Wrap your head around this: As of today, it's been 10 years that we've been trying to make "fetch" happen.
On April 30, 2004 Mean Girls—the Tina Fey-penned dark comedy about just how awful high school cliques can be—hit theaters. It was a mild success, bringing in just over $24 million in its opening weekend. As time went on, though, it became a cultural juggernaut. Its catchphrases infect our language; its GIFs fill our Tumblrs. In 10 years, we've gone from Mean Girls to Meme Girls.
Mean Girls was a perfect storm that made landfall too early. At the time it was released, Fey hadn't yet launched 30 Rock (or become every online wiseass' favorite cult hero); there was no Twitter demanding sub-140-character retorts like "Boo, you whore!"; and Lindsay Lohan was still an up-and-comer, not just God's gift to gossip blogs. But the jokes were good, and the internet—aka the world's own personal Burn Book— has claimed the film's dark, sarcastic voice as its own.
"It's the quintessential high school teen movie for the current generation, just like how Clueless and Carrie were for previous generations," says Emily Huh, director of business development for Know Your Meme home Cheezburger. "But the internet wasn't as popular then, so we didn't have the spread of the memes and GIFs that came out of those older movies."
It caught up fast, though. Know Your Meme cites scores of fan videos, GIFs, and other online ephemera that have sprouted from the film in the last decade. Mean Girls images and catchphrases rarely go more than a day or two without popping up on BuzzFeed, and Jezebel even has a tag dedicated to any news bit it feels can be surmised by the movie's line "You go, Glenn Coco." Offline, the movie has been referenced by everyone from Mariah Carey, who made a song based on Queen Bee Regina George (Rachel McAdams)'s line "why are you so obsessed with me," to internet mascot Jennifer Lawrence, who referenced the film's final prom scene while accepting a People's Choice Award in 2013.
And it's not just pop culture. President Obama—or at least someone from his staff—has used the film more than once, including as a call to watch a debate and to pick on the family dog Bo.
But it's Tumblr that has become the most fertile ground for Mean Girls talk. The movie, in true Fey fashion, tells the story of a fish-out-of-water student (Lohan) trying to survive life with an uber-popular clique—mostly through soul-crushing jokes and subtle visual reactions. In other words, it was trafficking in image macros long before the format became ubiquitous online. An image of one of the film's titular mean girls paired with a quote like "that's why her hair is so big, it's full of secrets" is an easy response to almost anything on the internet; by now, the producers of a film or TV show know they have a hit when a mashup Tumblr launches, whether it's Mean Mad Men or Mean Girls of Westeros. (See some of the best in the gallery above.)
"It’s pretty fascinating, the way all these dominant, mega-fandoms, have basically taken all the *Mean Girls *content and layered Hunger Games or Harry Potter on top of that to create this double-fandom," David Hayes, Tumblr's head of Canvas and entertainment evangelist told The Washington Post last week. "[They're] using the quotes, the GIFs, the lines and the content to extend their fandom."
In other words, Mean Girls was one of the original online fandoms, whether we were aware of it at the time or not. But either way, today is Wednesday—and on Wednesdays we wear pink.
