Straight out of the panels of Archie Comics comes Josie and the Pussycats (2001); a story about a band (Rachael Leigh Cook as Josie, Tara Reid as Melody, and Rosario Dawson as Valerie) who make it big when they sign with Wyatt Frame (Alan Cumming) and Fiona’s (Parker Posey) record label MegaRecords. As fame threatens to tear the girls apart they realize that their music has been a platform for Fiona to broadcast subliminal messages designed to strip teenagers of their autonomy and control their financial spending.
Josie and the Pussycats is an intelligent little movie that feels more relevant today than it did when it was first released. Twenty years later the youth culture of the 2020s has embraced the style, wit, and social commentary of a film that was dismissed as mass produced trash targeted at teenage girls. Even if one doesn’t invest in the story, the characters or the music, the humorous jokes at the expense of our collective pop culture are enough to sustain any viewer. How many movies from 2001 can perfectly satirize The Backstreet Boys and contain a mocking reference to the show Adam-12 (1968-75)?
Josie and the Pussycats came out just a year after Charlie’s Angels (2000) and follows a very similar modus operandi. Like its predecessor Josie and the Pussycats reimagines an older intellectual property with a built in fanbase and cultural profile as an entertainment for contemporary audiences. Josie and the Pussycats takes the most imaginative elements of the cartoon series Josie and the Pussycats (1970-71) and Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space (1972-73), both Ruby/Spears productions, and renders them as a kind of barrage of MTV video effects. The drama of Josie and the Pussycats, while delivered as high-camp, is nonetheless sincere and relatively affective.
What filmmakers Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont add to the proceedings is an explicit commentary on how American capitalism both controls and exploits American popular culture. One immediately thinks of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957) and Giants And Toys (1958) as obvious influences but there is another source of inspiration whose impact is felt just as keenly; that would be Christy Marx’s animated series for Hasbro Jem and the Holograms (1985-88). As is the case with Kaplan and Elfont’s film, Marx’s series follows a girl band’s struggle for success in an industry that always seemed at odds with them. But what Josie and the Pussycats really takes from Jem and the Holograms and elaborates on are the strategies for binding music video style interludes to the narrative drama.
Josie and the Pussycats is so very much the product of its moment yet it manages to transcend those limitations by virtue of how it handles themes. This is the kind of film that, as studios become more “woke”, Hollywood is desperate to make but for some reason can’t successfully. Josie and the Pussycats and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2002) are exemplars of how a feminist minded blockbuster spectacle can and should work.
