through the lens of eating disorders until it was explicitly pointed out to me many years down the road, but as much as I love this movie, I think it's giving it too much credit to say that we were supposed to read Regina as having an eating disorder and Janis as specifically triggering that disorder by sabotaging Regina's diet. This was a movie made in the mid-2000s, after all, and fat jokes were a comedic staple. Off the top of my head, there's only one moment in the movie where her relationship to her body isn't a comedy beat -- "sweatpants are all that fits me right now" as she's being excluded from sitting at the Plastics' table. If it were made now, seventeen years later, I can agree that it would feel a bit hamfisted if they turned Janis' revenge into an eating disorder PSA, but back in 2004? We probably could have used it. And either way, we can definitely stand to talk about it now. Honestly, given how sensitive Rosalind Wiseman is to the topic of teenage girls' eating disorders in her book, making Regina's weight gain funny feels especially awful in retrospect.
@@ramywiles yeah, I think the weight gain plot in the Mean Girls movie was just a product of 2000s fatphobia. The movie didn’t care about eating disorders and i really don’t think it was meant to be a hint that Janis was a villain, I think it was just that Tina Fey went “you know what’s the worst thing a person could do to another person? Make them gain even a tiny amount of weight.” Because she’s kinda fatphobic, like most skinny people popular from the early 2000s are.
I mean at least Book of Mormon had the rest of the Missionaries have their laughter devolve into a few uncomfortable coughs when one of them brings up he skipped out on his cancer ridden sister dying and the fact he could develop cancer one day. Granted they all kind of had fucked up lines, like the one having his mother beaten by his father. But there’s some acknowledgment of the tone difference between the cheery step music and the dark lyrics
Another thing that got really watered down was the costuming - the wardrobe choices in the movie are masterful, and show each character's personality and character arc really clearly. The costumes in the musical are... clothes.
I genuinely hate the costume design for the musical. The Plastics from the original movie dressed in clothes that you would see actual teenagers wear and also tell a lot about each character, and the outfits in the musical seem goofy, with every inch of their clothes being completely pink, and Gretchen's main outfit in the play version looks horrible imo, while the Gretchen from the movie was probably the best dressed (which makes sense, because her family is extremely rich, more than Regina). It's like for the musical, they thought, "Let's just have them all wear all pink, because, you know, it's Mean Girls? On Wednesday, we wear pink? And they will have nothing to do with the characters' personalities or backgrounds."
I'm a lesbian and honestly was ok with Janis' storyline: kids at that time would take literally any excuse to call someone gay and then make fun of them for it, and would definitely be dumb enough to confuse Lebanese with lesbian
I would agree if only she wasn't so directly named after a queer icon. But you're right that it happens in real life all the time, and probably more to guys. I think if Janis were a guy getting called gay all the time then no one would assume he actually was gay - just that high schoolers are dumb and homophobic.
i agree, i like that shes a lesbian in the musical a lot but im also more than fine with her ending up with a guy at the end of the movie, imo its one of the movies ways of conveying that people spread a ton of rumours in high school and its very possible for them to just be completely untrue. i think its more unexpected than random if that makes sense, because of how many scenes were talking about janis being a lesbian youd think that she is and then she actually isnt. all the things you hear about janis being a lesbian (besides the 'big lesbian crush on you' bit which was also prompted by someone else (regina)) are from other people and are never from janis herself. idk if that made any sense but thats kind of representative of rumours imo because the audience at this point is probably very sure that shes a lesbian just because the other students are saying so and then her not being a lesbian at the end is more of a 'dont believe everything you hear' instead of 'that was uncalled for and against the plot'
I don’t think the lyric in “Sexy” is a dig at modern feminism. It’s a dig at the idea that sexualizing yourself is enough to be considered modern feminism.
Right? I felt like in a way you could potentially read it as Karen seeing herself as only valuable when she's attractive; and that the "I can be who I want to be... AND SEXY" is like a desire of wanting to say "yeah, I could be someone smart and filled with substance without erasing my sex appeal" If anything it's one of the few lines that are like this that kinda fit. Dunno tho, maybe I'm reading too much into it! That's just what I got from all the Karen sections in the musical.
I interpreted it the same way! I remember I wondered if my reading was way off when the popular RUclips comments I saw seemed to see an entirely different point and were praising it for sexual liberation.
The funny thing about Mean Girls (The Musical) comes from the fact that a lot of the complaints about what it does wrong is what Heathers (The Musical) did right when it got adapted. It's almost as if Mean Girls tried so hard to *not* be Heathers that they shot themselves in the foot over what should have been basic storytelling/writing/music score techniques and best practices.
I remember two of my friends were obsessed when the musical first opened and told me "but they made it relevant to 2018!". The thing is, I kind of wished they had kept it in the early 2000s and made it more of a "period piece" (of course with less overt offensive humor). Also this ultra-pop contemporary sound is just not my thing, which is another reason why I don't care for the show. What I do find so funny about myself though, is that I LOVE Legally Blonde the musical. I don't know what it did right, but it's great. I think part of that is Legally Blonde kind of knows what musical it is (?) and wasn't trying to do anything except be a good adaptation.
Legally blonde the musical has a heart and it adds something to legally blonde. It gave us Elle and Emmet progression that wasn't seen much in the movie; Vivian was the one who defended Elle after Professor Callahan ( idk how to spell) made a move on her, compared in the movie that Vivian assumed that Elle was doing it for her own gain. Additionally we can see Elle do her best more, and Warner being torn and confused and not just stringing Elle (This, I may be wrong I cant remember which is which). The songs are also bangers, I listen to it when I'm feeling down and it never fails to put my spirits up. I dont know if that's a me thing only but thats that. (Would add on this later but now I have to eat)
@@reireiisconfused The progression in Elle and Emmet’s relationship was a lot more heartwarming and way cuter. And I liked how Emmet wasn’t some 6 foot early 2000s heart throb, and was like…a pretty normal looking dude.
One thing I always hated about the musical is that none of the characters are mean enough. In the movie Regina is such a hateable villain. And Gretchen and Karen are nicer but they still feel like mean girls. Cady transforms into a mean girl. Janice is the ultimate mean girl she’s just unpopular. In the musical Regina is just kind of a bitch but not really that hateable. Gretchen and Karen are basically not mean at all. Gretchen‘s actually really annoying in the musical tbh. Cady has a character shift for like 10 minutes and then that’s it. And Janice is a lot less morally gray. Overall the musical mean girls feels like a watered down version of the movie. Especially the delivery of quotes. The movie also feels better because it feels like it’s over the course of a few months and you’re just seeing a bunch of different days as opposed to the musical where it feels like it was over one month.
On a side note, I really hate the trend of using screens as the entire background in these modern adaptations. For a school trip we saw Anastasia, which had a similar thing and they’re backgrounds were so boring it really distracted me from the show (such a shame because the costume design was GORGEOUS and it would’ve been amazing if it had an elaborate set). It theoretically makes sense for stuff like this, but they didn’t do anything interesting with it besides the World Burn when it mimicked a copier. Most of the time it was just bland
To add on to the Hadestown stuff: as Orpheus continues to sing Epic III, the lyrics get more clever and complicated. It starts just saying, "Hades fell in love with Persephone" and ends with "Where is the treasure inside of your chest?" Orpheus' character development is shown through what he sings.(Think "Wedding Song" vs "If It's True). AND IT IS DONE WELL. All of the other characters start with very clever/sophisticated lyrics, which reflects the way they see the world. They (Persephone, Eurydice, Hermes, etc) sing like this because they are less naive/hopeful than Orpheus. Mean Girls could have done this with Cady. Having her beginning songs be more soprano and her "asshole" songs be more alto - I don't really know. But they didn't, which is a shame because it would have added some intelligent story telling into this train wreck of a musical. Great video, btw
In fairness, loving Hadestown isn't a fringe opinion. It's a mainstream smash, and so far hasn't had a backlash, which is by virtue of it being pretty much flawless. (Don't @ me :-))
I always read Regina as the actual lesbian deeply in the closet and abusive towards other girls as part of a really screwed up denial mechanism. I dunno if I'm crazy for thinking that, but I wasn't head-canoning, it just popped into my head as an obvious interpretation, and each time I've seen the film it's just the lens through which I see her actions.
Another good example (imo) of writing lines to convey childish / naive / awkward things is Starkid’s musical Twisted’s song Everything and More. When Jasmine goes “I want the moon! I want to live on the moon” and then just launches into a whole sidebar and a later callback about moon pie killed me, as did the choice to occasionally veer outside the song’s melody. It immediately characterized who Jasmine was and what her values / flaws / desires are.
Twisted is just genius in general. Jafar, technically-not-Jasmine, and Aladdin all have different musical styles. Jafar sings in a very operatic style like Les Misérables, Jasmine sings in a pop-y Disney style, and Aladdin sings in almost a rock opera style, and Happy Ending directly contrasts them. (Although the best song is still No One Remembers Achmed)
One change i really hated was in the mathlete scene, where instead of Cady realizing that her pointing out the other girls flaws was unnecessary and that she had changed so much that even in situations like that her new toxic behavious were still there, even when she tried to be better, they smoothed out Cadys character (again) by making the rival girl call her a slut and Cady being like "whoa c'mon, lets not bully each other :("
I mean it's literally canon that Janis and Regina are two sides of the same coin. And I always saw it as Regina started the rumour because she is so self obsessed and assumed everyone loved her that she genuinely thought that Janis was in love with her. Then she grasped on to the whole Lebanese/lesbian thing and started bullying her. And ot stuck because 1. She's Regina George and 2. Because Janis is an alt art girl Making her actually be straight helps reinforce the message that anyone can look like anything (without it being because of or having any effect on ones gender identity or sexuality) and show how teen girls really dont need a reason to rip you to threads
Mean Girls is definitely a “don’t think, just watch” thing for me, like I can’t listen to the soundtrack alone because I’d focus on the lyrics too hard. I think the original reason I liked it was because my brain mashed the parts I liked about the movie and the parts I like about the musical giving me a “Mean Girls good!” Response.
Janis dresses exactly like my ex girlfriend (I'm also a girl, to be clear), who's also obsessively an artist. It doesn't help that janis's actress looks VERY similar to her so yeah
Hi, I used to be a huge Mean Girls Fan and was on tumblr in 2018-2020 when the show was on broadway, so i remember when this exact bootleg first came out. the ensemble member that keeps on getting zoomed in on is Becca Petersen, and this was filmed on her last show in Mean Girls. The person who filmed this bootleg had filmed many other dates of Mean Girls (they were the main source of MG bootlegs at the time) and they specifically attended this performance to see Becca’s last show, hence why they intentionally zoomed in on Becca a lot.
Eh, in regards to Janice I feel like a major part of her bullying thing was people just ASSUMING she was a lesbian based on stereotypes and rumors, because at least back then it was something that bullies could latch onto and insult you with whether it was true or not ((I also went through a similar spat of bullying in high school where I was made fun of for being lesbian when I wasn't)) Maybe its just my personal perspective, but I dunno, I just got the impression that Janice either didn't care or had grown apathetic to the bullying because she knew she couldn't stop the rumor mill once it had started. Not that the movie writers were afraid of making her a lesbian proper, ((especially since they keep Damien being gay, even if he IS also stereotypically coded))
@@toxicsugarart2103 there are literally still tons of goth girls, it's an eternal fashion now - it manifests a bit differently, but the basics are still the same, and it fits with the doomer/sadpop vibes of the times.
The problem with Janice is she manipulated Cady into getting revenge on the Plastics and used her as a pawn (wether she noticed it or not), then plays victim. She never gets called out as ringleader and never apologizes or even sees she was also in the wrong too. And then we’re supposed to root for her in the end because “Janice is right! She’s awesome because she is herself and we should be like her!” Like at least Regina apologized to Cady. This was my biggest problem with the film and the musical made it worse.
I picked up on that too, but I don't think it was a problem with the film. I took it as intentional because the title is Mean Girls and there are different ways this meanness can be portrayed. Janis also says "at least Regina and I know we're mean...." I think one key difference is though that Regina was a bully and mean to everyone. Janis was mean to Regina because of what she did. Manipulating Cady was wrong, but she showed more signs of actually wanting to be her friend, which is why she was upset when Cady changed. If Janis only used Cady to "dethrone" Regina, she wouldn't have continued to engage with her once Cady took her place. I think this got lost in the musical and they tried to paint Janis as the hero.
Exactly! This problem is *especially* bad in the party scene where Janis calls Cady out. Her saying “at least me and Regina George know we’re mean” is her directly acknowledging her behaviour and makes her a direct mirror of Regina. This being switched out with the song someone gets hurts reprise ruins her. All Janis does in that song is call Cady out for being plastic with no substance to her own behaviour. It’s more like a self-pity “oh woe is me” ballad instead of something that’s filled with rage. This is called back when she sings I’d rather be me, since she paints herself even *more* of a victim by saying “yeah, both of my best friends have turned out to be mean :( I can do better than them” is such a misunderstanding of her character. Janis is mean. Why is she having an emotional power ballad after manipulating Cady for a good chunk of the film? Besides, the lack of anger towards Regina in the movie makes her actions even worse, since it seems like she’s messing with Regina for giggles instead of it coming from a place of genuine anger. Smh
I'd Rather Be Me would have been an _amazing_ and sinister song if the intended message was that this is Janis putting a spin on things. Her misrepresenting how events went down to the student body to come out on top in this game. And then they went ahead and did that unironic inspiring music video.
Some plot points that could've been interesting to add to the musical: Aaron Samuels starting as an airheaded football jock who wants to be nice but struggles with peer pressure from his male peers. The musical focuses more on female peer pressure so this would've been an interesting arc to add. It would also parallel Cadie's arc. Her arc is going from innocent and kind to a mean girl, Aaron would be going from a typical kinda mean jock to a genuine and nice guy. Janice struggling with being outed and being the only out lesbian in the school. Enough people have talked about this, so I won't. Cadie's parents feeling like they're losing her because she is changing so much. The movie shows a little bit of this, but not a lot. It would be interesting to see the parents realize something is up before Regina gets hit by a bus so that the blow up is built up.
watching the musical movie i think a lot of the concerns expressed here are also in the movie but i will say one of the only points that i actually felt anything for cady was when she was talking how her and her mom used to watch the stars together and her kind of wishing she was a kid again
This musical is the most front-heavy show I have ever seen. All the good numbers (save World Burn) are in the first act and there are some BOMBS in the second one that made me kind of regret going to see it.
And I know Sarah likes Stop (except for that one line she mentioned and I know exactly what it is and I haven't even gotten to this part of the video yet but jesus christ it is the worst piece of songwriting I have ever heard in my life and I cannot forget it or excuse it) but it just doesn't work as the second act opener. If anything, they should have done a sort of mashup of "Apex Predator" and "How Bad Can I Be?" to show just how evil Cady was becomig. Heathers keeps the vibe of the show going after a major dramatic plot point by calming everyone down and making them laugh with "Dead Gay Son" Beetlejuice makes us laugh with a totally out-of-left-field song about a Girl Scout with a heart condition that drops straight into "Beautiful Sound" to show how Lydia is acting out. Legally Blonde goes from Elle being the lovable boy-crazy idiot and jumps straight into lawyer mode with "Whipped Into Shape," a funny song that shows how Elle can be an asset to the murder trial. "Stop" simply does not do it for me. It's a poor way of painting the side characters as bad people who regret doing bad things but still have a smile on their faces when they sing about doing them all the while shaming Cady for being a bad person who is quickly losing track of who she is. There's a right way to do this. It's "Seventeen" from Heathers. Bad people acknowledge they are bad and want to change their ways.
"Fearless" is a track I always skip. Too slow, too soft, repetetive but not in the good catchy way.. The only good thing about it tbh is that it leads up to Someone Gets Hurt (Reprise).
@@Weirdanimalboy Which is my favorite moment in the entire soundtrack (possibly tied with all of Apex Predator) so I'll put Fearless on and then skip immediately to the end
Me: shakes head in commiseration while Sarah goes on about her high school theater programs golf cart for legally blonde, remembering a similar ramble I have made about my own high school theater program and the horse and carriage we got for Cinderella…
Every single high school theatre kid who wasn’t the lead has at least 5 bitter stories off the top of their head that’s the golf cart but in different flavors
There was actually a clique of girls at my elementary/middle school who emulated The Plastics intentionally and even called themselves The Barbie Squad and made a burn book. The movie came out when we were late elementary age, and I guess these girls kind of missed the message. It was kinda funny, and they mostly just hung out together and wore pink, but they were also a pretty mean sometimes.
I'm pretty sure some girls at my school thought they were serena and blair from gossip girl (except serena is not supposed to be that mean and blair also has limits to her cruelty)
It’s just like when boring white guys deliberately dressed and acted like Don Draper. I love when people miss the message in media, it’s always so funny to watch
This movie came out when I was in 8th grade and in 9th grade, I was part of a clique who emulated The Plastics. Our "Regina" was more passive aggressive and controlling though rather than outright cruel. She had her limits and also our school was strict on the no-bullying policy. The other difference was that we had a Damien in the group (flamboyant gay guy).
I haven’t seen the musical but here’s my take on Janice’s sexuality movie wise as a person who was a teen back then. I know it’s like a bummer for representation but I think her arc serves a bigger point about how the plastics keep all the other girls and themselves in a comp hetero femme presenting conformity despite what their actual feelings might be and how Janice might’ve stunted her own feelings by obsessively becoming their antithesis instead of ignoring them and going her own way. Whether she’s a lesbian or not she never gets to explore one way or the other because she got pegged as one thing shamefully right at the point in her development when girls start to really do that, which puts her in a dilemma to either become so hetero as a means to prove Regina wrong or to openly be out and face ostracism from everybody for it…it’s not fun either way when you’re that age and it makes sense that she kinda just shelved that aspect of herself because it’s more intimate than the tough girl persona puts on as a form of resistance.Janice isn’t allowed to be vulnerable relationship wise at school because her label is a double bind. Maybe she’s straight, maybe she’s bi, she might be gay but she never gets the chance to try openly one way or the other until the plastics go down. Which brings me to Regina…because the movie kinda codes her as blink and you miss it gay. She dates men she has no real interest in beyond their status and how they’ll make her look she used sex as a means of control but hardly seems to enjoy it.She’s obsessed with other girls constantly noticing them. It’s weird how panicked she is about Janice and how she needed to push her out when they were the closest friends. It’s left in the air if it’s because she was worried about Janice as competition for boys or if the intimacy of their friendship was getting to be too much for her…but in the end Regina is free to release her many frustrations through ladies sports. Which back in the day ladies sports was coded for lesbianism sooooo. Interesting things there. Sucks we don’t get unambiguous representation in movie but…like at the time being out in high school was not a thing most people could do and I think the movie really captures those subtleties very well all bummers aside.
Honestly I’ve always gotten that message from the movie. I wonder if they didn’t flat out say it simply because of the time period and environment the movie was released in.
@@abigailchristenson388 I imagine it's a bit of both, but also we kinda assign homophobia more to boys in media and we rarely explore how homophobia both internalized and outward operates for girls and their friendships and relationship to their forming sexuality in general.
@@yonicorn1641 It feels obvious if you're a person who didn't figure things out until you're twenties/thirties and then looking back you're like ...oh shit that's what that was all about.
Can we talk about the fact that the musical opens with Janis and Damian singing “This is a cautionary tale”? Now there are certainly some dicey moments in the story but everything ends pretty happily for all parties involved. I don’t think a story with a happy ending can really be called a cautionary tale.
I was in a production of Legally Blonde as well. One of the biggest jokes during our rehearsals was how difficult the vocals were, especially for the tenors. Also the amount of key changes. Me and my friend decided to count how many key changes (like when the key signature in the score changed) were in each song and the total throughout the musical was some absurd number like over 200 or something. One song had like 36 key changes within the span of five minutes, it was nuts.
I think the problem with updating it from 2004 to the “modern” day is that the modern day is always changing. What was of the time in 2018 now feels so cringey. Plus it was a bunch of adults trying to sound like teens in 2018 so the tone was already a bit out of date when it premiered.
I always found it fascinating how american highschools apparently have this completely unique culture to them. Like, how do people have time socializing so much? How long are their breaks? How does every school seem to have extended programms for sports and arts and music and theater and such? In Germany, we just have classes with maybe 15 min breaks, in which everyone just goes to the toilet and to their next classroom.
Europe squad unite ! I mean, we still socialized : before class, at 10am, during lunch break (the longest), at 4pm and after class (if I remember correctly for my country). Enough time for bullies to bully, not enough for me to do extra arts and sports tho
Clubs are after school hours. The way cliques are portrayed in older teen movies is kinda exaggerated. It might be different between private and public schools, but at my public school, people tended to stick with friends they’ve had since elementary, but weren’t that strict about socializing with newer people. My school still had a lot of drama, but there really wasn’t a defined social hierarchy. It was more just there was people you got along with and people you didn’t.
You get about twenty to thirty minutes for lunch, four minutes between 7-8 classes and before school and after school. For mine, there was half an hour before school and after school that was the ‘tutoring’ window where you could go ask your teacher for help with an assignment….even through they weren’t there half the time. How is it okay for the TEACHER to be late to start but if I’m one minute late because MACKENZIE wouldn’t move from the only free sink that worked because she wanted to do her makeup while I had to wash my hands, then ***I*** get into trouble for ‘lolly gagging’
I know this comment is 9 months old but as an American high school was never as interesting or mean as the teen movies made it out to be which at first disappointed me but I was later grateful..I mean there were some asshole students but they weren't in cliques terrorizing other kids it was just friends talking amongst each other saying some dumb stuff and rude jokes I never saw any sort of groups or cliques or gossip. It was just pretty average
"With any luck, someone will make a non-musical play of the musical movie, and someone will do a musical adaptation of that, and we'll just get to suffer through a cycle of gradually more unrecognisable Mean Girls adaptations, until somehow it turns back into a self help book." Don't threaten me with a good time
If/when Mean Girls is eventually licensed out to high schools, do you think clever staging & direction could salvage the show? There's not much you can do about crappy lyrics and bad pacing, but for a start I'm thinking: - Cady's line delivery changes throughout the show from awkward to manipulative - A lot more costume changes to indicate the passage of time (this wouldn't have to be that pricy, since MG takes place in the modern day...so have everyone in the ensemble bring a start-of-school outfit, a fall outfit, a pre-Christmas outfit, a February depression outfit, etc. And it wouldn't have to be full costume changes either...people could throw on cardigans, scarfs, etc esp during a song like Revenge Party where time moves so quickly.) - There's not much you can do about Regina being defanged, but I wonder if close attention to deliver & staging some nonverbal mean-girlness could help make her evil again - Maybe you could find a way to put some sarcastic layers on "Fearless," which would make it slightly less boring - "I'd Rather Be Me" could be sung at Cady/Regina instead of at the audience. It could potentially be a giant Fuck You to Cady and Regina as Janice takes advantage of the growing sentiment against them to become the new popular girl at school instead -- a Fearless reprise. (Still OOC, but maybe a little less than the original version) - "I See Stars" might not be such a boring reductive song if Cady has been directed to really play up the descent into meanness throughout the show. It'd be a return to her previous kindhearted self, but using the charisma she gained from the Plastics for good. It wouldn't fix the show, but I do think shaking up the direction could help a lot.
Yes!!!! The costumes were killing me, they're awful. The most obvious one to me is Janis, they made her mildly double denim art kid rather than early 2000s goth. But the most important ones are the Plastics, the original movie told a story through their outfits, and they were goddamn iconic. In the musical, they're just... bland
The highlight of my day was listening to James Schaffrillas deadpan say the words, "I don't need their good opinions. I have plenty of opinions. Everybody has opinions but it doesn't make them true."
mean girls the musical: it's like la croix, but with songs!
LMFAOOOOO
@@SarahZ oh my god sarah z-vito, i love your work!
No because seltzer/La Croix is good
Hint of characterization
@@sholem_bond the lies. The utter blasphemy of that statement. La croix tastes like dirty tap water mixedwith tv static
i can understand why the musical wanted to be more progressive, but why adapt a movie about the toxicity and misogyny between teen girls, when you're not even gonna let them slutshame each other. that still happens today and it's kinda weird to take that out, since the movie already made a point of how bad that behavior is.
Can't have the main characters be too mean I guess.
Exactly! It kind of worked in Scream Queens, but that show was surreal as hell and the main focus was the campy horror rather than the social structure at play. Whereas watering Mean Girls down is just lame... I don't think anyone wanted that.
Agreed. The movie is so successful because it was willing to be honest about what slut shaming and body shaming and internalized misogyny looks like and does to people.
I absolutely hate when people interpret "progressive storytelling" to mean none of the characters can have any serious faults and nobody does anything particularly bad and everyone is holding hands and singing songs in the end. When actual progress is a BATTLE. progressive politics are in fact incredibly *confrontational*. It's about getting in society and the establishments face and saying "no this is BS". Its about challenging the audience in how they've perpetuated harm or who they've never given a second thought to before, and a call to action to do better.
This isnt progressive storytelling. It's liberal elite storytelling. It's shallow, insincere, totally misses the heart of the movie, and is pretty unabashedly a cash grab. The point wasn't to be progressive. It was to avoid any and all potential scandal to maximize the number of people who would want to buy tickets
@@ruminationstation4200 The musical feels like it *is* the establishment rather than fighting it.
your theatre director renting an actual golf cart that was only used in two scenes and ended up costing the department most of its budget truly sums up the high school theatre experience
I'm doing legally blonde and we just have the parents stand to the side of the stage. My director also refuses to build the big sorority house set because we only need it for 2 scenes. We are using a rolling ladder instead
I’m very proud of myself because for my senior project I directed the adjacent middle school musical, we made BANK off that show. Off I was a senior so I never saw that money the next year lol
My high school theatre director made her dog, an actual, living, breathing, dog part of our production. Literally no reason, except I, as part of the crew, got to follow the dog around the theatre with a mop and anxiety :)
@@liyre4189 My theatre director did the same thing. Weird.
One time we built a whole ass fake aeroplane that was used for 2 numbers at the end and one of them it wasn't even necessary for
"Mean girls except the girls aren't mean" sounds like one of those meme edits where someone uploads a version of the movie with 90% of the scenes removed, so it just cuts between the few innocuous scenes of people talking without any insults or scheming and then rolls the credits...
just a compilation of all the pauses between lines
God I LOVE Regina's one line in the bathroom scene "When I woke up in the street, all I could see was my mom's face and Gretchen looking down at me and they looked so surprised...not even sad, just surprised that I could be bleeding. Like they forgot I was a human person. I've been a human person this whole time."
that is SUCH A GORGEOUS LINE. I'm amazed, woah
i wish they didnt cut it
The line really shines a bit of light on the concept of... I guess almost reverse-bullying? Like the idea that bullying is only bad if the victim is someone you like or agree with. Regina is a shitty person, but she is still a person. IRL, laughing at her being hit by a bus would be super shitty even if we felt like she morally deserved it because of her actions. When you cross the line of disdain and become vindictive towards the mean girl, you become the mean girl.
@@jeonghansupremacist they what?
Because when you’re pretty, you’re dehumanized. When you’re ugly, you’re still dehumanized. I’ve been on both ends of the spectrum, nobody thinks you’re human unless you’re average.
I think a big issue with media or adaptations today is that they forget that a villain is allowed to be "problematic." We should have a reason to dislike the villain.
Yeah for example there is a joker graphic novel we’re he does something to a woman and the graphic novel was rated r and people got mad about it like he’s the joker he’s supposed to do messed up things
@@Hecateofcrossroads which novel was it?
@@Hecateofcrossroads RIGHT it makes me agitated
@@violetsdior The Killing Joke
@@Tplwtch That's like the most well known comic book. I don't think that's really a good example. It's really loved generally and the problem people had with it had more to do with Batgirl than with Joker. People in general hate Batgirl and Batman as a couple because it's fucked up in most cases and makes Batman seem like a jackass father, a huge creep, and the worst friend ever also it makes Batgirl seem less heroic because it brings up the thought of 'did she become Batgirl because she wanted to impress Batman?' which is a valid thought since she was an impulsive teen. It's also a clear cut example of the women in the refrigerator trope that downplays Batgirl's character. I really don't think what Joker did was the main issue people had with the comic. Besides that though it's still generally a beloved comic book that people use as the defacto portrayal of Joker so I wouldn't say it was disliked much, people just didn't like those two things and they didn't make up much of the comic from what I remember.
I think Janis (and Damian!) were definitely supposed to mirror the Plastics. Damian and Regina both say joining the mathletes is social suicide, Janis insults Mrs. Norbury's outfit behind her back, and Janis and Gretchen BOTH say at some point to Cady: "it'll be our little secret".
Don’t forget the best part of all time - in the musical, Damian says to Cady that the plastics will ‘make fun of her name’ in his words exactly. This is basically what Janis does as she purposely mispronounces Cady’s name
Absolutely, Janis and Damian are also manipulating and using Cady all the while going 'oh we're your REAL friends!'. Janis may not be a Plastic but she is absolutely one of the Mean Girls.
It's like this in the original movie as well. Janis and Damian are just as bad as the plastics in both versions.
@@sweetlorikeet I do believe that too. Janis even says “at least me and Regina know we’re mean.”
@@sweetlorikeet Aren't like all the girls (including some boys) supposed to be mean?
as a recovering theatre kid, anyone who says “the lyrics are poorly written because high schoolers are bad at crafting metaphors” was also someone who said “i’m not practicing the choreography because my character is bad at dancing,” and no one likes that guy
Why is being a theater kid something you have to recover from?
@@court9311 it's a joke. A lot of us millennium theater kids went through hell before musicals became "trendy" over the past 10 years.
@@witchingbrew3 Oh okay. Yeah I loved musicals before they were "trendy" and went to college for musical theatre. But I never got to be much of a "theatre kid" in high school cause the theatre department was awful. So I can't relate.
Yeah I had a character like that for a show but guess what you can still make good choreography from bad dancing, being bad at something in script is not an excuse for laziness.
It's like people defending Riverdale musicals 'cause "It's a High School Production, they can't sing that good"
can i also say i found it really weird that tina fey removed "fugly sl*t" and changed it to "fugly cow" and removed all the other "mean" stuff BUT changed the digs about janis being gay to the entire ensemble outright calling her a slur in chorus 😭
DAMN
🎶 *Priorities* 🎶
holy shit
That’s honestly one of the main things that made me mad like you remove everything… BUT THE FUCKING SLU R ?
they went from no slutshaming to Let's Have 20 People Say A Slur In Unison
I feel like removing the slut shaming from the show made it weaker, because a large part of the story is how women and girls are pitted against each other so instead of seeking equality, we seek superiority over other girls. Cady's growth as a character is spurred on when she realizes this is what is happening during the scene in the gym, and when she shares her crown. I understand the desire to, I guess, sanitize it, but it shouldn't be at the detriment of the story.
yeah i always loved the line from tina fey's character where she tells the girls they have to stop calling each other sIuts and wh0res bc it just emboldens guys to do the same
The biggest crime committed by the Heathers musical was cutting the line right after "dead gay son" where J.D. whispers to Veronica, "How do you think he would've reacted to a son who had a limp wrist with a pulse?"
I’m sorry English isn’t my first language could u explain the quote pls
a ‘limp wrist’ is a common stereotype or indicator of a gay man. JD is asking “how do you think he would have reacted if he had a gay son that was alive?” rather than dead, aka with a pulse
@@nameless568 Lol! I totally see why that would throw off someone who was ESL. Now, I'm curious to know how they translated that line for foreign audiences.
@@CERTAIND00M I didn’t even know that phrase, and I’m not only a native English speaker, but a gay one at that lol. Maybe “pansy” would work better, it’s a more well know phrase plus it’s got some nice alliteration.
Definitely for me, it has to be J.D. and Veronica's presentation:
J.D: Are you a Heather?
Veronica: No, I'm a Veronica. Sawyer.
My main problem with the musical is that *no one* is as good at being a mean girl as Rachel mcadams. She’s not over the top or cartoony but she exudes power and it’s an incredible performance. I think it’s because she could be a real teenager at any high school. The Regina George’s I’ve seen from the musical feel like they come from Disney channel original movies where all queen bees are cartoon level villains
Rachel McAdams is queen 👑
I feel like you're almost at the mark but just missed it. It's not that no one is as good as Rachel McAdams at playing a Mean Girl, it's that no one can play *Regina* like Rachel, and the musical is obsessed with trying to be the exact same as the movie, so new actresses just have to do the same as Rachel instead of attempting to put a new spin on the character. This issue spreads throughout the entirety of the show, with them repeating the exact same one liners that don't land the same way that they do on stage, instead just feeling like "HEY GUYS REMEMBER THE MOVIE? LAUGH NOW" (see the "she doesn't even go here" moment)
I haven't finished the video, so maybe Sarah addressed this.
exactly. regina isn’t a character meant to be over the top in a way that a theatre performer is demanded to be.
To be fair, Im not sure McAdams would have been able to do much better with Regina on stage. So much of what made the character iconic and believable were down to really subtle cues like a tensed mouth, etc. I don't know how you can convey to the audience that a smile is fake, or that Regina has just coldly eyed you up and down when you can't just zoom in on her face as she does it.
@@ruminationstation4200 yeah she’s such a subtle character
Huh, I always assumed Cady's generic "African" background was because her parents were scientists or whatever they were and they traveled around studying and doing research like the Wild Thornberrys so she never really had a single place to be from. Didn't she have a line in the movie about it? Something about the reason she was so fond of math was because even though language and culture changed when you moved from place to place, math was always constant.
This is correct.
yeah that’s right, she said her parents were research zoologists but her mom got offered tenure at a university.
she also knew several languages from various african countries so that makes sense
also I always thought that was kind of the joke in the first place, the joke being the ignorance of the average American teen. The country Cady is from wasn’t specified bc the characters don’t really care to know or aren’t wondering about it. Like it’s playing on the fact that the average white American high school teen has little to no knowledge about Africa or has a bunch of misconceptions, such as thinking that Africa is a country (as some irl Americans do) or that there are no white people in Africa and that it would be racially insensitive to ask someone from Africa why they are the race that they are. Cady being “from Africa” and no one having any questions about it (other than why are you white) is kind of the joke, and if you don’t find it weird that the specific country is never said or aren’t wondering about it, it’s kind of making fun of you too.
That doesn't make sense though because if they were real biologist and not Hollywood biologists they'd be staying in the general area of whatever animal/plant species they're studying. Africa is not a one-biome place and Cady often compares things to the savannah.
the way mean girls the movie taught a feminist sort of lesson was by showing the awful misogynistic way some girls treated others, and showing that, if you crave to be like them, you're gonna lose both yourself and the people who genuine like you
by taking away regina's open misogyny, you take away the core concept of the thing you're trying to adapt
Being a girl boss is still about cutthroat competition with everyone else and treating other women like they are beneath you. Late stage capitalism at work in pop culture. This is not real feminism because feminism is about equality, not about raising up a few women to oppress all the others.
i thought the point of the movie was that by the end, everyone except for damien had become a mean girl. the underlying misogyny was just a part of it. plus all the y2k vibes.
Did they really take away girls shaming each other? That was something captured in the original movie that was so real and relatable.
@@stonersirendamian was a mean girl too, in the way karen or gretchen were. he didnt take a lot of direct action himself but he helped with and was entertained by janis and cady's bullying behavior towards regina. (and gretchen, dont forget "none for gretchen wieners bye" lol)
@@vlad5042 that's the thing about characters like damien tho, they are not mean girls, they are intelligent enough to see through it all and are just entertained by it, like you said
so - what youre saying is....cady deserved her own "how bad can i be?" from the lorax
Oh no don't bring the Onceler into this 😭😭😭
NO
YES
HER OWN "BIGGERING"
@@poilaaliop this would slap
It's kind of amazing how Beetlejuice the musical was able to have Lydia sing a song like "Dead Mom" with really clever lyrics and yet make it still sound like a teenager's real voice/manner of speaking. No disrespect to Mean Girls, but it is possible to write teenagers and still write clever lyrics.
Oop
😊😊😊
okay but the seal line makes me scream every time 😭
Exactly
"cease and de-stop" being one of the high school line alternatives makes me feel something i don't know how to describe
My biggest complaint about the musical (and new movie adaptation) is that it completely absolves Janis. My favorite aspect of the original is that Janis is exactly like Regina. She sees people as commodities and is casually cruel and manipulative. There's an alternate timeline where the roles are reversed. It's only that Regina betrayed Janis first. In the musical, she's the hero. Her tempting and manipulating Cady is hinted in the beginning but is never resolved.
People can rip… well not evil Janis, I mean maybe evil Janis? Whatever, people can rip bad Janis from my cold dead hands.
Exactly! This problem is *especially* bad in the party scene where Janis calls Cady out. Her saying “at least me and Regina George know we’re mean” is her directly acknowledging her behaviour and makes her a direct mirror of Regina. This being switched out with the song someone gets hurts reprise ruins her. All Janis does in that song is call Cady out for being plastic with no substance to her own behaviour. It’s more like a self-pity “oh woe is me” ballad instead of something that’s filled with rage.
This is called back when she sings I’d rather be me, since she paints herself even *more* of a victim by saying “yeah, both of my best friends have turned out to be mean :( I can do better than them” is such a misunderstanding of her character. Janis is mean. Why is she having an emotional power ballad after manipulating Cady for a good chunk of the film? Besides, the lack of anger towards Regina in the movie makes her actions even worse, since it seems like she’s messing with Regina for giggles instead of it coming from a place of genuine anger. Smh
@@salem-01dare i suggest...MEAN Janis?
Love a quick, simple, short-form, 1 hour Sarah Z video. Always what I need.
At this point it might as well be a youtube short 😆😁
I love 1 hour is her short form
This gives me, Hermione slamming down a gigantic library book and saying "I checked this out weeks ago for a bit of light reading," energy
LIGHT READING?
+
as an irish person i gasped when you inserted the screencap from our prime minister quoting mean girls while easing the coronavirus lockdown measures. had totally repressed that moment of horrific cringe
Same 💀
oh god no not again, don’t remind me
Oh god no, please, no, god-
Time stamp???
@@discoshark7767 4:43
I love how we’ve moved on from “Tumblr Historian Sarah” content, at least for a while, and on to “Former Theater Kid Sarah” content.
Lets be real you never stop being a theatre kid
I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive.
@@demonslayermk235 this lmao people who are one tend to be the other too
Those are typically the same people
Nice pfp
If you're going to make a musical called Mean Girls adapted from a film called Mean Girls that was full of mean girls, and you decide that actually you don't like it when the girls are mean, it begs the question of why. It just feels unreal and overpolished, in the end, like a bullying PSA or a Lifetime film - both of which expressly exist to reassure adults about teens, not to actually be relevant to them. Nobody would have watched the film if it was just Not Particularly Kind Girls.
Now that you've mentioned the songs and performances seem to have been toned down for the purpose of being good school musical fodder, it makes even more sense the edge has been filed off. People who are old enough to select school musicals will probably recognise this as The Film My Kids Talked About, will have a script stripped of any edge of substance that gives them no reason to dismiss it, and as typical will simply assume this is relatable to teens because why bother checking.
God damnit. 999 likes.
The thing that ruined Mean Girls is the fact that it has become too self aware. It KNOWS it’s iconic. It tries too hard to push its own cultural impact when it doesn’t need to.
i feel like oftentimes ppl try to make media more "progressive" and just end up with "no one can do anything bad ever even the villains" which doesn't really work. let your villains be evil and do bad things. they're villains. that's what they're supposed to do.
It can come off a tad as if we've looped back around to bowdlerizing, can't it?
YES, I also feel like the push for diversity (which IS good) in shows like heathers and mean girls leads to the beta mean girls (never the alpha mean girl like Heather C or Regina) being women of color, which is kind of a weird thing bc the point is that the mean girls are usually rich, skinny, blinde white girls.
Mia M yeah ive noticed that too. i feel like thats one of a plethora of reasons why the heathers tv show fell flat. the people irl who would be the mean girls are still thin, conventionally attractive, and most likely white and cishet. having the heathers be a fat woman, a genderqueer character, and a black woman is something that wouldnt happen in a high school right now, or at least from what ive observed being in the US.
I really agree, it's an odd form of pandering when people think that the way to make a "progressive" show is to show no one causing any harm. Many people are bad, teen girls do say highly offensive things, you can show that without glamourizing it and allow your audience to use critical thinking.
Also not even villains but like...if you create characters who are not totally perfect or morally correct, it gives them room to grow. Also makes for way more interesting story and characters in general. Why would you create characters who just...don't do anything really? What's the point of writing a story without any sort of conflict?
Early 2000s homophobia was weird.
Where I grew up, kids would be bullied mercilessly for being "gay" and the one of a couple times anyone actually came out, the bullying stopped immediatelly (at least from that angle).
Like, being actually Gay was fine but Being "gay" was a social death sentence?
What you're describing isn't homophobic, it's just an insult kids use
@@ghost_fueled_scarecrow It's the use of an accusation of a gay identity as a weapon. To me, that's pretty clearly homophobia.
@@GeeBarone Well it's used that way cuz most of the time the other person is straight
It’s an interesting slang phenomenon. “That’s so gay!” was a common expression of disappointment in my school years, with a meaning akin to ‘that sucks!’ or ‘that’s so annoying.’ It was basically universally used but divorced from people being gay, to the point where openly gay students used the phrase too. Although it is of course quite homophobic, it didn’t feel like homophobia, just generic slang, like how ‘bear’ meant ‘very/a lot/many’ and was nothing to do with a bear as in the animal. I think ‘that’s so gay’ has mostly died out now though as phrase, which is good of course, as kids have become more aware of such things. As an example of just how divorced slang can be from its direct denoted meaning, I witnessed something very weird happen in my year once. The popular kids of the year were in a particular set/group for science and had a lesson on states of matter. This resulted somehow in ‘solids’, ‘liquids’ and ‘gases’ becoming a ranking system of insults for a week afterwards. Being a solid was fine and average, but I overheard on several occasions stuff like ‘can you tell Georgia she’s a f***ing liquid’ or ‘she is such a gas’. Totally blew my mind how quickly this happened and then it disappeared and everyone forgot about it. Perhaps in that class the coolest kids were solids and the group had extrapolated the ranks from there? But in this example, the actual slang used was meaningless. They weren’t interested in changes of states of matter, only the words required to be pejorative. It’s a lot like the ‘that’s so gay’ example, which is something so damaging, rude, homophobic and hurtful to say, but it was actually basically only meant neutrally and weirdly wasn’t at all related to sexuality and everyone seemed to understand this.
Sorry long comment, but I honestly find the development of slang quite interesting.
@@richardbourton4523 I still don't buy the argument that kids in the 70s and 80s used gay exclusively as a pejorative against homosexual individuals.
I find it much more reasonable that most teens who used gay in the negative sense did so sarcastically. We have to remember that gay used to mean happy, joyous, or enjoyable. I can easily imagine a kid sarcastically saying, "Oh, that party was a gay time," and then rolling their eyes.
It definitely picks up homophobic intent later, but being used as a synonym for lame is pretty explainable without resorting to latent homophobia in a society that barely called homosexuals "gay people."
when Sarah Z covers the movie version we will arrive full circle
The Lebanse thing is actually genious when you think about HOW CRUEL TEENS ACTUALLY ARE. It's deadass the most realistic shit in high school. Someone using Lebanese, and making fun of Lesbians. it's easy humour for bullying.
Yeah I deeply want Janis to be a lesbian and also I love that. Like especially cause they were still in middle school when their friendship destruction happened, so I can see it being genuine confusion but also intentional bullying.
Real talk, I went to middle school/high school with a girl who was from Lebanon and emigrated to the states as a kid and I swear those jokes were thrown around when we were 13 in 2009/10 because lol gay joke in the mid-2000s
yes exactly, and it's just so easy for something like that to be misconstrued (especially in elementary/middle school when they were friends) and the whole "she's supposed to be lesbian" headcanon criticism really doesn't get the point of the entire movie, to not judge a book by its cover (THIS IS LITERALLY THE MOVIE WITH THE BURN BOOK IN IT). it only serves the themes for the girl you as a viewer (and the entire school as an extension) assume to be a lesbian for the whole movie actually being straight. it's not "queer baiting," people just want their headcanons to be true, and justify it with moral grandstanding when it isn't.
Yep. If teens want to bully you, they won’t necessarily bother to pick something that’s true. They’ll just find something that sticks and just use that.
Yeah, I understand why people would like for her to be canonically a lesbian, but the movie Janice was never actually presented as a lesbian. It was always about highlighting the fact teens will find anything about you, literally anything, and morph it into ridicule. The fact that Lebanese sounds like lesbian may be ham-fisted, but degrading people is not always clever, if you can stab two points in a person's identity at once, that's enough.
The way they made Karen act like a toddler was really annoying to me 😭 let women be stupid without making them act like a literal child it’s weird asf. It’s the flanderization of cat valentine all over again
YES YES YES
YEAH!!! Like,, this girl is supposed to be seventeen-eighteen, isn't she? Why is she simultaneously the most sexualized character while also being the most infantilized? It's so creepy
It's called a comedy, that usually involves exaggerating character traits.
the blatant infantilization of the most sexualized character in the movie… barf.
A character being stupid is not "infantilization."
Cady grew up in Kenya in the movie too, but it's *really* subtle. Her mom mentions Mombasa, one of the bigger cities in Kenya.
Does she? I’ve seen that movie a million times and I don’t remember the mum mentioning anything about Mombasa. She says they’re going to see Ladysmith Black Mambazo, perhaps you’re thinking of that? They’re a South African group, so that combined with the fertility vase of the Ndebele tribe made me think they had been living in South Africa.
@@HerHollyness a year late but there's a scene when she approaches black students and says "jambo!" which is a greeting in swahili, spoken in Kenya
@@22joshbb Ohhhh this explains so much. Every time I've seen the movie I thought she was misrecongizing the person she was talking to.
So, I was listening to mean girls the musical, and I thought it was alright. But! What immediately turned me off was the way that they make teens talk. It basically sounds like a parody of what middle aged people think teens say.
The one that really stood out to me was when Kady was trying to make friends and she goes up to this one girl who says “un subscribed” as an insult
Who? Whom? Whomst? Find me literally one person who has said that not trying to either make fun of teens or what people thought teens are like.
Yeah, that’s just something that bothered me, it’s not that big of a deal though, but writing this made me feel better.
Yeah I agree. The musical doesn't feel like mean girls at all but the biggest problem with this musical in my opinion is how they totally got rid of the themes and moral of the movie by making it PC instead. The whole point of mean girls was showing how mean girls can be to each other. So by taking out some of the meanest lines about s*** shaming you are really down playing how it's girls who sl** shame each other the most and are the most cruel to one another. Even if you were trying to go from a "feminist" angle in this you are doing a disservice to feminism by completely ignoring the fact, that was in the original movie, which was how the "patriarchy" doesn't need to be propped up by men anymore it's women upholding the "patriarchy". They made mean girls far too PC which is a major f****** problem and major mistake because why are girls who are cruel to one another going to be PC????!!!! They might as well call this musical the PC girls then. Mean girls is beloved by so many people of all genders races and orientations and by changing anything from the script to make it less mean and less offensive you are throwing the whole point of mean girls and the whole moral of the movie out the f****** window. This musical truly was a disaster
I kinda felt this way about the original movie. Like, especially at the age I was when I watched it. I hadn’t heard any teenager or young person sound like that. Maybe it’s because the movie is very American, but I just did not relate to the “teenager” aspect of the movie.
@@pykenotpike it wasn’t as obvious with the original movie because it was a completely satirical film in all regards, but the musical didn’t play up the absurd nature of the movie and so it felt tone death.
You briefly touched on Janis not being goth, but another thing I disliked about the musical was the production side of things. As someone who is studying theatre design, the costume design for a lot of characters was not it AT ALL. For supposedly being an updated musical, the costumes felt absolutely dated. It was more tacky than real, if anything. The screen type set also irked me to no end for how lazy it was. I get that they wanted to incorporate social media, but like the lyrics, it was clearly done in a way that was more reminiscent of a 40 year olds perspective than of a teenager. It had absolutely no bite or relevance other than saving money.
Yeah I’ve never seen it but just looking at the clips in this video, I was disappointed in the costuming for sure.
interestingly enough, the tour recently updated a lot of the costumes to keep up with modern trends. im not sure if broadway also did this, but i think its an interesting way to handle things. the broadway version came out a few years ago when most of the clothing was considered passable if not completely on trend, though now its entirely outdated
Some of those wigs are terrible! And I agree, even the boys costumes feel dated (and male clothing trends change so much slower).
Same! Especially the pics of the accidentally exposed ass with that specific early 2010s text meme format, like teenagers haven’t done that shit in a decade.
Mean Girls is one of the most iconic references of y2k fashion and a big part of the resurgence now. So the costuming is wildly disappointing and ugly and most of it isn't flattering on the actors.
something I noticed immediately was that costume-wise the musical lost what made the movie’s style so on-brand and smart. I suggest watching ModernGurl’s video on her style analysis but it’s so clear they just stuck them in pink and what they thought was trendy which is such an injustice to the careful craftsmanship of the movie :(
I cringe everytime I think about the musicals costumes. Karen looked like a ten year old, Reginas were just so over the top, Gretchen dressed like a 40 year old and Cadys actually weren't horrible. They clearly had no idea what teens wore
@@All-ze9clyou have to think about the unique needs of musical costumes. You have 1-2 minutes to get into them, maybe a bit more for some costume changes and they need to be able to be danced in. They also need to convey their message of what exactly they are about for people much farther away.
@@zachw566 that is true, theater is different from movies, but I feel like Karen’s did not need the stupid rainbow necklace or little kiddie colors, it just felt unnecessary. But I see what you mean
fun fact - the book it was based on was based on my school! the author was a teacher there. our student ambassadors even have a set response in case touring students ask about it
Oh holy shit that's wild
Out of curiosity, what is the response the student ambassadors have?
Did you know anyone that went there the time the book was written?
Could you tell us what the set response is? I’m curious haha!
Lmao I think it was partially based on my school too and they do the exact same thing
Karen talking about being on a CP website and then tap dancing away is actually bonkers
if the musical had been even slightly more of a black comedy this MIGHT have worked but it's insane
Its funny
@@russianvalkyrie2358 no, it's stupid
the musical has a lot of lines like that, “She’s leaving! Just like my dad!” is in the same song , and while not as bad, definitely fits
@@emiate Doesn’t really fit. Just feels cringe
The Janice thing I personally always liked, surprisingly. When going to an all girls catholic high school I already knew I was gay but no one suspected. My best friend, who’s straight, was often bullied tho because other girls assumed she was a lesbian. I think it fit the theme of the movie, how kids the truth doesn’t matter in high school, just the other kids perception of what’s true. Idk how to word this but yeah
I was the one being homophobically bullied, and my bullies did see through me, but I actually liked that Janice wasn't what the rumors said she was. Maybe it just was my own homophobia talking, but it felt like a big fuck you to the people who thought they could tell and used it to harm me. Also I like that her storyline wasn't resolved by magically granting her a gf as though it's like, a common thing for gay teens to find.
I liked that they turned out to be wrong. I really don't think that Janis is actually gay. Although, as others have said, I do think that it would've been cool if Regina was written to be bi or gay and in the closet. She showed a lot more signs than Janis ever did. I think it good that the message of that side plot is that you can't judge someone's sexuality based on what they wear or what they do (that isn't related to romance of any kind). I think it would've been cooler if while Janis is revealed to actually be straight, there would be a twist where Regina is revealed to be the actual closeted lesbian, who was projecting her insecurities on Janis, so that no one suspects that Regina was the gay one the whole time. It would've showed that you really can't judge someone's sexuality based on how feminine they act, while also giving some more representation to the LGBTQ community.
@@mynameisreallycool1 yeah but it would have fed into the damaging trope in Western media that homophobic bullies are all just insecure gay people, which then allows people to blame homophobia on gay people when in reality the vast majority of the time it really is just straight people who are being homophobic. while it can happen in real life, i think we should retire that trope because it's really not helping anyone. also, the movie kind of reinforce that being gay is something to be ashamed of - whilst i don't think janis needed or should have been shown to be a lesbian, the movie's need to prove that she wasn't actually gay (because that would be 'bad', in 2004) by setting her up with a random guy doesn't work as a great message either. that's just my opinion, though!
@@Coeurlarme as a bi i just assumed janis was bi.
@@mynameisreallycool1 regina just isn’t the representation we need. also the homophobic closeted bully is SUCH tired and harmful trope.
as a stereotypical girly girl, “i expect to run the world in shoes i can not walk in” is one of my favorite lines😂💁🏽♀️
I thought that was genuinely a clever line about the hypocritical simultaneous expectation of girls having to constantly be performing femininity while also insisting that sexism is over, and also hilarious.
@@StarryOak76 the line itself isn’t bad it’s just so out of place and random
me too, but I don’t actually like the mean girls musical anymore now realizing it’s novelty is lost on me.
As seeing your comment, your username checks out
I like it better when I change the word “expect” to “intend” in my head. To me, the word “expect” makes it seem like we’re supposed to think she’s stupid for wanting to do that, and should aim lower. “Intend” has more punch.
It was funny to me realizing that a big problem of Dear Evan Hansen is that one paper Evan is a villain because he is doing such awful things, but the show doesn't really treat him like the villain his actions make him. Meanwhile the mean girls musical says that the plastics and Caty are villains, but doesn't really back it up with their actions.
It's CADY!
Fun fact: I'm not terribly familiar with the show or the movie, but my friend sent me "Stupid With Love" and I learned it & added it to my audition book, _fully unaware that Cady's the protagonist of the show._ By the sound & lyrics of the song alone, I thought she was the cute/quirky sidekick character, pretty much right up until I watched this video, and I think that really speaks to your point about her personality & character arc suffering in the transition from screen to stage.
It feels like a parody of the Teen Broadway Musical. Also Mean Girls does NOT work as a modern take. High school doesn't operate like it did in 2004. This should have been a period piece like Heathers the musical was of the 80s.
Hearing something set in 2004 called a period piece aged me 60 years
Oh yes! the modern-day setting kills Means girls, and they should have kept the YK2 like Heathers for 80s.
i agree. also cool profile pic
Love your THTYG Icon!!
tbh feels like the social media bits are an explicit DeH reaction
i think the issue is that they yassified Regina a little much. she didn't have that fake-nice attitude and was way more seductive and over flanderized. world burn is a fantastic song, but it doesn't capture how weak she is deep inside, she just kinda #girlbossed her way into making everyone mad rather than throwing a fit and acting impulsively.
Over a year late so idk if you or anyone else will see it, but I have something to add to this.
Mean Girls is basically just a PG version of the movie Heathers, which coincidentally was written by the brother of the guy who directed Mean Girls. The character of Regina George is more or less inspired directly by Heather Chandler, the original "mean girl" in high school movies. She ruled Westerburg with an iron fist and could make or break people on a whim.
But during the scene where she takes Veronica to the college party, she gets coerced into giving a guy a blowjob. We cut away when it starts and when we cut back, she's washing her mouth out in the bathroom. And the camera lingers on her face in the mirror. She looks so disgusted with herself and so broken and sad, but she spits the water out in a fit of rage and forces herself to suck it up because THIS is how she will fit in once she isn't the queen of high school anymore.
It is arguably my favorite shot of the entire movie and says so much without saying anything in the span of ~10 seconds.
Regina George is such a flawed person with a really sad life who projects this image of being perfect in every way while simultaneously masking her insecurities through the blonde-haired blue-eyes image that people project onto her. She's a lot more subtle and backstabby than Heather Chandler, who could get away with openly harassing people because she kept a semblance of order in the school, but she also isn't afraid to flex her muscles every now and then just to remind people she's in charge.
What I'm trying to say is they really did a bad job of portraying the subtle aspect of the character and we don't get moments like her fake-smiles or Heather Chandler spitting water at the mirror and it really hurts the finished product.
@@melonyrobinson9944 o.o
Fr in the movie she screams and throws a fit like a teenager but in the musical she’s not like that
@@All-ze9clshe does do that in the musical
@@All-ze9clShe does actually scream and yell when she realises she was lied to about the Kalteen bar (her mom called out why she's trying to eat kalteen bars when she's trying to lose weight.) This scene takes place before Cady's party, and world burns starts IMMEDIATELY after Janis and Cady's altercation. it shows Regina had a few GOOD hours of crying and grieving before finally taking revenge.
“imagine a party with dresses and cake and singing and dancing and cake” literally a dont hug me i’m scared line
DHMIS MENTIONED 🗣️❗️❗️❗️❗️🗣️🗣️🗣️❗️❗️❗️❗️WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE IDEA❗️❗️MINE IS BEING CREATIVE
@@thebakingvetcringe stop
Re: Janis' sexuality in the movie. What I always took away from her origin story with Regina, was that Janis expected her best friend to actually respect her time and attention (ie not ditching her for a boy, calling her back when she said she would) and that Regina was so self-centered and shallow and so unwilling to accept any blame or responsibility, that she categorized Janis' quite rational emotional responses as Janis being "obsessed/in love with her." Janis being called a lesbian throughout the movie wasn't because she actually was (it didn't seem to matter to anyone what the truth was), but because of the staying power of Regina's rumors. Also in 2004, high school kids loved to use "gay" as an insult. Made it particularly difficult for my bullies when I came out and made it clear they weren't insulting me by saying that, but just stating a fact. Did Janis need to be paired up with a boy in the end? No. But I'd argue Janis didn't need to be paired up with anyone, really.
Yeah, just let Janice be Ace. It would actually have been pretty cool to make her canonically Ace, because the joke would’ve worked even better. All this time Regina thought Janice was a lesbian and romantically interested in her (with Caty later making a similar accusation) when Janice wasn’t romantically interested in anyone.
Her reactions to questions about her sexuality and the angry refusal of being gay actually really reminded me of my own experiences. The defensiveness and frustration when people refuse to accept you don’t want to date anyone, and the annoyance at having labels pushed.
Might just be wishful thinking, though.
Edit: I know the difference between aromantic and asexual. I am pretty certain I’m both, so sometimes I refer to them together based on my own experience. I apologize for the confusion.
When the movie came out, accusing girls you didn't like of being lesbians was very much a thing. The movie was based on real high school hierarchies, and straight girls being called lesbians just because they weren't popular was extremely common.
@@samkathryn4825 The concept of asexuality wasn't really common in 2004. The overwhelming majority of teens at the time would nave have even heard of asexuality in the context of sexual orientation.
and when regina is telling the story of how she had her first boyfriend and janis was "jealous", they;re in 8th grade, it's literally the most typical shit to have younger teenage girls who are close friends be broken off because of a boy and attention.
That last part gave me a flashback to a bully at school shouting muff diver at me across a crowded hallway and I was just like “yeah? Aren’t you?” He said “fair point we’re sound, nobody bully her again” 💀 they’ve got no comeback to yes I am indeed a gay.
wait why'd they take janis from goth art kid down to mildly alt art kid? the disrespect
actually that doesn't bother me half as much as them not properly showing cady's changing character that's literally the core of the show
Do goths even exist anymore? I feel like that was only a thing when I was a kid. Art/band kids are definitely still a thing, I had a bunch dog pile me when I bitched about Lin manual Miranda's corny ass.
@@Isaaxz123 goth kids still exist but its mostly tik tok alts now a days..
Because it’s set in the new thousands.
@@Isaaxz123 i mean i listen to old school goth like the cure, joy division, and depeche mode. But mainly nowadays kids are just watered down "alt" kids who think theyre edgy
rewatching in Jan 2024 and praying Sarah does a video on the movie based on the musical based on the movie based on the non fiction book
same!! honestly i think the musical movie improves on some of the issues of the musical, though it still doesnt outshine the og movie
@@orangejuice782it fucked up the music so hard though 😭😭
@@WAFilms-gv2enright .. idk if this is just me but they were less upbeat and lost their overall charm
@@orangejuice782 yeah i think some of the changes were great (janis and damian getting more backstory and screen time
Her ending line about it "somehow turning back into a self-help book" made me laugh at loud.
Musical Janis always gave me the vibe of those teenage girl characters from Nickelodeon who were all edgy and punk and wore clothes that made no sense, and were not like the other girls, etc.
100%, it's very jade-likes-scissors, which is 'quirky' and 'funny' instead of genuinely ruthless. It's also boring hahaha
If the musical was written with licencing it to high schools in mind, that could also explain the defanging of the writing/characters/plot. It’s an easier sell to parents/staff/etc if it isn’t at all risqué.
Oh that’s definitely a good point
That makes perfect sense
I agree but this is reminding me of my high school making 9th and 10th graders perform big spender lol
Ahh I hadn’t even considered that. Good shout
There are a lot of shows that have a school licensed version that's cleaner than the Broadway original though.
I saw a lyric video that subbed "lioness, only with *faux* fur" and I thought that was far superior.
I feel like if they played into internalized misogyny and feminism, they could have kept and expanded on the slut-shaming, body-shaming, and overall bitchiness. I think it would have worked better.
YEs! especially considering that the musical adaptation is supposed to be set in the modern day too!
Something like, cruelly sarcastic 'are you okay? I mean, [a bunch of body criticisms]. You should get plastic surgery. You know, as self care."
The first time I listened to Rather Be Me, i remember getting all emotional and my first thought just being, “god, middle school me would’ve loved this, I wish it came out then.” But that’s… kinda the exact problem, isn’t it? You hit the nail right on the head, it’s a song written to market to sad kids but not an actual working piece of the musical.
Also the older I get the more I hate the lyrics lmao. I hope they’re helping some twelve year old somewhere, but uh… yeah. That’s maybe the best and only nice thing I can say about it.
Yeah when I was in 8th grade I loved this musical and was obsessed with that song especially. I even almost sang it for my talent show. Now I hate it lmao
I was 14 when I became obsessed with the musical and loved this particular song, I was genuinely on the verge of tears when I saw the musical, now I can't listen to the song lmao
@@littlezorkie9311 it’s just so unfitting? Like it’s a good song but not
He r e
I thought the same about primarily early high school for me. I realize now I think I've established a natural bias towards it because I needed it in high school.
Whats wrong with it? Just xurious
Did everyone forget the whole point of Mean Girls?? The film featured mean slut-shaming, not to *endorse* that kind of behavior, but because *it’s a thing teen girls experience & can relate to.*
It’s a story about MEAN GIRLS lmao. It’s in the title for christ’s sake
Reminds me of that Lemony Snicket quote about not being able to write a villain who doesn't do villainous things
I actually like Karen's "modern feminism" line in Sexy. A bit outdated maybe, but I think it's a dig at the 'girl boss' style of feminism that is marketed to young women and girls. Like girls are encouraged to be sexy 'for themselves' at its a bit weird. Kind of like the CXG song Put Yourself First. What gives me the ick about the song is that it's a 30 year old woman, pretending to be 16 and singing about being sexy
I don't think the problem Sarah has is the line itself, but how it doesn't fit the character and song overall
imo it's also kinda weird to make it a dig at "modern feminism" when its a dig at a very specific brand of feminism that's actually fallen out of favor recently. it just ends up showing how out of touch w modern movements tina fey and the writers are that they think that's all modern feminism is
@@butterknifepatten4455 I do agree with you, but the musical was written sometime around 2016 I think, so I think it probably wasn't as cringey then as it comes across now.
Okay but I gotta say, the horrible lyrics made it so much funnier to me, like they didn't even bother to revise it and just spit every single thought as they came.
- my teachers correcting my essays, probably
I honestly thought the lyrics were stupid on purpose
@@misterfartballs I'm sure Karen's were.
Yeah this musical is a guilty pleasure of mine now both because of how dumb the music is and that I thought it was super deep as like a 13 year old so its funny to relive that cringe lol
11 minutes in and this, admittedly brilliant, video doesn't mention my man Kevin G. The audacity.
I can't believe this video is anti-mathlete
@@SarahZ be better!
Feels so surreal seeing this channel here
@@fightingfitz214 this military historian is a big softie
@Faye Litzinger absolutely. I’ve seen him pop up in the comment section of a few of these types of RUclips videos
Wait, they toned down Regina's bodyshaming? I mean, I get that sometimes even having a bad guy do a thing normalizes it, but you have to balance that against the fact that never portraying a thing stops you from commenting on that thing at all. Regina is a criticism of a young woman who cuts down other young women by using sexist double standards, and toning down bodyshaming from that is like making a film about war where nobody fires any bullets. I... I have to admit I haven't seen the show but that makes no sense to me.
Well, it is not explored as much as it is in the movie, but in the show Regina is dieting and Cady gives her the kalteen bars. There’s even a scene where she wears a fat suit so I don’t agree that the body shaming is totally absent from it.
@@Alek.17 Got it. I almost feel like that's the worst part of the bodyshaming, though. It's framed as something that the "good guys" do as revenge while you are kind of rooting for them, rather than a shitty thing the villain does that is framed as a reason to dislike her. I'd have kept Regina's dialog and changed the revenge plan, personally.
@@Alek.17 A fat suit doesn't work in this at all? Regina isn't supposed to be "fat" at that point, she's not even supposed to be chubby. She's supposed to go from a 0 to an 8? I had to check it and it's a medium. That's the point: that she's still thin, yet not THIN ENOUGH. It's there to show how they're just looking for excuses to treat someone like trash and that a size difference is enough to exclude her from the group.
@@LaneMaxfield And I agree partially with how it being revenge is terrible? But I also feel like it was SUPPOSED to be a horrible thing, since pretty much everything they do to Regina isn't just "mean", instead it's kinda evil. Even that part could get dangerous, since they're giving her bars that make you gain a lot of weight verry quickly. It could EASILY mess up her health?
@@thecolourfulpill I mean it's not a full body fat suit if I remember correctly and it's not like an XXL thing or anything. The scene goes with them at Regina's room putting on their Christmas costumes for the show and Regina's skirt doesn't fit, and later while they are performing, her skirt falls off or something??? And her butt is exposed and like,,, that's supposed to be funny I guess. It's more like butt padding like the one Rachel McAdams wears in the movie in the scene they tell regina she can't sit with them bc she's wearing a tracksuit. My point was that the bodyshaming aspect wasn't absent from the musical like Sarah said at some point in the video I think. But it still doesn't make it better lol
Just watched this with my girlfriend (who was in the Broadway ensemble for the entire run).
We laughed SO HARD when you kept noting how the bootlegs keep zooming in on that one ensemble member (she’s INCREDIBLY popular with the fans and we’ve noticed before how much the bootlegs focus on her)
who is she?? why is she so popular?
Out of curiosity what did your gf think of the video?
@@liyre4189 she is probably becca petersen, an understudy from the original broadway production, the mean girls fandom always loved the understudies and people from the ensemble
i already heard that some people took a last time flight just to catch her performing on the tour! musical theatre fandom is very dedicated when they want
where did you watch the musical ?
@@amemelia i find a mean girls but it's not the cast that i want
One of the original teen musicals is West Side Story. And no one can make the case that the lyrics didn't elevate the story. And it was perfectly authentic. "It's for teens so it doesn't matter if it's actually good" is the same argument people use to excuse poorly written YA books.
And also to dismiss well-written YA books.
@@MsFeyCreature True.
i think karen's moment in stop is supposed to emulate the darker moments of 'turn it off' in book of mormon. it just works a lot better in a show that had already established these darker themes as opposed to mean girls which never did
I thought that too!!!
get you a guy who looks at you like the bootlegger looks at that one specific chorus member
Totally agree. The musical weirdly tries to go more subdue and literal instead of playing up. And it lacks the edge. Mean Girls IS a really edgy movie. Characters need to be over the top and wrong because they're teens. And Mean Teens. It feels flat biteless.
It feels a lot like the Legally Blond musical, but Legally Blond is fun and fluffy so it works there.
Mean Girls the movie is basically a satire, so unless you really play up the satire, it falls flat in comparison
I was worried that you were about to insult the masterpiece that is Legally Blonde (movie and musical). I would’ve thrown hands lol
I read it that way too at first!
And *Gay and European* is a banger
@@shinyagumon7015 the entire soundtrack is a banger
regarding bad lyrics, i think you also solved the issue of why karen is so infantilized in the show- so much of the show is simple and kind of awkward lyrics that they need to make it doubly so for karen for it to seem like she's actually Less Smart than the rest of the cast...
So basically Karen got made into the show's resident Ralph Wiggum? Ouch.
I watched an interview where Tina Fey jokingly admitted she was only interested in doing a musical bc of all the money she could milk from school field trips and that told me all I needed to know
my bigger issue with the OG meangirls and LGBTQ+ stuff is less around janice and more about how damien's sexuality is literally JUST treated as a joke. For a guy who's "too gay to function" he doesn't even have a crush, let alone an actual love interest.
His sexuality is like an accessory and punchline. His "gayness" is completely severed from romantic or sexual attraction and instead defined solely by his gender presentation, afectation, and interests.
this movie came out when I was a kid, and at the time, I honestly didn't know what "gay" was. I thought it was like a trend/thing for fashionable white men (I'm neither white nor a man), because that was what I saw on TV and movies.
As far as it being "a different time," when I think of the LGBTQ+ rep (and racial issues!) from Mean Girls, I can't help but also think about Clueless, which came out 10 years earlier, and featured way better representation for characters of color as well as a gay character who wasn't ostracized or teased for being gay. It wasn't even his defining charchteristic. W/o spoiling Clueless, I'll say that at the end, the main character reflects on all of her friends and her take away from Christian, said queer character, is that he loves art and strives to see the beauty in everything. (yes I know damien is an art kid but his art isn't really explored.
i get that it's a teen comedy, it's not that deep and wasn't TRYING to be that deep, it just is kind of :/ that the teen comedy from 1994 has less racist and homophobic elements/undertones than the one from 2004.
I always saw Mean Girls as a parody of teen movies in the same vein as Scream was for slashers. Like it treated itself as a unique idea and concept but heavily leaned into the tropes and stereotypes of the genre to be referential.
The idea of a gay man being viewed as "basically a woman" by women and the narrative is reinforcing this idea absolutely sucks. Like he's a gay man but he's really not (allowed to be) gay and the story doesn't treat him as a man.
@@ahhh4117 This, absolutely this. So often in both media and real life, gay men are just simply not treated as men, I'm glad someone else noticed this...
@@kitnal4143 I would say scream and mean girls arnt parody’s there are self aware they both are still a teen movie and a horror film just ones that are confident in there selfs as a horror fan the original scream is honestly a great horror movie
@@Hecateofcrossroads you can function as a seminal piece of media in a genre whilst also satirising said genre- something both Mean Girls and Scream does effectively.
Something that annoys me so much in this musical is the clothing, like yeah it's not supposed to be the 2000s anymore but the movie does SUCH and amazing job telling the story through the clothing, and the musical was such a disappointment, mostly Janis like wtf goth aren't extinct
UGH yes!! Another one is Regina, her outfits are just boring ://
Janis isn't fucking goth
the way that the musical was released in 2018ish and the fits all look like theyre from 2014.....,..why is cady wearing wedge sneakers and a giant denim belt, why is there an infinity scarf, why is regina's meet the plastics outfit 2 colors?? if regina saw the musical, let's be honest, she'd have like a section of the burn book dedicated to it
where did you watch the musical ?
WHY WAS GRETCHEN WEARING A BLUE SHIRT AND A JEAN SKIRT 35:03??? SHE WOULD NEVER HAVE WORN THAT!! 😭😭😭🤢🤢🤢
I honestly don’t know how I never realized just how out of character and bizarre I’d Rather Be Me is. I mean, scream singing the song in my car while recovering from a toxic friendship was super cathartic to me but still. Damn.
Cady could have sung it instead of Janis
@@caitlingill I fully believed it was Cady's song the first time I heard it on a playlist, in fact I stil sometimes confuse the casting because in my brain that's Cady's song. But also I can't accept that that's not like, an ironic song, because it's so contrarian to Janis
I think the whole Janice sexuality mess makes a lot of sense if you’ve watched Tina Feys show thirty rock. Her self insert character was presumed to be a lesbian in her childhood but is fully straight. Maybe Tina Fey was bullied for being perceived as gay as a kid and just hasn’t let go of that hang up
From what I’ve seen (granted I went to catholic school) kids when they bully don’t really care what your sexuality actually is, just what they think it is. I’m gay but didn’t get bullied in high school until I was outed, while a straight friend of mine who fit the “lesbian stereotypes” was terribly bullied. Idk I actually kinda liked how they treated Janice
This was always my take on it. I know it's a fairly personal opinion but I had an extremely similar experience in high school so Janice getting with a guy at the dance seemed perfectly standard to me. Even if she *was* lesbian or bisexual, expecting her to conform and openly 'come out' just for the sake of a school dance seems extremely opposite from my experiences with high school, lol, and unfair on a teenaged girl. When I was in school in the 90s/early 00s in some back-end city in the UK, openly dating same sex just wasn't a thing that happened, and I don't think it's fair to put that pressure on teens even now.
I've always been an exceptionally masculine girl, and throughout my high school years especially I was consistently bullied for not only acting/looking like a boy, but also got called every gay slur under the sun because everyone joked that I was a lesbian. I was so insecure that I didn't even accept or explore that as a possibility (but I also wasn't very interested in boys either). I still had a boy date for our dances, and the few times I did date, it was happily with boys. At the time I considered myself fully straight, still did into my 20s, and I don't think that was anything to do with lying to myself. Sexuality changes.
Tl;dr; I was a straight teen who was heavily bullied about being perceived a lesbian. Janice's arc and end seemed fine to me, even if she *was* actually gay, there's nothing shameful about taking a boy to prom.
Yeah but the characters name is literally Janis Ian, which is also the name of a 70s singer songwriter whose a lesbian
@@lenah9027 People can be named after things and not be a direct copy of thair namesake. Even a character who is an homage or parody of another name doesn't need to be identical. Janis in Mean Girls wasn't a 70's singer songwriter, for instance, so why should her sexuality factor in?
@@Spamhard I’m not saying that needs to be the case, but it’s pretty much the only thing your average person would know about Janis Ian the singer, so it’s odd if it wasn’t intentional
I’ve always found it smart for a movie or a show not to point out every “bad” thing. Like yes, Regina does have eating disorder and it is horrible that Janice chooses to make her gain weight knowing that. We don’t need a character to point that out. We don’t need someone to stand and say: wow, that’s really bad.
I also find it funny that everybody just “moves on” after Karen says about nude pics. There are those awkward moments when someone suddenly overshares like “yeah, my dad used to beat me and my mom and then he got into jail for burning our neighbor’s house right before Christmas, so my family doesn’t really celebrate it”. I’ve been in these situations and believe me, everybody just stands in shock and then tries to continue conversation, so this was on point in the show.
exactly. we already realize its bad, the movie respects the viewer's intelligence enough to not explain everything
i think the reason not addressing it kinda sticks out for some people is that oftentimes eating disorders are trivialized or played for jokes rather than taken seriously, and so even in edgy comedies like mean girls there's this worry from the audience that the subject matter isn't being taken seriously. that's not to say i think they should have addressed it, but i understand why people would want them to.
also the karen thing sticks out to me because in media, generally if you introduce something about the character that would have impacted them that much, there's a reason for it. it's not meant to characterize her as an oversharer, or really characterize her at all in any way that matters, it mostly seems like they added it because what happened to her is a common issue and they wanted to shoehorn in their two cents about it.
Re: OP and the comment above me: I'm definitely biased because I myself didn't think about Regina through the lens of eating disorders until it was explicitly pointed out to me many years down the road, but as much as I love this movie, I think it's giving it too much credit to say that we were supposed to read Regina as having an eating disorder and Janis as specifically triggering that disorder by sabotaging Regina's diet. This was a movie made in the mid-2000s, after all, and fat jokes were a comedic staple. Off the top of my head, there's only one moment in the movie where her relationship to her body isn't a comedy beat -- "sweatpants are all that fits me right now" as she's being excluded from sitting at the Plastics' table. If it were made now, seventeen years later, I can agree that it would feel a bit hamfisted if they turned Janis' revenge into an eating disorder PSA, but back in 2004? We probably could have used it. And either way, we can definitely stand to talk about it now. Honestly, given how sensitive Rosalind Wiseman is to the topic of teenage girls' eating disorders in her book, making Regina's weight gain funny feels especially awful in retrospect.
@@ramywiles yeah, I think the weight gain plot in the Mean Girls movie was just a product of 2000s fatphobia. The movie didn’t care about eating disorders and i really don’t think it was meant to be a hint that Janis was a villain, I think it was just that Tina Fey went “you know what’s the worst thing a person could do to another person? Make them gain even a tiny amount of weight.” Because she’s kinda fatphobic, like most skinny people popular from the early 2000s are.
I mean at least Book of Mormon had the rest of the Missionaries have their laughter devolve into a few uncomfortable coughs when one of them brings up he skipped out on his cancer ridden sister dying and the fact he could develop cancer one day. Granted they all kind of had fucked up lines, like the one having his mother beaten by his father. But there’s some acknowledgment of the tone difference between the cheery step music and the dark lyrics
Another thing that got really watered down was the costuming - the wardrobe choices in the movie are masterful, and show each character's personality and character arc really clearly. The costumes in the musical are... clothes.
I genuinely hate the costume design for the musical. The Plastics from the original movie dressed in clothes that you would see actual teenagers wear and also tell a lot about each character, and the outfits in the musical seem goofy, with every inch of their clothes being completely pink, and Gretchen's main outfit in the play version looks horrible imo, while the Gretchen from the movie was probably the best dressed (which makes sense, because her family is extremely rich, more than Regina). It's like for the musical, they thought, "Let's just have them all wear all pink, because, you know, it's Mean Girls? On Wednesday, we wear pink? And they will have nothing to do with the characters' personalities or backgrounds."
right like the movie’s costuming was meticulously crafted and the show’s costuming felt like just that: costumes
I'm a lesbian and honestly was ok with Janis' storyline: kids at that time would take literally any excuse to call someone gay and then make fun of them for it, and would definitely be dumb enough to confuse Lebanese with lesbian
I would agree if only she wasn't so directly named after a queer icon. But you're right that it happens in real life all the time, and probably more to guys. I think if Janis were a guy getting called gay all the time then no one would assume he actually was gay - just that high schoolers are dumb and homophobic.
i agree, i like that shes a lesbian in the musical a lot but im also more than fine with her ending up with a guy at the end of the movie, imo its one of the movies ways of conveying that people spread a ton of rumours in high school and its very possible for them to just be completely untrue. i think its more unexpected than random if that makes sense, because of how many scenes were talking about janis being a lesbian youd think that she is and then she actually isnt. all the things you hear about janis being a lesbian (besides the 'big lesbian crush on you' bit which was also prompted by someone else (regina)) are from other people and are never from janis herself. idk if that made any sense but thats kind of representative of rumours imo because the audience at this point is probably very sure that shes a lesbian just because the other students are saying so and then her not being a lesbian at the end is more of a 'dont believe everything you hear' instead of 'that was uncalled for and against the plot'
I don’t think the lyric in “Sexy” is a dig at modern feminism. It’s a dig at the idea that sexualizing yourself is enough to be considered modern feminism.
Right? I felt like in a way you could potentially read it as Karen seeing herself as only valuable when she's attractive; and that the "I can be who I want to be... AND SEXY" is like a desire of wanting to say "yeah, I could be someone smart and filled with substance without erasing my sex appeal" If anything it's one of the few lines that are like this that kinda fit.
Dunno tho, maybe I'm reading too much into it! That's just what I got from all the Karen sections in the musical.
Maite That works too! I actually think the musical reveals Karen to be the most insightful. She’s simple, but she’s not stupid.
I interpreted it the same way! I remember I wondered if my reading was way off when the popular RUclips comments I saw seemed to see an entirely different point and were praising it for sexual liberation.
Like "Put Yourself First" from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
@@cutiepuppy4427 THANK YOU FOR THE CXG REFERENCE
The funny thing about Mean Girls (The Musical) comes from the fact that a lot of the complaints about what it does wrong is what Heathers (The Musical) did right when it got adapted. It's almost as if Mean Girls tried so hard to *not* be Heathers that they shot themselves in the foot over what should have been basic storytelling/writing/music score techniques and best practices.
I remember two of my friends were obsessed when the musical first opened and told me "but they made it relevant to 2018!". The thing is, I kind of wished they had kept it in the early 2000s and made it more of a "period piece" (of course with less overt offensive humor). Also this ultra-pop contemporary sound is just not my thing, which is another reason why I don't care for the show. What I do find so funny about myself though, is that I LOVE Legally Blonde the musical. I don't know what it did right, but it's great. I think part of that is Legally Blonde kind of knows what musical it is (?) and wasn't trying to do anything except be a good adaptation.
Legally blonde the musical has a heart and it adds something to legally blonde. It gave us Elle and Emmet progression that wasn't seen much in the movie; Vivian was the one who defended Elle after Professor Callahan ( idk how to spell) made a move on her, compared in the movie that Vivian assumed that Elle was doing it for her own gain. Additionally we can see Elle do her best more, and Warner being torn and confused and not just stringing Elle (This, I may be wrong I cant remember which is which).
The songs are also bangers, I listen to it when I'm feeling down and it never fails to put my spirits up. I dont know if that's a me thing only but thats that.
(Would add on this later but now I have to eat)
@@reireiisconfused loll. I saw it at a regional theater in my city in 2019 and the opening number made me cry just because it just radiates joy.
@@neengreen6122 noooiiiccee, I hope our country would cater to musicals more. WOULD LOVE TO WATCH IT LIVE
@@reireiisconfused The progression in Elle and Emmet’s relationship was a lot more heartwarming and way cuter. And I liked how Emmet wasn’t some 6 foot early 2000s heart throb, and was like…a pretty normal looking dude.
One thing I always hated about the musical is that none of the characters are mean enough. In the movie Regina is such a hateable villain. And Gretchen and Karen are nicer but they still feel like mean girls. Cady transforms into a mean girl. Janice is the ultimate mean girl she’s just unpopular. In the musical Regina is just kind of a bitch but not really that hateable. Gretchen and Karen are basically not mean at all. Gretchen‘s actually really annoying in the musical tbh. Cady has a character shift for like 10 minutes and then that’s it. And Janice is a lot less morally gray. Overall the musical mean girls feels like a watered down version of the movie. Especially the delivery of quotes. The movie also feels better because it feels like it’s over the course of a few months and you’re just seeing a bunch of different days as opposed to the musical where it feels like it was over one month.
On a side note, I really hate the trend of using screens as the entire background in these modern adaptations. For a school trip we saw Anastasia, which had a similar thing and they’re backgrounds were so boring it really distracted me from the show (such a shame because the costume design was GORGEOUS and it would’ve been amazing if it had an elaborate set). It theoretically makes sense for stuff like this, but they didn’t do anything interesting with it besides the World Burn when it mimicked a copier. Most of the time it was just bland
To add on to the Hadestown stuff: as Orpheus continues to sing Epic III, the lyrics get more clever and complicated. It starts just saying, "Hades fell in love with Persephone" and ends with "Where is the treasure inside of your chest?" Orpheus' character development is shown through what he sings.(Think "Wedding Song" vs "If It's True). AND IT IS DONE WELL. All of the other characters start with very clever/sophisticated lyrics, which reflects the way they see the world. They (Persephone, Eurydice, Hermes, etc) sing like this because they are less naive/hopeful than Orpheus.
Mean Girls could have done this with Cady. Having her beginning songs be more soprano and her "asshole" songs be more alto - I don't really know. But they didn't, which is a shame because it would have added some intelligent story telling into this train wreck of a musical. Great video, btw
Hadestown is god tier and the future of Broadway
hadestown appreciation
I LOVE Hadestown. It’s such a great show that captures the audience from the beginning to the end, including why we built a wall.
In fairness, loving Hadestown isn't a fringe opinion. It's a mainstream smash, and so far hasn't had a backlash, which is by virtue of it being pretty much flawless. (Don't @ me :-))
I still prefer the off Broadway version of hadestown, but the Broadway version is still undeniably fantastic. Anais Mitchell is insanely talented
My fav lyrics are " if regina is the sun then im a disco ball, cause im just as bright and fun if you've had alcohol."
I always read Regina as the actual lesbian deeply in the closet and abusive towards other girls as part of a really screwed up denial mechanism. I dunno if I'm crazy for thinking that, but I wasn't head-canoning, it just popped into my head as an obvious interpretation, and each time I've seen the film it's just the lens through which I see her actions.
Agreed!!! Thought the same since the movie first came out!
I personally see her more as Aromantic, but a lesbian Regina would be too powerful for this earth...
Agreed. I don't know if I could take a being so powerful
Same!! I always just headcanon her as such because she gives off so much of those vibes
I personally could definitely see it, esp since we never see her actually attracted to any guy
Another good example (imo) of writing lines to convey childish / naive / awkward things is Starkid’s musical Twisted’s song Everything and More. When Jasmine goes “I want the moon! I want to live on the moon” and then just launches into a whole sidebar and a later callback about moon pie killed me, as did the choice to occasionally veer outside the song’s melody. It immediately characterized who Jasmine was and what her values / flaws / desires are.
yes!!!
Twisted is just genius in general. Jafar, technically-not-Jasmine, and Aladdin all have different musical styles. Jafar sings in a very operatic style like Les Misérables, Jasmine sings in a pop-y Disney style, and Aladdin sings in almost a rock opera style, and Happy Ending directly contrasts them. (Although the best song is still No One Remembers Achmed)
Her delivery really sells it as well
One change i really hated was in the mathlete scene, where instead of Cady realizing that her pointing out the other girls flaws was unnecessary and that she had changed so much that even in situations like that her new toxic behavious were still there, even when she tried to be better, they smoothed out Cadys character (again) by making the rival girl call her a slut and Cady being like "whoa c'mon, lets not bully each other :("
I mean it's literally canon that Janis and Regina are two sides of the same coin. And I always saw it as Regina started the rumour because she is so self obsessed and assumed everyone loved her that she genuinely thought that Janis was in love with her. Then she grasped on to the whole Lebanese/lesbian thing and started bullying her. And ot stuck because
1. She's Regina George and
2. Because Janis is an alt art girl
Making her actually be straight helps reinforce the message that anyone can look like anything (without it being because of or having any effect on ones gender identity or sexuality) and show how teen girls really dont need a reason to rip you to threads
Mean Girls is definitely a “don’t think, just watch” thing for me, like I can’t listen to the soundtrack alone because I’d focus on the lyrics too hard. I think the original reason I liked it was because my brain mashed the parts I liked about the movie and the parts I like about the musical giving me a “Mean Girls good!” Response.
SAME
I HATED the costuming in this show for the most part. why is Janis dressed like her favorite store is Hobby Lobby?
Janis dresses exactly like my ex girlfriend (I'm also a girl, to be clear), who's also obsessively an artist. It doesn't help that janis's actress looks VERY similar to her so yeah
Regina was dressed the worst imo
another thing: i love barrett wilbert weed (the actress) but she couldn’t pull off half of the costumes
@@bobsburgers8497 Her spring fling dress in the musical is honestly upsetting someone needs to be fired
@@batfurs3001 she looks exactly like an ex friend of mine who is also queer and so am i lol
Hi, I used to be a huge Mean Girls Fan and was on tumblr in 2018-2020 when the show was on broadway, so i remember when this exact bootleg first came out. the ensemble member that keeps on getting zoomed in on is Becca Petersen, and this was filmed on her last show in Mean Girls. The person who filmed this bootleg had filmed many other dates of Mean Girls (they were the main source of MG bootlegs at the time) and they specifically attended this performance to see Becca’s last show, hence why they intentionally zoomed in on Becca a lot.
Eh, in regards to Janice I feel like a major part of her bullying thing was people just ASSUMING she was a lesbian based on stereotypes and rumors, because at least back then it was something that bullies could latch onto and insult you with whether it was true or not ((I also went through a similar spat of bullying in high school where I was made fun of for being lesbian when I wasn't))
Maybe its just my personal perspective, but I dunno, I just got the impression that Janice either didn't care or had grown apathetic to the bullying because she knew she couldn't stop the rumor mill once it had started. Not that the movie writers were afraid of making her a lesbian proper, ((especially since they keep Damien being gay, even if he IS also stereotypically coded))
ok wtf did they do to janis in the musical? she looked all cool and grunge in the movie and they turned her into a Pinterest fashion girlie
To be fair every character’s fashion was updated to be more late 2010s, not just Janis.
@@toxicsugarart2103 You can still be goth in modern day...
@@toxicsugarart2103 there are literally still tons of goth girls, it's an eternal fashion now - it manifests a bit differently, but the basics are still the same, and it fits with the doomer/sadpop vibes of the times.
idk i would not call her outfit "pinterest fashion girlie" lmao she looks ridiculous
@@shayla4007 Yeah exactly
The problem with Janice is she manipulated Cady into getting revenge on the Plastics and used her as a pawn (wether she noticed it or not), then plays victim. She never gets called out as ringleader and never apologizes or even sees she was also in the wrong too. And then we’re supposed to root for her in the end because “Janice is right! She’s awesome because she is herself and we should be like her!” Like at least Regina apologized to Cady. This was my biggest problem with the film and the musical made it worse.
I picked up on that too, but I don't think it was a problem with the film. I took it as intentional because the title is Mean Girls and there are different ways this meanness can be portrayed. Janis also says "at least Regina and I know we're mean...." I think one key difference is though that Regina was a bully and mean to everyone. Janis was mean to Regina because of what she did. Manipulating Cady was wrong, but she showed more signs of actually wanting to be her friend, which is why she was upset when Cady changed. If Janis only used Cady to "dethrone" Regina, she wouldn't have continued to engage with her once Cady took her place. I think this got lost in the musical and they tried to paint Janis as the hero.
Exactly! This problem is *especially* bad in the party scene where Janis calls Cady out. Her saying “at least me and Regina George know we’re mean” is her directly acknowledging her behaviour and makes her a direct mirror of Regina. This being switched out with the song someone gets hurts reprise ruins her. All Janis does in that song is call Cady out for being plastic with no substance to her own behaviour. It’s more like a self-pity “oh woe is me” ballad instead of something that’s filled with rage.
This is called back when she sings I’d rather be me, since she paints herself even *more* of a victim by saying “yeah, both of my best friends have turned out to be mean :( I can do better than them” is such a misunderstanding of her character. Janis is mean. Why is she having an emotional power ballad after manipulating Cady for a good chunk of the film? Besides, the lack of anger towards Regina in the movie makes her actions even worse, since it seems like she’s messing with Regina for giggles instead of it coming from a place of genuine anger. Smh
I will never understand why they cut that lind
To quote our dark comrade mommy: "how to put this delicately ... Reality is sometimes misogynistic" like.. you can't clean up being mean!
I'd Rather Be Me would have been an _amazing_ and sinister song if the intended message was that this is Janis putting a spin on things. Her misrepresenting how events went down to the student body to come out on top in this game. And then they went ahead and did that unironic inspiring music video.
Some plot points that could've been interesting to add to the musical:
Aaron Samuels starting as an airheaded football jock who wants to be nice but struggles with peer pressure from his male peers. The musical focuses more on female peer pressure so this would've been an interesting arc to add. It would also parallel Cadie's arc. Her arc is going from innocent and kind to a mean girl, Aaron would be going from a typical kinda mean jock to a genuine and nice guy.
Janice struggling with being outed and being the only out lesbian in the school. Enough people have talked about this, so I won't.
Cadie's parents feeling like they're losing her because she is changing so much. The movie shows a little bit of this, but not a lot. It would be interesting to see the parents realize something is up before Regina gets hit by a bus so that the blow up is built up.
watching the musical movie i think a lot of the concerns expressed here are also in the movie but i will say one of the only points that i actually felt anything for cady was when she was talking how her and her mom used to watch the stars together and her kind of wishing she was a kid again
This musical is the most front-heavy show I have ever seen. All the good numbers (save World Burn) are in the first act and there are some BOMBS in the second one that made me kind of regret going to see it.
And I know Sarah likes Stop (except for that one line she mentioned and I know exactly what it is and I haven't even gotten to this part of the video yet but jesus christ it is the worst piece of songwriting I have ever heard in my life and I cannot forget it or excuse it) but it just doesn't work as the second act opener. If anything, they should have done a sort of mashup of "Apex Predator" and "How Bad Can I Be?" to show just how evil Cady was becomig.
Heathers keeps the vibe of the show going after a major dramatic plot point by calming everyone down and making them laugh with "Dead Gay Son"
Beetlejuice makes us laugh with a totally out-of-left-field song about a Girl Scout with a heart condition that drops straight into "Beautiful Sound" to show how Lydia is acting out.
Legally Blonde goes from Elle being the lovable boy-crazy idiot and jumps straight into lawyer mode with "Whipped Into Shape," a funny song that shows how Elle can be an asset to the murder trial.
"Stop" simply does not do it for me. It's a poor way of painting the side characters as bad people who regret doing bad things but still have a smile on their faces when they sing about doing them all the while shaming Cady for being a bad person who is quickly losing track of who she is.
There's a right way to do this. It's "Seventeen" from Heathers. Bad people acknowledge they are bad and want to change their ways.
@@manband20 Stop always felt *way* to similar to Turn It Off from The Book Of Mormon for my liking.
"Fearless" is a track I always skip. Too slow, too soft, repetetive but not in the good catchy way.. The only good thing about it tbh is that it leads up to Someone Gets Hurt (Reprise).
@@Weirdanimalboy Which is my favorite moment in the entire soundtrack (possibly tied with all of Apex Predator) so I'll put Fearless on and then skip immediately to the end
Me: shakes head in commiseration while Sarah goes on about her high school theater programs golf cart for legally blonde, remembering a similar ramble I have made about my own high school theater program and the horse and carriage we got for Cinderella…
oooh that sounds… fuuuun.
sarcasm aside, i hope it wasn’t too much of a disaster
Every single high school theatre kid who wasn’t the lead has at least 5 bitter stories off the top of their head that’s the golf cart but in different flavors
God I wish I had the balls to be a theater kid back in high school
There was actually a clique of girls at my elementary/middle school who emulated The Plastics intentionally and even called themselves The Barbie Squad and made a burn book. The movie came out when we were late elementary age, and I guess these girls kind of missed the message. It was kinda funny, and they mostly just hung out together and wore pink, but they were also a pretty mean sometimes.
I'm pretty sure some girls at my school thought they were serena and blair from gossip girl (except serena is not supposed to be that mean and blair also has limits to her cruelty)
It’s just like when boring white guys deliberately dressed and acted like Don Draper. I love when people miss the message in media, it’s always so funny to watch
This movie came out when I was in 8th grade and in 9th grade, I was part of a clique who emulated The Plastics. Our "Regina" was more passive aggressive and controlling though rather than outright cruel. She had her limits and also our school was strict on the no-bullying policy. The other difference was that we had a Damien in the group (flamboyant gay guy).
I haven’t seen the musical but here’s my take on Janice’s sexuality movie wise as a person who was a teen back then. I know it’s like a bummer for representation but I think her arc serves a bigger point about how the plastics keep all the other girls and themselves in a comp hetero femme presenting conformity despite what their actual feelings might be and how Janice might’ve stunted her own feelings by obsessively becoming their antithesis instead of ignoring them and going her own way. Whether she’s a lesbian or not she never gets to explore one way or the other because she got pegged as one thing shamefully right at the point in her development when girls start to really do that, which puts her in a dilemma to either become so hetero as a means to prove Regina wrong or to openly be out and face ostracism from everybody for it…it’s not fun either way when you’re that age and it makes sense that she kinda just shelved that aspect of herself because it’s more intimate than the tough girl persona puts on as a form of resistance.Janice isn’t allowed to be vulnerable relationship wise at school because her label is a double bind. Maybe she’s straight, maybe she’s bi, she might be gay but she never gets the chance to try openly one way or the other until the plastics go down.
Which brings me to Regina…because the movie kinda codes her as blink and you miss it gay. She dates men she has no real interest in beyond their status and how they’ll make her look she used sex as a means of control but hardly seems to enjoy it.She’s obsessed with other girls constantly noticing them. It’s weird how panicked she is about Janice and how she needed to push her out when they were the closest friends. It’s left in the air if it’s because she was worried about Janice as competition for boys or if the intimacy of their friendship was getting to be too much for her…but in the end Regina is free to release her many frustrations through ladies sports. Which back in the day ladies sports was coded for lesbianism sooooo. Interesting things there. Sucks we don’t get unambiguous representation in movie but…like at the time being out in high school was not a thing most people could do and I think the movie really captures those subtleties very well all bummers aside.
heard the Regina is gay theory before and i'm really interested at it, her whoel comp heterosexuality thing is so interesting
Honestly I’ve always gotten that message from the movie. I wonder if they didn’t flat out say it simply because of the time period and environment the movie was released in.
Yessss! My friends and I had that as a headcanon as teenagers, it's great to see it laid out in a more well-thought-out way!
@@abigailchristenson388 I imagine it's a bit of both, but also we kinda assign homophobia more to boys in media and we rarely explore how homophobia both internalized and outward operates for girls and their friendships and relationship to their forming sexuality in general.
@@yonicorn1641 It feels obvious if you're a person who didn't figure things out until you're twenties/thirties and then looking back you're like ...oh shit that's what that was all about.
Regina's bland "I'm a big deal" intro doesn't seem like she's meant to be a villain. Glinda had the same intro in wicked
Can we talk about the fact that the musical opens with Janis and Damian singing “This is a cautionary tale”? Now there are certainly some dicey moments in the story but everything ends pretty happily for all parties involved. I don’t think a story with a happy ending can really be called a cautionary tale.
I was in a production of Legally Blonde as well. One of the biggest jokes during our rehearsals was how difficult the vocals were, especially for the tenors. Also the amount of key changes. Me and my friend decided to count how many key changes (like when the key signature in the score changed) were in each song and the total throughout the musical was some absurd number like over 200 or something. One song had like 36 key changes within the span of five minutes, it was nuts.
Was that song so much better?
@@TarynM716 I think it was Chip on My Shoulder
I think the problem with updating it from 2004 to the “modern” day is that the modern day is always changing. What was of the time in 2018 now feels so cringey. Plus it was a bunch of adults trying to sound like teens in 2018 so the tone was already a bit out of date when it premiered.
I always found it fascinating how american highschools apparently have this completely unique culture to them. Like, how do people have time socializing so much? How long are their breaks? How does every school seem to have extended programms for sports and arts and music and theater and such? In Germany, we just have classes with maybe 15 min breaks, in which everyone just goes to the toilet and to their next classroom.
Europe squad unite ! I mean, we still socialized : before class, at 10am, during lunch break (the longest), at 4pm and after class (if I remember correctly for my country). Enough time for bullies to bully, not enough for me to do extra arts and sports tho
Clubs are after school hours. The way cliques are portrayed in older teen movies is kinda exaggerated. It might be different between private and public schools, but at my public school, people tended to stick with friends they’ve had since elementary, but weren’t that strict about socializing with newer people. My school still had a lot of drama, but there really wasn’t a defined social hierarchy. It was more just there was people you got along with and people you didn’t.
That's in TV and movies, actual American High School wouldn't be very interesting to watch.
You get about twenty to thirty minutes for lunch, four minutes between 7-8 classes and before school and after school. For mine, there was half an hour before school and after school that was the ‘tutoring’ window where you could go ask your teacher for help with an assignment….even through they weren’t there half the time.
How is it okay for the TEACHER to be late to start but if I’m one minute late because MACKENZIE wouldn’t move from the only free sink that worked because she wanted to do her makeup while I had to wash my hands, then ***I*** get into trouble for ‘lolly gagging’
I know this comment is 9 months old but as an American high school was never as interesting or mean as the teen movies made it out to be which at first disappointed me but I was later grateful..I mean there were some asshole students but they weren't in cliques terrorizing other kids it was just friends talking amongst each other saying some dumb stuff and rude jokes I never saw any sort of groups or cliques or gossip. It was just pretty average
"With any luck, someone will make a non-musical play of the musical movie, and someone will do a musical adaptation of that, and we'll just get to suffer through a cycle of gradually more unrecognisable Mean Girls adaptations, until somehow it turns back into a self help book." Don't threaten me with a good time
If/when Mean Girls is eventually licensed out to high schools, do you think clever staging & direction could salvage the show? There's not much you can do about crappy lyrics and bad pacing, but for a start I'm thinking:
- Cady's line delivery changes throughout the show from awkward to manipulative
- A lot more costume changes to indicate the passage of time (this wouldn't have to be that pricy, since MG takes place in the modern day...so have everyone in the ensemble bring a start-of-school outfit, a fall outfit, a pre-Christmas outfit, a February depression outfit, etc. And it wouldn't have to be full costume changes either...people could throw on cardigans, scarfs, etc esp during a song like Revenge Party where time moves so quickly.)
- There's not much you can do about Regina being defanged, but I wonder if close attention to deliver & staging some nonverbal mean-girlness could help make her evil again
- Maybe you could find a way to put some sarcastic layers on "Fearless," which would make it slightly less boring
- "I'd Rather Be Me" could be sung at Cady/Regina instead of at the audience. It could potentially be a giant Fuck You to Cady and Regina as Janice takes advantage of the growing sentiment against them to become the new popular girl at school instead -- a Fearless reprise. (Still OOC, but maybe a little less than the original version)
- "I See Stars" might not be such a boring reductive song if Cady has been directed to really play up the descent into meanness throughout the show. It'd be a return to her previous kindhearted self, but using the charisma she gained from the Plastics for good.
It wouldn't fix the show, but I do think shaking up the direction could help a lot.
Might be only me, but I would love a less funny and more honest portrayal of "what's wrong with me"
awesome ideas!
Yes!!!! The costumes were killing me, they're awful. The most obvious one to me is Janis, they made her mildly double denim art kid rather than early 2000s goth. But the most important ones are the Plastics, the original movie told a story through their outfits, and they were goddamn iconic. In the musical, they're just... bland
The highlight of my day was listening to James Schaffrillas deadpan say the words, "I don't need their good opinions. I have plenty of opinions. Everybody has opinions but it doesn't make them true."