The Story

How Mean Girls made ‘fetch’ happen

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Episode notes

Twenty years after Mean Girls introduced Regina George and her pink-clad Plastics to cinema screens, the high-school Queen Bee is back in a new musical film and a West End stage musical. So why is a film for teenage girls still so popular two decades later? And what did it expose about the complicated politics of girl world?

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Guest: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, pop culture historian and author of So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We’re Still So Obsessed With It).

Host: Manveen Rana.

Clips: Mean Girls (2004)/Paramount Pictures, CBS Sunday Morning, Saturday Night Live, Late Night with Conan O’Brien/NBC, The Breakfast Club/Universal Pictures, Clueless/Paramount Pictures, Rosalind Wiseman/The Empower Program, Mean Girls (2024)/Paramount Pictures, Apex Predator/Barrett Wilbert Weed, Erika Henningsen/Mean Girls (Original Broadway Cast Recording).

Read more:

• The enduring cult of Mean Girls
• That is so fetch! Reneé Rapp, the star of the new Mean Girls movie

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