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chocolatepotI watched Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies recently and I keep telling myself "it's a kids' show, it's a kids' show, just move past it," but I CAN'T so I'm going to write a whole thing about its problems.
It feels weird to me that they'd make this show for teens at all because I feel like being allowed/encouraged to watch Grease at a young age despite it being WILDLY inappropriate is really a Millennial thing - have Gen Xers been doing that with Gen Z? But, that aside. We all know that Grease is a fucked up musical. The entire thing is about teenagers (played by adults) being horny, there's barely any plot, it's driven by Danny and Sandy being together, breaking up, being unable to get over each other, and then getting back together, and of course in the end Sandy changes for Danny. So like ... a lot to contend with.
RotPL is set four years before Grease, so in theory it's about how the Pink Ladies became a girl gang. But instead of being about a younger Rizzo, Jan, Frenchie, and Marty, it's about four older girls: Nancy, Olivia, Jane, and Cynthia. There are also T-birds but I can't recall any of their names except Shyguy (not his real name) and Ritchie, Olivia's brother. The T-birds are actually a lot like the ones in canon - that is, dumbasses who just want to get girls and have fun - but the Ladies are nearly always *so* serious. Jane is the overachiever who wants to be class president, Nancy wants to go to fashion school, Cynthia is a lesbian (big bonus points for the show from me), and Olivia doesn't really have ambitions. From very early it's clear that the show is going "Look, we're fixing Grease! Instead of just being teens who want to make out, they have Full Lives that don't revolve around boys!"
Only ... they still do revolve around boys, kinda. Not Cynthia (yay!), but Jane's got a big love triangle with the rich boy she was with at the beginning before her social stock fell and Ritchie, and it's very much the frame for her whole plotline; Nancy started out seeming ace but then gets into one of the T-birds in a way that even makes her go "this is weird and I don't know why I'm into you;" Olivia's one thing outside of her sexuality (very Rizzo vibes) is this long-running affair with a teacher, which is ... weirdly not problematized until the very end??? (The kind of thing that I'd expect in something more faithful to the fucked-up tone of Grease.) Very "girl power but don't look too hard at it!"
On the same lines, they set things up to explore racism a whole lot more than Grease (which is very white) and then do almost nothing with it. Jane's father is Italian and her mother is Puerto Rican, and early on it's super important that her mother pass for Italian-American to help them assimilate, but this is only lightly touched on. Olivia and Ritchie's family are Mexican, which led me to be like oh! this parallel/similarity is going to be a major thread! but they dropped it apart from two brief moments (one where Ritchie sees Jane's mother and recognizes her ethnicity; one where Jane goes to their house and can't speak Spanish). Nancy is Asian and that has no effect on anything apart from a single remark about WWII-era camps. One of the popular boys is black, the drama teacher is flamboyant and black, and a second-tier character, Hazel, is a shy black nerd - and again, there are these kind of subtle references with Hazel and the boy but it never really goes anywhere. The extras are also very diverse. It overall feels very wishy-washy, racism exists occasionally to make a point but the rest of the time you're supposed to forget about it, which was honestly kind of crappy given that the show is clearly trying to be progressive. It just sucks because Jane feeling the pressure to uphold whiteness for her family because she's more white-passing than her mother and sister, who is Frenchie btw) would have been a much more compelling arc for the season than the love triangle OR the class president election.
Also, it's a musical but the songs are bad. Maybe this is me being Aziraphale-ish again but IDK, I couldn't hum a single one of them and the choreo was nearly always super overwrought. Very pop music, would have been way more fun as pastiches of 1950s songs.
It feels weird to me that they'd make this show for teens at all because I feel like being allowed/encouraged to watch Grease at a young age despite it being WILDLY inappropriate is really a Millennial thing - have Gen Xers been doing that with Gen Z? But, that aside. We all know that Grease is a fucked up musical. The entire thing is about teenagers (played by adults) being horny, there's barely any plot, it's driven by Danny and Sandy being together, breaking up, being unable to get over each other, and then getting back together, and of course in the end Sandy changes for Danny. So like ... a lot to contend with.
RotPL is set four years before Grease, so in theory it's about how the Pink Ladies became a girl gang. But instead of being about a younger Rizzo, Jan, Frenchie, and Marty, it's about four older girls: Nancy, Olivia, Jane, and Cynthia. There are also T-birds but I can't recall any of their names except Shyguy (not his real name) and Ritchie, Olivia's brother. The T-birds are actually a lot like the ones in canon - that is, dumbasses who just want to get girls and have fun - but the Ladies are nearly always *so* serious. Jane is the overachiever who wants to be class president, Nancy wants to go to fashion school, Cynthia is a lesbian (big bonus points for the show from me), and Olivia doesn't really have ambitions. From very early it's clear that the show is going "Look, we're fixing Grease! Instead of just being teens who want to make out, they have Full Lives that don't revolve around boys!"
Only ... they still do revolve around boys, kinda. Not Cynthia (yay!), but Jane's got a big love triangle with the rich boy she was with at the beginning before her social stock fell and Ritchie, and it's very much the frame for her whole plotline; Nancy started out seeming ace but then gets into one of the T-birds in a way that even makes her go "this is weird and I don't know why I'm into you;" Olivia's one thing outside of her sexuality (very Rizzo vibes) is this long-running affair with a teacher, which is ... weirdly not problematized until the very end??? (The kind of thing that I'd expect in something more faithful to the fucked-up tone of Grease.) Very "girl power but don't look too hard at it!"
On the same lines, they set things up to explore racism a whole lot more than Grease (which is very white) and then do almost nothing with it. Jane's father is Italian and her mother is Puerto Rican, and early on it's super important that her mother pass for Italian-American to help them assimilate, but this is only lightly touched on. Olivia and Ritchie's family are Mexican, which led me to be like oh! this parallel/similarity is going to be a major thread! but they dropped it apart from two brief moments (one where Ritchie sees Jane's mother and recognizes her ethnicity; one where Jane goes to their house and can't speak Spanish). Nancy is Asian and that has no effect on anything apart from a single remark about WWII-era camps. One of the popular boys is black, the drama teacher is flamboyant and black, and a second-tier character, Hazel, is a shy black nerd - and again, there are these kind of subtle references with Hazel and the boy but it never really goes anywhere. The extras are also very diverse. It overall feels very wishy-washy, racism exists occasionally to make a point but the rest of the time you're supposed to forget about it, which was honestly kind of crappy given that the show is clearly trying to be progressive. It just sucks because Jane feeling the pressure to uphold whiteness for her family because she's more white-passing than her mother and sister, who is Frenchie btw) would have been a much more compelling arc for the season than the love triangle OR the class president election.
Also, it's a musical but the songs are bad. Maybe this is me being Aziraphale-ish again but IDK, I couldn't hum a single one of them and the choreo was nearly always super overwrought. Very pop music, would have been way more fun as pastiches of 1950s songs.
no subject
Date: 2023-06-09 12:41 pm (UTC)Thank you for the review. Phooey.
no subject
Date: 2023-06-13 12:36 pm (UTC)On behalf of a friend, do you have any recommended links similar to https://phrynefishersfrocks.tumblr.com/ and Frock Flicks for quality-entertainment-fashion-design analysis? Not patterns, but inspection and review.
No rush!
no subject
Date: 2023-07-03 12:24 am (UTC)