Holiday Hiatus Announcement

I will be off on a family vacation from December 15th (roughly) until the second or first week of February!

But before then there will be at least one Alpha Asshole I have known, the piece on witches and Rare Parodies Month!

The Girls of Summer: From Justin to Kelly

We close out this year's look at the Girls of Summer with this last blast of nostalgia.  

The beach movie sort of died off as a genre by the time the late 90’s rolled around.  Nostalgic types were busy reflecting on the 70s, with all of its attendant odd affection for the 50s (Grease singalong slumber parties often ended with frantic iterations of the “YMCA” dance for 90’s kids; you can’t say we weren’t a creative generation).    That explains My Girl’s popularity, and its positioning as the ultimate 70’s nostalgia throwback with a mid-60s Mo-Town soundtrack.

The 00s were a different time.   We had different priorities; our idols were self-made people winking at us from the television set, and we could vote them off of our screens with the pressing of a button when we grew tired of them.   Reality television was a brand new medium, and every single ancillary production arm, from radio to the internet, tried to take advantage of the nascent fame of the Richard Hatches of the world.  When Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guaraní came in first and second place during the very first American Idol competition,  two cogs spun into motion – the music industry set about manufacturing a sound for both musicians, and the film industry set about creating the first American Idol motion picture.

The Girls of Summer: My Girl 1 and My Girl 2

Every child of the movies hopes to have it: The Summer that Changes Everything, a series of golden afternoons bathed in sunlight and hope, where the child in question gets their first kiss (or if they're older, loses their virginity), hangs out with friends spouting quotable quotes and riding bicycles, and makes memories that they'll carry with them into the winter of cruel adulthood.  Every generation gets a movie of their own to accompany said Magical Summer, and for 90s kids, that movie was My Girl.