Mean Girls: Multi-Multimedia Mayhem

We all know about the 2004 triumph of American feminist cinema; Mean Girls. However, I don’t think many people know how that piece of media has evolved over time. To begin with, the film is actually an adaptation of the high school self-help book, Queen Bees and Wannabes, which was aimed at, you guessed it, teenage girls. The movie, which was written by Tina Fey, was essentially a satirical look at the book while still following its core principals. It, of course, was a huge hit, and popular enough to spawn a sequel that no-one really cares about. Also, all of these examples are pretty hypermediacy-centric, meaning, they’re all pretty meta. As in, the book will use the term, “you,” and address the reader, and I seem to recall Lindsay Lohan’s character looking directly into the camera at some points during the film?! Yeah, that sense of meta-ness (hypermediacy, I mean) is prevalent throughout all the forms of this piece of media! Anyway, take a look at an image for Queen Bees and Wannabes that is so big it’s super grainy. I also can’t figure out how to edit it down. How cool! There’s more after the huge book cover, so scroll down some more, will ya?

So, after the 2004 spectacle of peak cinema, came a broadway musical adaption of the same name. Yeah, they just called it Mean Girls again. No addition of “The Musical” to the end or anything. Not many people know about this! I’ve heard it’s pretty good, actually, but seeing as how I’m here in the state of dead cornfields and not in New York, New York, I haven’t seen what I’m assuming is the best stage production since Sliced Bread: The Musical. Also, once again, Tina Fey was the main gal behind the musical. Genius or too stubborn to hand off the baton to somebody else? You decide! Anyway, here’s a montage of some decent-enough looking clips from what I’ve now decided is a halfway-middling looking musical. Take a look!

Now… What we’ve all been waiting for dreading… Not the first, not the second, but the third movie in this franchise… An adaption, not of the book, not of the original film, but of the dang stage musical, it’s… Mean Girls. That’s right. The third thing called “Mean Girls” is an an adaptation of the broadway musical, which is an adaptation of the film, which is an adaptation of a self-help book which really has nothing to do with Regina George and her misadventures as the school’s biggest, uhm, well, I like to think of myself as a feminist, so I’m going to act like I wasn’t even going to go there. School’s biggest dummy, how about that? Anyway, here’s the trailer! (Oh, and I forgot to mention, Tina Fey ONCE AGAIN wrote the dang screenplay. How much work does she need in the “rude women” genre?!)

So! You’ve learned all you’ve needed to learn about the MEAN GIRLS SAGA— But I haven’t even talked about the video games or novels! Well… Too bad. I’m sick and tired of mean girls. How about “good boys?” Just kidding, that movie sucks.

What I was mostly interested in was the book to movie to broadway musical to movie musical pipeline, otherwise known as “BTMTBMTMMP.” I know, could use for some shortening, but so could these movies, I mean jeez. Tina Fey seems to think the world revolves around rude white people that are in high school. How about kind people- of different races and cultures, perhaps? I think the new movie was better with that, but anyway, I notice I haven’t actually much talked about the behind the scenes of this stuff that much, which is weird, because I actually know quite a lot about it.

The 2024 movie musical was originally going to be released on Paramount+, and was filmed during COVID, so it doesn’t exactly look good, sound good, or have much of a feeling of scale since it was unfortunately rushed into theaters to make a quick buck. It’s a shame, too, because pretty much every other entry that I’ve mentioned here has been near universally praised by its target audience! The self-help book? Helpful! The comedy film? Funny! The musical? Music…y? However, they didn’t advertise this new film as even being a musical. Instead, they went for more of a “Hey, we’re doing it for a new generation because all of the executives at our movie studio are cool teenage girls!” route, which is, as you probably assumed, untrue. (They are all elderly men who don’t know how to connect with anything. They don’t even talk to their wives. Just kidding! They’re divorced.)

Anyway, I hope you have a great time reading this halfway-educational, mostly comedic blog post, and I mean this as much as a straight man can say it; Stay fetch!