The Bechdel Cast - Cheetah Girls with Korama Danquah

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

Cheetah Girls Jamie, Caitlin, and special guest Korama Danquah get together to sing about the Disney Channel Original Movie, Cheetah Girls. (This episode contains spoilers)For Bechdel bonuses, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com/bechdelcast.Follow @koramadrama on Twitter. While you're there, you should also follow @BechdelCast, @caitlindurante and @jamieloftusHELP  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Trust us, it's out of this world. On the Bechdelcast, the questions asked, if movies have women in them, are all their discussions just boyfriends and husbands, or do they have individualism? The patriarchy's effing vast start changing it with the bechdel cast there's a time when we all choose caitlin join in come on my dog just fell in a hole oh um yeah the next lyrics are this you're fired from the cheetah girls oh no

we're supposed to be matching and we just know the words to this song welcome to the bechdel cast yes welcome welcome i do really like the girl power song i've been listening to it on purpose you texted me about it two times oh really yeah every song i've been listening to it on purpose you texted me about it two times oh really yeah every song i remember the one every song in this movie uh is fun it's fun this is a this is a fun and complicated movie text yes expanded universe it's the cheetah girls episode of the bechdel cast uh for let's get some formalities out of the way my name is uh jamie loftus my name is caitlin dorante and this is our movie podcast where we take a look at your favorite movies using an intersectional feminist lens uh cheetah girls i believe is one of our most popular requests in

the dcom canon i would say specifically in the decom canon yes yes i mean if we're going subsections and so this episode has been a long time coming i am so thrilled i feel that we have really found the perfect guest here this is this episode was originally going to be on our matreon because we were like let's just do every raven simone decom which turns out to be a more ambitious project than you would imagine it would be. That's going to have to be its own whole podcast. Exactly. Yeah, I'm just so thrilled it's finally Cheetah Girls Day on the pod.

It's been a long time coming. I'm completely ambivalent. But let's introduce that wonderful guest. She is a writer, actor, and co-host of the podcast popcorn book club it's karama dankwa hello hi thank you so much for having me i'm so excited to talk about the cheetah girls i'm excited karama and i had a 2 a.m discussion about cheetah girls yeah it was intense it was intense it was the like the best late night dm uh results of all time yes and no unsolicited dick pics so just couldn't have ended any better

oh it's possible it's possible it happened um yeah i'm really excited to to talk about the cheetah girls expanded universe with you today. So let's just get into it. Karama, what is your experience with The Cheetah Girls property in general? Books, movie, whatever it is. I'm so excited. Thank you for asking me that question because a lot of people don't even know that The Cheetah Girls was a book series originally. Started in the late 1990s.

I think the first one came out in 1998. And there are over 10 books. And they were written by Deborah Gregory. Her name is spelled like Deborah, but it's pronounced Deborah, which is a thing that I know because I, and I was telling Caitlin this. You don't know this, Jamie, but I met her in 2003, right before my 12th birthday. I've just aged myself forever. And she gave me this signed headshot where she is in cheetah print

I just found this yesterday and all of my stuff so I can definitely scan this and get it for you if you want to make this a cool thing for the matreon I don't know oh yeah we'll put it on our instagram no big deal her twitter handle

is mama cheetahs she's like she's like, she's on brand. She's very on brand. Love it. Yeah. So my experience with the Cheetah Girls property was being an avid reader of the book series. It was like my whole life. I used to, quote unquote, work in a bookstore when I was 10, which is illegal because I was 10. But I used to like, hang out there and they would like watch me and I would put prices on like eight books and say I did work. And then they would pay me and free Cheetah Girls books, which was like a cool thing. Other books as well.

But the Cheetah Girls books were what I was really angling for. Sure. That's amazing. Yeah. And then the movie came out in the early 2000s, 2003, I believe. And I was psyched and stoked. And then I found the movie a little bit disappointing when I watched it. As a fan of the books, it was my very first experience with whitewashing. So that was super cool because that's the big, big difference for me in the books and the movies is that Dorinda is not a biracial woman of color as she was in the books. And we'll get more into that later and how my feelings on that sort of progressed, especially because I do believe the girl who plays her is a white passing

or white presenting Latinx person, which I think is very interesting and didn't know until i was an adult and race is complicated yikes what do you mean but yeah i love the books love the movies and i'm so excited to be here and talk about them yay we're so excited to have you here well i'll go next because as with most as with all dcoms until we cover them on the show until we cover them on the show i have never seen them because i grew up without cable i did not have access to the disney channel much as a child and didn't know that dcoms existed until like three years ago or something or that they were called dcoms so i uh just hadn't seen this until a couple days ago uh but i will say that now that we've been covering a few since it's d-com month on it's d-com july on our matreon i'm getting more into them and i actually watched a d-com

not for homework i saw a teen beach movie and i loved it it's my new favorite movie is that a newer one yeah i think it's from 2013 or 2015 it's within the past 10 years outside of my era of expertise like if you got alley cat strike i'm there motocross so yeah i'm i'm broadening my horizons is what i'm saying amazing um jamie what's your relationship with cheetah girls pretty similar to karama i think i started reading the books maybe like in the year leading up to the movie it was definitely before the movie because i remember my main memory with watching the movie for the first time was that I was the only girl at the sleepover that had been curated to watch this movie at

that had read some of the books. And I was really upset that Angie wasn't there. That was what mainly jumped out to me, which we'll talk about. But basically, there are five cheetah girls in the books. Aquanet has a twin named Angie. And she was my favorite character because she was really quiet and she was like her i don't know she was like the quiet cheetah girl

and so i like felt connected to her because i was really shy and then she was so quiet that they just wrote her out of the movie um so i remember being really disappointed in that and my friends finding my disappointment annoying because they didn't know what I was talking about and then I enjoyed the movie I definitely loved the songs I watched the second one I was too old for the third one and I hear it's really bad also Raven's not in the third one so what's the point truly what's the point? No shade to like Adrian Bailon or Keely Williams or girl whose name I can't remember, Sabrina something, I think.

Dancing with the Stars girl, yeah. But yeah, like Raven was, she was the cheetah girl. She was girl power. She was growl power. She was cheetah-licious. And I think taking her out really takes some wind out of the sails i will also say this

viewing because i haven't seen this movie in at least 10 years of like revisiting it even though the lyrics to the songs i was like oh my god like they were just apparently imprinted on my they're just in you memento style because i just knew them all uh but i will say i was more on Galleria's side at certain parts of the Cheetah Girls this time than I ever was as a child I'm like she is she has her flaws certainly quite second act there is a lot going on with her but in the end she's the only Cheetah Girl with any focus anyways I agreed with Galleria more than I was expecting to this time and you know people change I agreed with Galleria more than I was expecting to this time. And, you know, people change. I agreed with Dorothea a lot more than I thought I would. Galleria's mom.

I'm like, yeah, you know what? She's making sense. That's the thing about becoming an adult. You start agreeing with a lot of like movie parents. With the parent characters. Yeah. You're like, you are too young for this. What's wrong with you?

I got annoyed with the dad. I'm like, why does the dad always get to be the good guy in the situation it's not fair oh there's a whole there's so much to discuss but i love the cheetah girls they have a special place in my heart uh but it's a complicated adaptation job yeah well should we get into the recap and go from there yeah i'm down all right the film opens on a performance by the cheetah girls they are a girl group comprised of galleria that's raven simone chanel played by adrian bylon and then i think her chico now goes by houghton is her last name if i'm not mistaken um aqu is, is her name Keely?

Yes, Keely Williams. I have a lot to say about her. There is, I recently caught up, because there was like Cheetah Girls drama while we were in quarantine, and I was clinging to it because I needed things to cling to. Adrienne and Keely, I guess they did not get along, and I don't know how much was related to Cheetah Girls

and how much was related to 3LW, which was the group that they were in together. With that other girl. With that other girl who, why wasn't she in the Cheetah Girls? Anyway. Shrug. Shrug. And then the fourth member of the Cheetah Girls in the movie adaptation is Dorinda, played by Sabrina Bryan. That's her name, yes.

Yes. They discuss whether or not they're ready for tomorrow's talent show audition at their Magnet High School in New York City. Ever heard of it? And they are hoping to be the first freshmen to win because winning the talent show could open up some doors for them in their career. We learn that Chanel and Galleria started the group, just the two of them, and they added the two other girls later on. This is relatively faithful to book canon minus a fifth

member. Correct. We see Galleria at home and we meet her parents and her dog toto whose presence in the story is going to pay off way more than you would ever imagine but toto falls in a hole and that's the climax of the movie i love when toto's in the hole and the the like fireman is like sing faster it's working faster faster it's working keep going that guy really earned his sag card that day that was beautiful oh good grief so we meet toto the dog then we see chanel at home and we meet her mother and establish their relationship both of these girls come from pretty upper class backgrounds and then we meet also faithful to the book i will say okay good to know meanwhile we see dorinda she is mopping the floors

at a community center we will come to learn that she is a foster child and comes from a lower socioeconomic background and then we don't learn anything about aqua's home life at all including that she has a twin that she has a twin sister who just stays at home in the basement in this particular iteration of the cheetah girls canon what if it's like in um what's the christopher nolan movie um oh no Prestige where like there's secret twins and you don't know that they're twins and they just keep swapping out we're really in the Christopher Nolan zone today

making memento jokes oh sure I'll bring up Inception by the end oh you guys didn't know that Christopher Nolan actually wrote and directed this film the cheetah girls they're experimenting with time um okay so then we see the cheetah girls at school and we meet these two boys who

are also competing in the talent show i think their names are derrick and mackerel that sounds right one is the boy from alley cat strike which i remember being thrilled by and that's basically all you need to know about him i i will say i'm disappointed that eric von detten was not in this film because eric von detten was the major export of disney channel in the late 90s early 2000s we were trying to make eric von detten happen so much wasn't he wasn't his like final stand in the princess diaries and then it was just like it's not gonna happen for him that was i guess his last stand i think that sounds like the right era for him to have faded away i hope he's doing okay hi eric uh we miss you we love you he's a listener yeah he's our fan who isn't he's a listener. Yeah. He's our fan. Who isn't? He's a matron.

And it's Derek has a crush on Galleria. Then they do their audition and we meet the teacher who is running the talent show. Her name is Drinka, played by Sandra Caldwell. And she tells them that they did a great job. And so does Jackal Johnson, who is a big time music producer and he's got the outfit to prove it oh he's wearing chains he looks so early 2000s like vague sleazy but also like hot like coated is hot but looking at him i'm just like there's no way anyone ever thought this was attractive it's baffling that he's coded as hot because it just who is like oh my god jackal johnson i wrote in my notes jackal johnson wishes he was matthew lillard he does he really does that is it that hits the nail on the head

definitely big matthew vibes when matthew lillard is sick they call this guy to show up that's wild i will say just as an aside and i don't know how many of these are canon like to the book but they casually drop a lot of artist names in this movie and they all made me laugh there was monique twig uh which was a fun one. I think I caught Michelle Breeze. There was like electric breeze or something. I was like, is this Michelle Branch? So here's a really funny fact about the books. I recently just because I hadn't, I hadn't read them in a while. And like, I can't find my copies. They are lost to the ages. I got them from my local like digital library they have all of them with the in the la public library system and uh there is a group that's mentioned early on in the books called karma's children and i'm like this is destiny's child oh my god oh yeah

galleria is talking about how everybody says she looks like the lead singer of Karma's Children, Backstabba. And they all have like, sort of vaguely sin based name. So it's like greed. And I'm just like, who which one of these is supposed to be Kelly Rowland? That's all I want to know. And there are four of them, which makes sense for the time that the book comes out because there were four people in Destiny's Child at the time maybe it was it was predictive because destiny's child eventually just mysteriously did away with one of their members without disappeared farah yes just like they went through a whole thing there's a conspiracy here another thing another thing about the book that i went to i like went to whatever the amazon preview because i'm like oh I hope it's there I vaguely remembered like the cheetah girls pact that was oh the cheetah girls credo which I have

here and can read from oh girl I did my homework I love it thank you I'm okay the cheetah girls credo this is from the first book I think it's at the beginning of all the books but this is from wishing on a star uh to earn my spots and rightful place in the world i solemnly swear to honor and uphold the cheetah girls oath cheetah girls don't litter they glitter i will help my family friends and other cheetah girls whenever they need my love support or a really big hug all cheetah girls are created equal but we are not alike we come in different sizes shapes shapes, and colors, and hail from different cultures. I will not judge others by the color of their spots, but by their character.

A true cheetah girl doesn't spend more time doing her hair than her homework. Hair extensions may be career extensions, but talent and skills will pay my bills. True cheetah girls can achieve without a weave or a wiggle jiggle or a giggle i promise to rely mostly on my brains heart and courage to reach my cheetahlicious potential i love mostly it's about halfway through it talks about how grown-ups are not always right but they are bigger older and louder i will treat my teachers parents and people of authority with respect and expect them to do the same which i really appreciate yeah yeah like the true cheetah girls don't run with wolves or hang with hyenas true cheetahs pick much better friends it's just i don't know that really stuck with me as a kid and i was like oh i wonder and it's it's right there there's no bullet points. There's just cheetah paw prints. It is aesthetically on brand. It is amazingly progressive also just for the time.

Like environmentalism right off the bat. They don't litter. They glitter. Although glitter is somewhat of a contentious thing in the environmentalism community. There are some environmental like biodegradable glitters and you should definitely look into those if you're a glitter person because we don't want to hurt the environment that's not cheetahlicious remember certainly not it was uh deborah is an inspiration um and then there was also the glossaries in the back of the book which would

just if you didn't know yeah it was so good it was like if you didn't know what a cheetah girl was saying you could look it up and be like oh she was saying that's cool yeah ducats that was the one that i recall learning at the time and i was like oh okay buckets of ducats means like a lot of money i am cool now which they use a lot of money. I am cool now. Which they use a lot of in the movie. They use a fair amount. I was excited looking back and thinking, oh, okay, yeah, this is a lot. It is pretty, if not exactly directly faithful,

it's got the spirit of the thing. Mm-hmm. You know? Oh, I miss the glossary. And rereading that Cheetah Girls credo going into rewatching the movie made me a little disappointed in myself at how upset I was about Dorinda's recasting. I was like, you know what? She is still a Cheetah Girl and we don't judge other people by the color of their spots, by their character.

And I felt that Dorinda's character still lived on in sabrina bryan and i would just like to formally apologize to sabrina bryan for all of the vitriol that my 12 year old self had at your like if anything bad happened to you in 2003 i'm so sorry for that energy she's okay she came in like fourth place and dancing with the stars she's doing great that is amazing that is more places than i place and dancing with the stars she's doing great that is amazing that is more places than i got in dancing with the nobodies the thing that i do in my bedroom by myself hey well i think there's a lot that we could all learn from the cheetah girls credo and i i kind of want to print it up and hang it in my house. I saved it as a PDF on my computer.

I'm like, this is the thing that I need to remember. Like, there's a lot of good stuff in here that I can still benefit from as I move into my 30s. Absolutely. Okay, so Jekyll Johnson was at the audition, and he's this big time music producer, and he wants to work with them. But Galleria's mom is there, Dorothea, and she thinks the girls are too young because they're only in ninth grade. They're freshmen. Right. But after a lot of pleading with Galleria's mom, she changes her mind. And the Cheetah girls are allowed to contact Jackal Johnson. So they set up a meeting with him at deaf duck records hilarious sort of that some of the i that was like one of those moments where i'm

like oh fun art department assignment to be like okay we need a logo for deaf duck records like that's fun homework and some might argue and by that i mean me that they did not try very hard or do a good job their budget was 14 kaitlyn what are they gonna do it was a valiant effort we understood that there was a duck involved so for that i will commend them it did not look like another creature it looked like a duck that's true the semiotics was like working uh we did get into our first song also in that audition with jackal johnson cinderella and which one is that that's cinderella that was my favorite that was my favorite back in the day cinderella was like my top cheetah girls song and it's still really i still sing that in the shower regularly and like they're they're very

specific dances and like uh i just love i liked that dcoms were pretty good about if there was dancing it was usually dancing that like a kid could basically learn which i think is a nice touch yes it was like darren's dance, right. You know, do you guys remember Darren's Dance Grooves? Mm-hmm. Mm-mm. No. Oh, Darren's Dance Grooves were, like, that's all I wanted as a child was a Darren's Dance Grooves DVD. So there was this guy named Darren. He had a last name. Doesn't matter what it is. And he used to choreograph for, like, NSYNC and Britney Spears and he had this DVD that he would like pedal on television where you could

learn these dances that he taught Britney Spears and in sync alone in your home which is the best way for people like me to dance sure Darren Henson yeah I remember my friend had the DVD and it was like it really made her mom's condo a hot spot to visit because she had Darren's dance grooves. No, you all had those friends when you were little and there were things that you couldn't have or weren't allowed to have that you definitely used for their access. Like I had a cable friend. I didn't have cable in my house. So I'd be like, hey, how's it going? Let's hang out.

Oh, my gosh. I want to come over to your house and see you. And just watch Disney Channel. Yeah. I had a Mary-Kate and Ashley VHS friend. There was, like, she just had. Oh, yes. I remember this. She had them all.

She had them all. And if you wanted to see one, you had to do it. Mm-hmm. Gotta get your daily fix of Brother for Sale. Yes. But, yeah, so Cinderella was the the first performance and jackal sees that and that's where he's like i need these children in my deaf duck factory right so so they go to that meeting and um jackal he seems pretty sleazy and galleria's mom is trying to like i think the movie

would have you think she's trying to interfere but she's really just looking out for she's making sure this weirdo isn't like abducting the cheetah girls right also galleria had stepped in dog poop the meeting is kind of it's relatable there's a lot of stuff going on but they do schedule a demo recording on that saturday which conflicts with their school talent show which the other girls didn't want to miss but galleria is like screw that we will be here for the demo recording because galleria had been she's been turning into a bit of a diva we will say she was mean to aqua about the hot sauce she condescends to drinka their teacher she's mean to dorinda about her clothes and stuff like that

and her like abilities as a singer she was really she was doubling and tripling down on dorinda yeah yeah truly just like not she was rude she was just rude there's no other way around it there yeah but she was being an asshole she's being an asshole yeah and it was oh my i forgot how intense that insult is because it's like dorinda tries to walk away three times and then galleria just continues to double down she's like well you can't sing also you're poor also i hate how you look and then it was just like oh my god dorinda run and she's like it well, you can't sing. Also, you're poor. Also, I hate how you look. And then everyone's just like, oh my god, Dorinda, run! And she's like, it's not optional. It's just like, okay, wow, Gestapo over here. learns that dorinda is in foster care so the girls go in for their demo recording but it turns out that jackal johnson has a different vision for the cheetah girls that includes the creepiest masks

i've ever seen in my life horrifying they're like okay what if you were daft punk but scarier like it's very i think it was the inspiration for the ad campaign for that movie you're next do y'all remember that they had posters with all those animal faces yeah that was somebody watched the cheetah girls and was like haunting this is haunting i must make a film i remember having like just i don't know that like shot of Dorinda holding the panda mask and then tilting her head to the side I just remember that really sticking with me in a negative way it's horrific yeah same exact same I was like oh it's gonna happen when I was re-watching this is the moment was that in the trailer or something it was I did that okay okay because I was like did that shot really

hit for me i had like a like a weird little psychological gut punch uh gallery is like this is some bullshit we're not gonna wear your masks we're not gonna lip sync like come on cheetah girls let's go but the others are well, maybe we're okay with this. We're fine. We'll rebrand as Global Get Down. Whatever. Geez, we're very in that year. Which is another moment where I, like the other three Cheetah Girls, I'm like, what? They're like, what?

We should do it. We should sell out. What are you doing? And then I was like, wait a second. I'm not on their side i guess i was of two minds right yeah because i'm like on the one hand i feel like they should talk about it as a group and it shouldn't be them i think to use dorinda's term rubber stamping galleria's decision but on the other hand i'm like you all are actually a creative group you're not just like lip-syncing

to pop songs on the radio. They're 14. They're writing and producing their own stuff. God knows how. They are very wealthy though. They're rich. It did establish that they were rich people. At least half of them.

Yeah. Three quarters of them are rich. Because Aqua like got sent from Houston and she can afford to take taxis everywhere. She's afraid of the subway. Her whole thing is she hates the subway. Yeah. So she's wealthy enough to afford to live in New York City,

apparently by herself, and then take taxis everywhere. She goes home to feed her twin every once in a while. I think I do remember, though, in the books that maybe her dad was gone a lot on business, and that might have been one of the reasons that we didn't see a lot of her home life because it was the two of them angie and aqua that were often together and they had each other and were very tight-knit which now without angie there it's just aqua being alone with her hot sauce and i know it makes me kind of sad. Yeah. So I guess that she, I like went back into the, there is a wiki for this.

But like that, yeah, like Angie and Aqua lived with just their dad. I'm not sure where, how they came to. I think the mom is dead. Okay. Maybe. So, so their mom has died. They live with their dad, but their dad travels a lot. So they're on their own quite a bit on the Upper West side but there was like i don't know yeah this ended up i was expecting to come to

this episode being like this this adaptation is wholly unfaithful um but not quite i mean down to like the like in the books i didn't remember this but i guess aqua carried around hot sauce in the books as well and like if there were there was a fair amount carried over i was like okay all right all right all right it made me feel like very cool because my mom would carry hot sauce in her bag oh my god and i was like oh my mom's like this cool character from this book i like maybe my mom's not that uncool after all she's not my mom is very cool i just was whack as a kid and i was just, everything my mom does is bad. You're just 12. Yeah.

Sure. Okay, so the other cheetah girls, they're like, we're cool with doing this global get down rebranding thing. And Galleria is not. So the cheetah girls kind of more or less break up or like galleria breaks away from them and then one day galleria is out walking her dog toto and she spots a poster for global get down so she thinks that like the other cheetah girls had like gone ahead with this deal and she feels very betrayed betrayed but then toto gets loose and he falls in a hole in the sidewalk and chaos erupts around the city of new york cops show up fire people show up the press shows up there's an enormous traffic jam it's it's everything is chaos in new york city but then Chanel, Aqua, and Dorinda show up to help Toto. Also, everyone at school shows up because they were in the middle of the talent show.

But this dog emergency was so severe that they had to cut power around the city. So the power went out during the talent show. I love the rap that Galleria's crush that yeah i was i watched it three times because you're just like what is going on here it was just that's another one where it was a little bit imprinted inside of me because when he was like come on come on i was like doing the shout back he was like come on i was like yeah come on and then i was like stop it don't encourage him and then he just ends it so like it's just such a like generic it's just so generic where he's like and my dj's gonna play his beat and then it just like cuts away and you're like

oh my god i was watching that and i was like thank god the power is gonna get coming and I will say earlier when they were about to do the audition Mackerel and who's he what's it I can't remember Derek yes Mackerel is the name that truly stuck with me in that duo um the two of them were making a big deal about having to switch their audition time slots because uh Mackerel had to go to the orthodontist right and they had real instruments that they needed to set up and i was just like where are these alleged real instruments in this moment but then at the end he's a good derrick is a guitar god but it just doesn't come into play in his actual song not only is he a white rapper he's also a legendary rock guitarist and my dj's gonna play his beat i was just like i can't get over it they're also in that scene where they're trying

to switch the times there was just another funny character you never see name where chanel i don't know why she's kind of like oh let's switch the time but she's like no we should switch the time Mrs. Almanac needs to look at my history paper I was like Mrs. Almanac I literally on my notes I just have written really big Mrs. Almanac I was dying I was like that is just bold to be like oh history teacher character a history teacher character mrs almanac perfect i love it i hope that's in the books i have no idea but whoever wrote that remember that but i hope it is too because it's great whoever wrote that line or even if adrian bailon uh improvised it it's genius oh good grief okay so toto is still in the hole and they can't get toto out of the hole so the cheetah girls start singing to him and because it's been set up that he responds well

to their music it works he's they're able to coax him out of the hole and the day is saved but the cheetah girls are still broken up question mark and galleria realizes that their friendship is is the most important thing so in a very what i felt was an extremely titanic moment remember in titanic when the musicians are playing as the ship is sinking and then they say their goodbyes they're like let's go the ship is about to sink let's just go off and split apart yes but then one of them stays behind and keeps playing and then the others are like well what else are we gonna do so then they come back and join him and it this happens in cheetah girls as well where galleria starts singing and then the other cheetah Girls join in because they're

Cheetah Girls, Cheetah Sisters. It's inspiring. They all, I love, even when I was a kid, I'm like, wow, they really were all wearing the matching outfit. That was the wild part to me because I was like, oh, right, there's a talent show. But then I remember they were not going to perform in said talent show. So why are they matching? Is it just the power of sisterhood? Or is it... They could feel it. I love that moment.

I did appreciate the detail of Dorinda's matching outfit looking just a little shittier than everybody else's. Just a little bit. Because presumably she had to make that herself. Like, I guess. Yeah. Or like, or like thrift shop it like she's Macklemore. Oh, my God.

Macklemore, Mackerel, the connections. There's everything. It's all there. Okay. So then they get back together they're singing in the street with the crowd that has is still there on the streets for some reason and the other girls are like no we didn't take that global get down deal we're the cheetah sisters and we don't break up and they win the talent show. I think bait is it based on the performance they did on the street that everyone saw? Yeah.

Because in this world, the news is filmed like a music video. And so they see the music video news and then Jack was like, Oh, can't believe I missed out. So they win and then everyone's happy and that's how the movie ends. So let's take a quick break and then we'll come right back to discuss. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was murdered.

There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free,

subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. you come up here and document my project all you need to do is record everything like you always do one session 24 hours bpm 110 120 she's terrified should we wake her up absolutely not what was that you didn't figure it out i think i need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people.

There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. How do you feel about biscuits?

Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the Biscuits. I was a lady rebel. Like, what does that even mean? The Boone County Rebels will stay the Boone County Rebels with the image of the Biscuits. It's right here in black and white in print. They lying. An individual that came to the school saying that God sent him to talk to me about the mascot switch. As a leader, you choose hills that you want to die on.

Why would we want to be the losing team? I just take all the other stuff out of it. On the segregation academies, when civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools were exempt from that. Bigger than a flag or mascot. You have to be ready for serious backlash. Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Oh, boy.

Where to start with the Cheetah Girls? There really is so much. I mean, we've already been talking about the books quite a bit. My first instinct, because i don't know i i honestly i was expecting to like this movie far less on the rewatch there's definitely some stuff that i still don't like there's whitewashing elements of the movie that are inexcusable they cut a character for for every reason i've been able to find was pretty like dismissive and not realistic sounding because they were like we couldn't find black twins which I'm like I don't

believe that I also didn't believe that when I read it because I read the same thing and I'm like okay but it's not like anybody else was a big draw and like right Sabrina Bryan was not a name you know what I mean like Raven was the name Adrian Bailon was a name. You know what I mean? Like Raven was the name. Adrienne Bailon was a name because she was in 3LW. And I feel like it was because they didn't want to spend the money to make like a parent trap situation. Two Keelys. Yeah. They were like, maybe not.

And they had the 3LW people. So they were like, well, we got this really great deal on these two real singers so let's bring them in i felt for the third lw i was like why why are we not bringing the third lw into the mix here but i looked i looked her i need to find what her name is she's like a thriving tv actor and she it turns out that she didn't need the cheetah girls amazing that makes me really happy because i know they had a whole dramatic 3LW fight that involved like KFC at one point. Whoa. Oh, like somebody threw KFC at somebody else. It was very dramatic and embarrassing for everyone.

3LW, it seems like there was a lot of, I don't know why there's been so much 3LW cheetah girls drama resurfacing since quarantine but it's a part of the conspiracy I know yeah it's the 5G but so Naturi Naughton is the third LW she's doing fine she's in a stars drama show right now it turns out she's actually doing better than the other lws i also learned that alicia keys was asked to be a 3lw and she was like i am busy no and the final thing that i learned from just behind the scenes i guess it's kind of fun to know is that all like the cheetah girls didn't get along very well behind the scenes but i guess it mostly had to do with the fact that keely and adrian already didn't like each other from 3lw so then it's a picking side situation exactly so

it's a polarizing effect within the group and then for god knows why raven simone took it upon herself to go live with keely williams a few months ago and just talk about all of it so i guess if you're interested in that you can watch it but it was just like the messiest i was watching it live um it was just the messiest instagram live broadcast i had seen in a while where raven was like yeah we're gonna go live and we going to talk about 15 year old teenage drama and people are going to love it. And she was right. She was correct. Oh, well, I was trying to say one. So, so I was, the first thing I wanted to make sure was that, was that the author, Deborah Gregory was involved in the production of the movie. And it seems like she was involved in all three movies. She was a co-producer on the

first two and an executive producer on the bad one question mark i don't know what happens in that one so so i was first off very relieved and and knowing that it kind of like contextualizes a lot of the book makes it in so that i was pleasantly surprised at and I'm glad that just in general Deborah Gregory is getting paid she's like a really interesting career where she's like dabbled in comedy and she's been like a magazine writer and she's written books and like she's just but she's not a former model also I don't know she definitely studied fashion. And it seems like her life story kind of mirrors Dorinda's in more so in the book. But what I'm seeing on the scholarly journal Wikipedia is that she was put into foster care when she was three years old. And as she was growing up, she started designing her own clothes and fantasized about a singing career.

So it seems like her life mirrored Dorinda's character quite a bit. I don't think I knew about the foster care. Yeah, I didn't either. I read that because of her background, in the background she wrote for the character of Dorinda, she identifies most with Dorinda of all the characters that she wrote. So it's interesting that that's the character who ends up being whitewashed in the movies because deborah gregory is a black woman yeah so to have

the character that she most identified with be the like white presenting character it's frustrating it's frustrating because i believe that again again, consulting this scholarly journal, that Deborah Gregory is biracial and so is Dorinda in the books. Yes. And so it seems like, yeah, Dorinda is her like avatar. Sorry, I watched Avatar recently. The last airbender or James Cameron Avatar? No, the horrible one the so you know it's like turned as her avatar she gets in the machine she comes out she's dorinda but in the mood so it's i feel like it's a real

like twist of the knife to change this character so significantly and that's not Sabrina Bryan's fault but I just it's such a no it's it brings us such a Disney decision I felt like not at all in line with the principles set forth in the Disney film the color of friendship I will just say yes absolutely that's another one that we another popular request of ours in the decom sphere I haven't seen understandable i think it's the only decom that has the n-word um so that's oh i did read that yeah yeah brave there i yeah so i mean it's i was especially disappointed because i didn't know these details about deborah gregory's life either um but the fact that dorinda is her and that that is the character that the movie elects to whitewash is super disappointing and also just I mean I'm curious on um everyone's thoughts around just that scene

between Chanel and Dorinda where Chanel has taken her mother's credit card something I remember very clearly from the books. That was a good one. Because in every Cheetah Girls book, for those of you who haven't read it, it's like, I think that it's like narrated by a specific character. And so you're like, yeah. So the first one is narrated by Galleria.

The second one is narrated by Chanel. I think the third one is narrated by Dorinda. And the fourth one is narrated by Aqua. Angie does not narrate any books because she's quiet. Because she's too quiet. She's too quiet to write something down. Justice for Angie. Those books are so, even just rereading, I reread the first chapter that was available

on Amazon. And the writing style is just like teen girl, tween girl mainlining of like what you want to read. It's so fun. But that scene with Chanel and Dorinda where Dorinda like they are kind of talking about race, but then Dorinda kind of shuts the conversation down where I think that like Chanel is like, oh, you're you're mixed. You're half black because she confuses Dorinda's foster mother for her biological mother and then Dorinda replies by saying no like that's not what I'm saying I'm not black I don't know if I'm white I don't know what I am but I'm a foster child and then that's kind of like the scene I just found that to be a very bizarre scene.

Like the way it plays out. It just seems to be like skirting any discussion. I don't know. Yeah. There's also a class element that I think the movie doesn't really know how to handle as well. Yeah. And then following that scene is when Chanel goes back home and talks with her, who has been dating this French guy named Luke. Who's a huge part of the second movie.

Oh, really? Okay. Oh, because they're in Barcelona. They go to Spain to visit his family. So this Luke guy is taking up all of Chanel's mom's attention. And Chanel is resentful of this. So she confronts her mother and is like well you know i've seen what it's like to not have a mom and she's referring to the fact that dorinda is in

foster care and she's like i know what it's like to not have a mother and she's like conflating that with like her mother being gone sometimes and it's like um i don't i mean maybe that's just a very like freshman year in high school understanding of all of that but i also very dismissive of of mrs bosco who is dorinda's foster mother who seems and she calls her mom yeah in that scene so you're like dorinda does have a mom right, there's somebody who's there who cares for her. And I think that much of the Dorinda's parents not showing up for things, at least my understanding of it, is Dorinda harboring a sense of shame for not being wealthy. And I think that's especially hard for her because she lives very adjacent to wealth. Because Mr. Bosco is the super of the building that they live in,

which is this very like fancy New York City high rise. And that's how she's sort of been able to make people think that she's rich is because she'll have them drop her off there or like meet up in front. And she's like, this is the building I live in, which is not technically a lie. But yeah, I think that the class aspect of it is a big deal. And I think that's one of the reasons that she hides. She's a foster kid so much, and it has nothing to do with race or anything. And that's, that's Chanel's immediate thing. She's like, Oh, well,

we know you had to have a little something in you cause you could dance. So of course you're half black, which is its own problematic statement. Right. Right. The whole scene. you're just like oh no oh no oh no um yeah i it's and it's like though that element is introduced of i don't know i mean this maybe it's just like this movie not maybe like this movie is just i guess not really making a class statement isn't really their thing because it's like the cheetah girls are so like girl power capitalism as much as i love them like that they very fall they very much fall into that early 2000s like girl power capitalism aesthetic um where they're talking

about buckets of ducats all the time and like money is a part of what they are aspiring for so i feel like it is interesting to have this class aspect but then it kind of like ends up sputtering in this weird way i forgot that mrs bosco comes at the end to the talent show and that she's immediately welcomed into the cheetah mom like fold and i thought that was awesome and like I'd forgotten that that happens um yeah it just is it's Dorinda's whole character is so just strangely handled in this movie for reasons that feel very like sinister Disney and then on top of that the storyline they do give her this class storyline is also not really resolved or examined in a conclusive way right because what happens there is that she works at this community center to basically earn credits to be able to take dance classes there right so she's become a really

skilled dancer to the point where this dance instructor who has like a traveling like a touring dance crew she should have gone on the tour she should have gone on the tour dancing and then offers her a spot and then she which would have been paid and she says like oh wow it's paid great i need that money but then she kind of backtracks when she's talking to the her rich cheetah girls friends and she's like well i'm just holding out for you know cheetah girls cheddar and it's like i don't understand why you made that choice you just you just turned away from all of that so now there's no there's no anything yeah i uh that it was a weird i was like she should have also now the cheetah girls as much

as i loved their performance when toto got out of the hole uh it's not like they're like okay and now we're off to do this like they're just kind of well actually not to not to be the well actually person no the prize the prize from the talent show was studio time. So they do get to record like in a professional demo like they would have gotten with Jekyll Johnson. But they get to do it on their own terms, which I do think is a lovely resolution to that issue where it's like, oh, we all come together. We're sisters. We're a big family. And now we get to make our recording studio debut without sleazy wannabe matthew lillard right okay so that i i didn't i didn't even think of that okay so that's good but the movie doesn't make it clear at the end it's all about the friendship they have a disco

ball progression it's not about the progression of their career at all right it's and the books i feel like are more explicit about like the goal of they want to be a pop group and then sometimes there's like there was like a whole book about do you remember the one that was like it was a whole book about like galleria like where's a dog collar and then it becomes a really popular accessory and then she's like i have to market this that was a whole book so sometimes stuff like that will happen but most of the time it's career focused it is very capitalistic the whole thing hashtag girl boss to the max it's really girl bossy it's great uh i haven't yeah i hadn't

thought about the the dog collar one in a long time that was a whole book wow well because there's like 16 cheetah girls books right there's a whole lot of them i remember the 11th one i think it's the 11th one was the one that stood out to me the most and just going back to dorinda's character and how deborah gregory sees herself most as dorinda uh that's the one where dorinda finds out that her mother was white because she had this image in her head of her mother being this beautiful black woman. Cause she knew that she was biracial and she knew that, uh,

one of her parents was black and one of her parents was white. She just didn't know which, and she had this image in her head of this beautiful black woman that looks kind of like her. And then she finds out that she has a bio sister who shares the same mother as her. So she goes to meet her bio sister and her bio sister is like white and blonde and looks like scandinavian and that sort of really shatters her world and her view and takes away this mother that looks like her and this powerful black woman that she feels

she has as her ancestor and that made a huge impact on me as like a tween I was like wow can you imagine your entire personality and not entire personality but your entire perception of your of yourself being shifted like that and I feel like that's sort of all the stuff that maybe they were trying to get at there and she's like I don't know what I am and I don't know who I am and that's why being a foster kid is so like tough for me. But and this isn't a pre 23 and me world. Obviously, we need to remember that. But I feel like it was just so shallowly handled.

It was very surface in that scene. Which is which is kind of a bummer, too, because it's like, I mean, yeah, I guess that her like race is not really I mean she does make that comment to drink like cuts drink off which is another thing of like oh let's explore this insecurity that she has and then it just kind of doesn't come up again but where she cuts drink off and she's like oh I'm the white girl that can dance and I'm like it like are you like do we know and and she seems and then especially because they cast i did a little bit of research on sabrina bryan and she is she's certainly white passing but um her her father is uh mexican spanish and her mother is german and cherokee so she is a mixed person herself so it's like you hired a white passing mixed person so if

you're gonna do like that is very like like you were saying grandma that's a very cheetah girls like storyline to examine but then they kind of are just like question mark question mark and it never gotta move on to the dog in the hole right now a dog's in the hole um i don't understand why that's the climax of the movie what does a dog in a hole have anything to do with anything anyway it's a bummer because i feel like i mean i don't know i i'm very curious of what what deborah gregory thought of that decision i wasn't able to find a quote on it but you know it's like this was her character and then i feel like generally dorinda is everyone's least favorite cheetah girl um so that stinks because she has the least

personality i feel like in the film also and maybe the part of that springs from the fact that in the book she was actually two years younger than everybody which I thought was interesting that they I mean I guess it's easier to kind of just have them all be the same age in the movie but uh she kind of feels behind in terms of character development and maybe that's what they were trying to get at but it just came off as like oh she's the white one and all she does is dance she doesn't sing much and she dances and that's she's cute for the dancing right which is also confusing because she sings at least as much as aqua does so i was like yeah this seems like they're all singing equal parts it's weird because like with dorinda she is mostly characterized by her shame she feels around being a foster child like that's mainly what we

know about her aside from like she's also she's the one who can like dance better than everyone so i think like that and then and then we've got aqua who just like is barely characterized at all except that we know that she has she takes a trigonometry class at NYU yeah it's like okay so you're a math genius because in the book she wants to be uh it's again just like a nod to the book but it's so passing that you're if you didn't read the book you're like huh like she wanted to be a doctor in the books I remember that super clearly where it was like she was like yeah I'm a musician and like her and Angie were the best singers in the group, but Aqua also had this ambition to be a doctor. And like,

she just, there was just so much more there. And I feel like horror films. Yes. Oh yeah. They like their, her and Angie did right. Like that was like,

there's that was their thing. There was so much there. And then, yeah, I feel like it's kind of like, at least they get in references to her character but we don't see her home life I wonder if that ever was in the script because it's like the other three cheetah girls get their side quest as it were and um no side quest for Aqua

except that I guess she takes the subway one time and she is the darkest which i'm also like is this colorism or is this just bad script pacing i was kind of curious as to like if casting i mean no shade on keely williams again it's not her fault but like that uh if the casting of keely williams was also colorism because i remember in the books and then i went back to the covers the original covers of the Cheetah Girl books that uh Aqua and Angie were darker than the rest of the group they were like dark-skinned um and then uh Disney Channel did not really follow through on that much like Dorinda she was I will say the darkest of the people that were cast that's um in the group but yeah she's still keely williams is not like super dark-skinned and not in the same way that angie and aqua were on the covers it was like very clearly and they used the same models for all of the book covers so they were like oh there's my

girl dorinda there's my girl galleria like you had your girls on the cover and they were much darker i did some deep dive into because i was like who are the girls on the covers of the cheetah girl books i found out um three of them i don't know who's who but three of them were in a girl group named before dark one of them was a ballerina and one of them was on broadway in the lion king. Don't know who's who. But it's just like, it looks like a group. It looks like they did a casting call for a group of tween girls from New York. So there's iconic covers, too.

I went back into a used book website to revisit the covers and scratch my nostalgia, whatever, brain, what? And the covers rock but anyways yeah it seems like there's some some fuckery going on there as well yeah um let's take another quick break and then we'll come back for more discussion Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16, 2017, was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel Delia. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere,

a podcast that unhurts the plot to murder a one-woman Wikileaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad-free,

subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I've been thinking about you. I want you back in my life. It's too late for that. I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project.

All you need to do is record everything like you always do. One session. 24 hours. BPM 110. 120. She's terrified. Should we wake her up? Absolutely not.

What was that? You didn't figure it out? I think I need to hear you say it. That was live audio of a woman's nightmare. This machine is approved and everything? You're allowed to be doing this? We passed the review board a year ago. We're not hurting people.

There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When you think of Mexican culture, you think of avocado, mariachi, delicious cuisine, and of course, lucha libre. It doesn't

get more Mexican than this. Lucha libre is known globally because it is much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment. Lucha libre is a type of storytelling. It's a dance. It's tradition. It's culture. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask, a 12-episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of Lucha

Libre. And I'm your host, Santos Escobar, the emperor of Lucha Libre and a WWE superstar. Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture. We'll learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport, from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture, we learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring. This is Lucha Libre Behind the Mask. Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you stream podcasts. So I was starting to say before the break that I found some of the characterization to be a little weird. And then with Galleria and Chanel getting more screen time, I guess that mostly makes sense

because they were like the original founding members that they would get maybe just a little bit more focus in real estate in the movie which i think is generally true of the books and also i'm just like you know because raven it is kind of a funny coinciding plot point that everyone in the cheetah girls is annoyed that galleria is the center and bigger than everyone else on the poster because that was just also very true of this movie where like everyone knew who raven was and there was maybe some head scratching for the other three if you didn't know 3lw which i did not at all i didn't learn of the existence

of that girl group until i started reading about this movie that's crazy because they have such a good song yeah their music is so cute because that was when they literally were like 12 or 13 or something yeah there's a line in there it's like well you promised me kate spade but that was last year baby in the eighth grade and i was just like oh my god first of all what young gentleman is promising an eighth grade girl kate spade and why do i have the same taste in handbags as an eighth grade girl i forgot about that lyric but yeah it's like adrian has maybe she has braces or something but she has like a little lisp and it's really it's really cute but yeah raven was also very much the star of this movie so i wasn't surprised that galleria got a gigantic storyline as well it's all about the dollars but i think

that i think this movie would have actually benefited from being a series sort of a la the brand new babysitters club series on netflix because like the babysitters club movie i felt was a pale dive into the world of the babysitters club another book series that i was super into as a child and this new tv show that's happening is much better and gets into the interior lives of more of the characters and it's a similar thing where each babysitter had their own book so it's like christy's big idea claudia and mean janine all of that and i think that the cheetah girls probably would have benefited from something similar where we could have seen aqua and hopefully angie at home watching horror movies wanting to be a doctor which again in again, in the 90s, black girl who's, like,

very clear about wanting to be a doctor, that's actually huge. Mm-hmm. And having that not be, like, a big thing where it's just, like, normal that she's like, yeah, I want to be a doctor. It's, like, pre-Doc McStuffins, too, a show that made me cry the first time I watched it with my little sister.

She was like, why are you crying? And I was like, she wants to be a doctor, and everyone's just fine with it and it's normal and even the little detail we do get with Aqua's character that she's like a math genius apparently taking a college level trig class like that's also pretty revolutionary to see like a young black girl interested in math taking an advanced math class like that's not something we saw very offhandedly mentioned she's like I have to catch a cab so I can get to my very fancy class and another thing that I think this I mean just putting it in the context of 2003 because we've covered so many movies that are in this like chunk of late 90s into early to

mid 2000s of um even like seeing in detail the home life of a non-white teen character is huge i mean it's yeah you you talked about it a lot in your bring it on episode yeah where we didn't get to see any of isis's like life at all outside of what torrence was exploring and what torrence felt was relevant to her and yeah seeing galleria at home and seeing chanel at home is still really cool especially because we get to see galleria's interracial parents and this like intercultural thing where her father's an immigrant and speaks in italian he's like i don't understand the slang a bling bling now there's an extra bling which is adorable and very relatable to anybody who has immigrant parents who are like wait no this is not what you said last week i just everything's always changing right and also

that it seems like galleria's mom is the breadwinner of the family and like she's she's uh i think this is i also like watched the second cheetah girls movie just simply because i wanted to but she's like a fashion designer like a famous fashion designer and that's why they have this huge apartment and i don't remember if we know what uh chanel's mom does i don't really remember um dates rich men i guess yeah i was kind of i i kind of forgot that being the huge element of chanel's mom where i think it's like cool to have like a single parent representation that like rocks i was kind of that storyline for me was a little all over the place. And I don't really remember. I remember in the books that she like took her mom's credit card and spent a ton of money and Chanel like was pretty well off.

But I but then she also like resents her mom for being kind of like openly like I want to date a rich guy and this is what I want. And she kind of like is calling her mom a gold digger but then also is in this very like kid-like way. It's like she doesn't like how her mom lives her life but also directly benefits from it and so it just kind of ends up being a story element that exists. I didn't really know what to make of that. I liked her mom but then there also were times where she was kind of neglecting Chanel

to go hang like go hang out with rich guys and i didn't like that and then when when their storyline resolves after that dorinda scene and chanel comes back and she's like actually you're an awesome mom and i'm like she's not an awesome mom she's not a bad mom she's a complicated she feeds you but she doesn't do other things that maybe could make her an even better mom like she stopped paying attention to chanel and chanel wanted to tell her like i hit the high c with the cheetah girls today and she's like i have to go meet up with luke bye yeah she keeps getting like bailed on by her mom and then just kind of forgives her mom for doing that without her mom having to like do anything or change her behavior.

Which seems like maybe kind of a lucky break for Chanel's mom. Yeah. Yeah. So we've talked about the whitewashing of Dorinda's character. And, you know, there's lots to be critical about there. But, you know, the fact that this movie's cast is predominantly women and girls of color between galleria and her mom chanel and her mom aqua drinka and then also like as far as behind the scenes representation the screenwriter is a

black woman named allison taylor the director is a black man named oz scott a number of the producers are black women whitney houston is a producer so many i i loved doing research on the writer of this movie allison taylor was such a pleasure because she has written on so many legendary like millennial children's properties. She wrote the first two Cheetah Girls movies. She wrote on Lizzie McGuire. She wrote on Sister, Sister. She wrote on Married with Children, which I don't care about. She wrote about Clarissa Explains It All.

And she wrote on, does anyone remember this show, A Hundred Deeds for Eddie McDowd? Never heard of it. I do not. It was about, it was a Nickelodeon show i love it okay so the premise of the show and i want to go back and re-watch it it was about a man that was trapped in a dog's body and the dog and the dog had to do a hundred good deeds and then he could be a man again and so what okay wait wait back how does the dog do a good deed like timmy's stuck in a well like does he have to

go toto's stuck in a hole and he has to get the other dog out of the hole basically and it was one of those scary movies where i mean if you google it was like one of those scary movies that terror or not movies shows that terrified me where they would manipulate like the dog was talking like a man oh no and was like i have to do a hundred good deeds like he was and the jaw is scary and the eyes are dead and but that was just logistically is it like a puppet like it was on sabrina or is it like cgi it's early cgi it would have been like early 2000s dog cgi if you look it up the dog has really blue eyes and they're digitally manipulating his mouth anyways she wrote on that show i liked that show even though it scared me and really quick aside since i talked about salem the cat from sabrina the teenage witch uh nick bakai who voices salem

the cat wrote paul blart mall cop what yeah that is a true fact. Whoa. So what is the lesson to be learned from that? That Salem the Cat really loves Kevin James? I don't know. Did we just give Salem the Cat too much money and he felt emboldened to rip off their mullet car? I mean, it got greenlit and got a sequel. So did we embolden him or is this who we are as a nation? That's true. let's not let's

not put the blame on Salem we we were asking for it but yes so Allison Allison Taylor I just um it turns out I'm a fan of so much of her work um and yes I was I was also one of the first things I was like did they give this to a black female screenwriter and they did disney channel uh well i mean disney in general but but the channel by extension no one ever makes the right decision there and in this movie they did it seems like several times over the author is involved whitney houston is a producer that there is a black director in the first movie although kenny ortega comes in on the second movie which is why the second movie is uh all dancing no plot no shade to kenny ortega i love him but those are what his movies are like um but on this movie yeah oz scott is a director he directed for color girl for colored girls

also at a certain point yeah i didn't have like name recognition for him but once i looked at his filmography i was like oh i know this guy's worked pretty well and yeah so it was a it was a good team making this movie i was happy to see that uh can we talk really quickly about drinka yes yes first of all just drink at the character a wonderful character i'm so glad i don't remember is drinka in the books girl i don't i believe drinka in the books i don't i believe drinka is in the books i think that she's like a vocal coach or something in the books though like an outside vocal coach and not somebody involved with school if i remember correctly because the talent show thing is a contrivance for the movie so that they can like be in school and have all the stuff be school related

when the thing i i like drink his character a lot in the movie i like how when galleria is being an asshole you know drink it doesn't stand for it she's like i all i have is this school you kids and my word and you're like yeah drink a fuck galleria she She's being, you know, she's being rude. The stage name, drink a champagne. Like, just beautiful. Incredible. When she starts, what is that anecdote she starts saying on stage when the power gets pulled? She's talking about, like, the captain in Tennille or something. The captain in Tennille.

It's all so silly. She's like, this reminds me of the New York City blackout of 1977. And you're like, okay, drink up. All right. Give us the history. It's the best. But I also I didn't realize until I recently saw her speak to it in an interview on Netflix that the actress, Sandra Caldwell, is a very famous trans actress. I did not know that. I mean, when I saw the movie when I was a kid, but that was kind of what brought Cheetah Girls back to,

because you see her, you're like, oh my God, Trinca. I think that though, at the time that the movie was filmed and at that point in time i don't know that she was out as trans correct yeah yeah right she i believe didn't come out until fairly recently i want to say like 2018 there was a new york times article about her coming out in 2017 so yeah in the last couple of years um she she came out yes she is one of the actors featured in the documentary Disclosure that I keep referring to, in which she was describing her struggle of being a trans actor, but not being out, and living in constant fear that someone would discover that she is trans, and that might have meant her not being

able to continue to get work that might have meant the end of her career that might have meant she was a target for violence like any number of things that trans people have to deal with on a daily basis um so yeah she she speaks to that in that interview and in the documentary. We'll link to it in our episode description, too. It's like a really incredible interview and is worth mentioning inside of this episode because it's also just like, I don't know. It's just such a fun character. She's an amazing character actress. And the added context of knowing, you know, the constant anxiety and stress that she had to be under while consistently turning in these amazing character performances. It's like, it's incredible. So we'll link that.

It's frustrating, too, because I'm just like, if she hadn't had to worry about this, what could she have accomplished? If this weren't a fear that she had and a legitimate danger in her life? What could she have accomplished because look at what she did with all of that totally and it's it's just mind-boggling that on top of everything else that actors have to worry about that she had to worry about this added like genuine legitimate in like 19 i mean i guess at this point it's 2003, but still her career spans from the late 80s or early 90s. Yeah, she was an active working actor. And just the idea that this is something that was a part, this anxiety was a part of her career trajectory is just very upsetting.

Absolutely. And then to come out as an older person and face a whole new wave of scrutiny and anxiety and i mean she speaks to it so like it's just it's an incredible devastating interview because the way she talks about it she's like well i just i just had to do what i had to do and it was stressful and i you know like it was hell but this was the path i had to take and it's such an unfair it's such an unfair path for anyone to have had to worry about. I don't know. It makes me want to watch more of her work as well.

She's been in so much and hopefully we'll, we'll continue to be as well, but she's wonderful. Drinker rocks. She's such a funny character, the captain and Tennille. Well, and I,

I love the sort of loving read that she gives Galleria at the end where she's like, he captain and Tennille. Well, and I love the sort of loving read that she gives Galleria at the end where she's like, you got a big heart. You just have to worry about that big mouth of yours. And it's like the sort of adult non-parental guidance that sometimes you need because nobody listens to their parents when they're 14. And it's nice to have an outside adult

who is engaged in the thing that you want to do be this mentor to you and teach you like it's okay to be opinionated but you also need to know when to hold back and you need to be considerate of the people around you part of the cheetah credo it really is and you know she does drinka upholds the cheetah credo of you know expecting adults to treat you with respect because even in her frustration even in her anger with the girls she does not ever malign them or be like you're banned from my talent show forever or anything like that she's just like okay if you think this is more important then fine go do that but this is something that's important to

me and i am still going to treat it as if it's important to me. And you treat what's important to you as what's important to you. Right. And then it comes back around and she's the best. Yeah, she's very classy. And I love how supportive she is of the girls and their musical talent and ambition. I wish that I don't think that she's in the side. They're not really in school in the second one.

I just wish she came back in those movies yeah second one is like junior summer summer after junior year trip to Barcelona like yeah really relatable um what and the fact that Dorinda had to use Galleria's dad's miles was I like how that's how they got around it I'm like what about when she gets there who's paying for her food who's paying for her lodging I'll tell you what she starts dating a count in the second one right away what which I totally forgot there's like some count that she meets that is like I think you're beautiful and I want you to dance the tango with me and there's a whole tango sequence. I realize I do not remember a lot about the second movie at all.

Wow. Well, speaking of the teen romances, can we talk about Derek and the romantic subplot with him? And so it's not worth going into that much about it but it's set up that he he's got this musical duo with his friend Mackerel. Mackerel has an orthodontist appointment. The whole thing.

We're introduced to him because they're also trying out for the talent show so he pops up every so often in the movie to mostly condescend to Galleria to a greater extent than I've ever seen in a movie where when he's pitching the idea of switching audition times he calls the cheetah girls a little project which is really rich cut once you hear his music especially you're like that god right you're not bob dylan men will go to the mat with their mediocrity in a way that is

never not shocking right um then he he hears that they've gotten a meeting with jackal johnson and he tries to one-up her by talking about another and i don't know if this is a real musician if this is just one of the inventions of the movie but some famous musician he's lying about the extent to which they've interacted mackerel calls him on it he's like what are you talking about bro yeah right i was like you handed him a sugar packet it made me want way more of mackerel because i'm like mackerel is the real character here he's not a liar he's like i need to go to the orthodontist derrick handed him a sugar packet like he's a journalist he's yeah i need a mackerel drinker spin-off movie. Oh my god, where he's like her intern or something. They would be such good teams.

Also, and this was another character that I think they made show up in the movie for two seconds to be a little brother, but Poochie! Yeah. That's Chanel's little brother, right? Yeah. Where does he go?

Where does he go? he's with their dad there's a very explicit line in the earlier part where it's like oh Poochie's at your dad's house I'm going out with Luke and I guess it's supposed to be a thing where it's like Poochie's with the dad because he needs a strong male figure in his life or something but

they also have him running the light and sound board for the audition and he's like eight years old. A literal child is running the board. And you don't know that it's Poochie at first. So I'm just like, what is this child labor that's happening at this high school? Who's also condescending to the Cheetah Girls. Yeah, he does neg them.

This eight-year-old negs the Cheetah Girls. I think that this is at very least a disney channel trend but i think it might be a stock character that expands beyond the disney channel of of like precocious little brother specifically where it's like a brother who is secretly a tech genius who shows up for plot reasons this is like huge in lizzie mcguire but it comes up in a lot of kids shows where it's like if it's a show about a teen girl, there's often a bothersome little brother around who knows how computers work. I also think it's very funny that Chanel and Pucci are both named after designer brands. Yes, I love it.

Right. And Galleria is named after a mall. The Glendale Galleria is named after a mall. So in the second movie, because they don't really talk about their names in the first one. In the second movie, Galleria literally says to a boy she just met in Barcelona, because he's like, my name's Angel. And she's like, oh, that's such a beautiful name. My name's Galleria. It's a big building where you buy things. And he's like, oh.

That's actually in the books too it is specific that she was named both of them their names are very intentional and their parents intentionally named them those things for the reasons that you hope that they didn't baby capitalisms yeah um going back back to the Derek thing really quickly. So after he's like lying about this interaction with a famous musician, then he like leaves the scene and Galleria is like, that's when she gives the incredible line. If he can't respect my art, he can't have my heart. We're like, we do love that but then no later in the movie after

the cheetah girls have kind of broken up she is in the theater at school playing a song and then Derek comes in here's what he says quote it wasn't entirely all that bad it actually sounded like something not like that pop fluff you usually are doing and right and then and then he assumes that someone else wrote it for her and that she did not write it herself so he's being this like condescending piece of shit the entire movie yeah he is still and then at the end they kiss and it's like, I just I hate this. I don't hate necessarily that there is a romantic subplot. I hate that it's with this kid, Derek, who sucks and constantly condescends to her. You know who doesn't condescend to the Cheetah Girls music and who is very supportive of them?

Toto the dog. Well, you can't kiss Toto the dog at the end no no i'm not suggesting that she ends up with her dog romantically i do love the i mean if we're talking screenwriting caitlin i know you've got a handful of degrees of this the plant and payoff of toto the dog and they also because of the decom they reuse the same shot of the dog jumping around constantly they use it three or four times every time she goes toto it's the same shot it's shot on like a 1992 camcorder like they did not i don't know it cuts to this weird like really grainy poorly lit shot of the dog in the hole and it's like what always the same happened oh it's very funny

yeah i i didn't think that the the um thing that it needed to be there i think it's definitely a part of the disney channel formula and i at least appreciated that it didn't take up you know because sometimes those stories really i mean we were talking about it with xenon not too long ago where a boy plot really ends up kind of consuming the back half of the movie. But at least that doesn't happen here. He's like only in three scenes, maybe. I mean, he's not in it that much. Yeah, three or four. an interracial romance which is something even for the early 2000s was not something that was

seen or if it was seen it wasn't presented in a way that was just normalizing it it was always like it was something like save the last dance where it's like oh yeah a white person and a black person want to kiss they come from different worlds he's hip-hop she's ballet can they dance together it's like yes she's a pop star he's a white rapper can they kiss you're like i guess so but should they i do love that galleria basically says that men are scams early on she's like i don't have time for that i need to focus on my career and that that for me was the problem with the kiss with Derek at the end. It didn't feel earned. There was no chemistry there. There was no real desire from her to be involved with him. And there are like jokes from the other girls.

It's like, oh, he's your boo. And she's like, no, he's not. And then at the end for them to kiss, I was like, oh. Right. Where is this coming from? Did she even like him? Yeah. I think that because he was there in the wake of the global get down thing,

she's like, ah, my rock. And I was like, no, get another rock. Right. You have Toto.

Toto is your rock. I mean, yeah, I wouldn't mind the romance subplot if it had been presented in a way that just like made more sense. Cause it doesn't seem like she likes him. She is very articulate and like makes a lot of sense of the reasons she doesn't like him um and then at the end she's like i guess i like him and which which is um it just didn't make a ton of sense i did appreciate um that the main conflict

of this movie it's not a will they or won't they it mainly is like the tension of the friendship with galleria and chanel i remember at least when i was a kid even though it's like it was aspirational because there's their problems are very like rich girl problems but i do like seeing um and i feel like you don't get a lot of like two friends in conflict where it's resolved with love i i think that that's always nice to see and also like galleria is being a huge asshole to chanel for so much of the movie and like and several other characters everyone that's the thing they end up with they end up with in 2003 a disc site chomp cheetah.com nothing currently there i checked i also checked i was like oh i hope this still exists

have they kept on to this have they held on to this domain the same way space jam has since 1996 it would it would have been a beautiful thing to see but i mean i guess if you're listening and you want that domain name it is available it's my new personal website chompcheated.com jamie please please do it by that domain name it's just during the plug section i'm like uh you can check out my website chompcheetah.com i love that they have a diss site um yeah i mean again i'm like i don't mean to be too critical of the i mean the girls that eventually just become the only cheetah girls, Sans Raven. But they, I mean, they just seem to be so, they're like, well, we should give these terrifying masks a chance. And I get, I mean, that's a great place, I thought.

I was like, okay, this is where they can introduce the class aspect of like, okay, like maybe Dorinda is inclined to play ball here with the scary panda mask because they're offering her money that she wants to elevate her status and that is a part of her character but they kind of don't do that and they're just like it is more of a fame thing than uh he is offering them money that would give them independence that they want. I don't know. It's weird to me. Well, maybe I don't know how to feel about this, but I found it something that Galleria is both the character who turns into an enormous asshole to everyone

and is mean and condescending to everyone. That montage. Maybe she and Derek deserve each other since they're both condescending to everyone that montage maybe she and uh Derek deserve each other since they're both condescending to everybody but she is like very mean to everyone but then she's also the character with like the strongest conviction in terms of like no we need to be true and authentic to ourself and our music and we're not going to sell out so it feels like those two things should have been given to two different characters maybe i don't know unless they were making a really sophisticated point which is that people

can be assholes and then also occasionally make a good point but that doesn't seem like the the kind of sophisticated point that should be made in a movie for 11 year olds like that seems like a more like a three hour long Paul Thomas Anderson thing to say don't you mean Inception by Christopher Nolan no his characters suck no but

yeah I guess Galleria does turn into such a cartoon villain for a good 20 minutes of the movie and then she becomes she's right at the beginning and then it starts good where it's like oh she said she was the founder that's not necessarily true that you're like okay that's an interesting but then she just goes full like she's cackling for an entire montage um and then she's kind of back to being the moral center and like our art is more important than art than capitalism and yeah it's a little messy i do appreciate that perhaps the movie is making commentary on how like the music industry among many other branches of the entertainment industry try to like commodify

people especially young women to like sell stuff it felt very intentional to me because they were like oh we're gonna capitalize on the letter g being big this year we're gonna capitalize on environmentalism and how all of these creatures are endangered. And I was just like, can we just talk for a second about their sound? Because they briefly are like, yeah, you guys sound good, which is why we're going to put you into this thing that sounds nothing at all like you. And it was just sort of this complete erasure of everything that made the Cheetah Girls Cheetahlicious and fierce. And I am very disturbed by their handshake though

where there is a very realistic cheetah growl oh my god i'm like how do you make that sound out of your mouth multiple times that was also in the trailer i remember very clearly because it's just yeah like copy paste cheetah sound dot mp3 like it's the same every time yes i will say what was interesting to me about that sort of montage where galleria was just laughing at her own hilarity and jackal says that all the time was that as soon as everything became about a man, it got very hairy and like very unfun and uninteresting. And that was sort of the commentary for me. It was like when you let men enter your sphere and you make things about the men entering your sphere instead of about your girls and about the connection that you have and the people that were already in your world so just even taking gender out of it like when you let somebody else come in and influence you as opposed to the people that you built something with that's when things go topsy-turvy and bad totally i like

i mean that i i never had that read of it before that that i love that read it was like when you let men and capitalism into your mix things Things get bad. Things go so quickly. Your world gets turned upside down. You get diss websites. You get chompcheetah.com. I think, too, like, there's the lyrics to several of their songs are empowering for women and young girls. And maybe it's a little bit of like the superficial like i mean there's literally a song called girl power which we have criticized the idea on the podcast

a lot of the idea of like 90s early 2000s like just very surface level girl power sentiment that is not that helpful for our purposes but i've also been thinking about this recently, where like, girls and women generally have to learn feminism, because, you know, we grow up, we're still surrounded by patriarchal structures, we are often conditioned to think and believe certain things that are in direct conflict with our own self interest. We and we have to unlearn a lot of stuff. But, you know, you have to start somewhere when it comes to learning feminism. So the kind of surface level, like, girl power thing that is often directed at young girls, yes, it's very superficial, but it also feels like a good entry point, you know, for this learning process process as long as it also like moves into

more kind of complicated feminism that everyone needs to learn well i think that that's my general problem with this message is that it doesn't really ever tend to do that beyond that cinderella sort of more than girl power the song cinderella has the idea of don't wait around for a man to rescue you. Rescue yourself. You have that power and you have the capability. But then that's the first song that we're really getting from them as the Cheetah Girls. And then it just sort of devolves into like generic. Oh, we're here for each other.

I'm like, how? How are you here for each other? Are you disclosing your salaries to make sure that everybody's getting paid the same? And like, what's the deal? What, how, what is the action here? Not just the sort of slogan, the future is female sort of deal. Right. There is, I guess that that is, and this is like, I mean, Cheetah Girls, I'm like, I almost

want to give Cheetah Girls a pass on it because I love the Cheetah Girls so much. But all of these, I mean, my main criticism of the girl power aesthetic has always been that like the sentence itself, not a problem with it. Yes, girls should have more power than they do and they should be empowered by themselves and by each other and by the people around them. But to me, the message underneath that girl power message is that the way to get power is by being complicit in capitalism and participating in it as thoroughly and as heavily as you can, which is also baked into what the Cheetah Girls are and what their aspirations are. It's like they want to succeed through capitalism.

Obviously, it's like, I'm not asking the Cheetah Girls to be a socialist text. It's fine as is but just that overarching like we talk i think we started talking about it in our spice girls episode like three years ago at this point but that it's like i agree with what they're saying but how much is actually done through the actions i think that the cheetah girls are certainly doing a lot more than spice world was, but not as much as Josie and the pussy cats. Exactly. Like if we're talking about the spectrum of,

you know, how much a franchise is challenging. Josie and the pussy cats is the best movie ever. Join the army. Kayla's got the shirt. Yes. Thank you, Jamie.

Jamie bought it for me and my mom i have two of the same shirt that means two people know you very well yes uh so yeah i think that that's i mean but it's capitalism is baked into the cheetah girls to such a comical degree that it's kind of funny because their names are galleria and chanel, they are embodying it. And I feel like, especially the books, Dorinda presents kind of an oppositional force and a bit of a challenge to that mindset, which she sort of does in the movie as well. But yeah, I don't know.

I'm never going to like 2000s girl power, partially because I deeply resent it. It's a tough thing to reckon with because you do, again, want girls to have more power and do sort of want to implant just the seed of the idea that like, hey, girls, you can be in NYU math classes and be good at STEM, but it's also like, how are you then going to use that?

It's about what you do with the tools that you're given. And right now they're just like let's use these tools to help build the capitalist machine ding ding what are you gonna do with the buckets of ducats once you've acquired the buckets of ducats gallery are you going to redistribute it things redistribute the ducats the ducats but The ducats. But yeah, I mean, like in this song, Cinderella, I think some of the lyrics are, I can slay my own dragons. I can dream my own dreams. My knight in shining armor is me.

So I'm going to set me free. Set me free. I don't want to be like Cinderella, sitting in a dark old dusty cellar. Wait for Cinderella. Wow. It's so good. That's not a Cheetah Girls original, BT Dubs. Oh, really?

Another group, I think it like is some European group also, recorded that song prior to the film and then they repackaged it as a Cheetah Girls song for the movie. I cannot remember the name of the group offhand. I thought that Galleria wrote cinderella as she claims in the film i know yeah also there was i was like oh no there's authorship issues that never bodes well for a group no it does not i guess the last thing i wanted to talk about was um galleria we've like alluded to this heavily so maybe it won't even be a very long discussion. But Galleria and her mom, Dorothea,

and I am just now connecting Dorothea and Toto. Okay, Jamie? Oh, nope, didn't make that connection either. Yeah, no, and they love the Wizard of Oz. And there's the scene right before Toto goes down into the hole, which maybe is Toto's own version of Oz, who's to say, where Galleria's bummed because of the global get-down thing goes down into the hole, which maybe is Toto's own version of Oz, who's to say, where where Galleria is like bummed because of the global get down thing.

And Dorothea is like, well, maybe we'll just go home and watch your favorite movie. And she's like, I don't know if the Wizard of Oz can solve this. I remember really liking that because it was my favorite movie when I was a kid. But Dorothea, I used to be more like, I feel like it's interesting. I want to like give props to Deborah. And I also want to give props to Allison on the way that this character is written in the movie. Because it like I feel like there's multiple reads on her. Like when I saw her when I was a kid, I was definitely like, oh, OK, this is like a parent who is going to be withholding from their

kid who wants to do something cool like I've seen this character I get it but when you revisit this character as like we were saying it's like oh you totally understand why she's like she's protecting Galleria that wasn't she wasn't just saying that she she meant it yeah I mean she was looking at this contract and Jockqueline was like standard contract she crosses out several subsections of the contract looks at him and says standard revisions which i was just like yes that's great because she's like she's like a famous fashion designer she would know all about this shit and she would be really like you know like rightfully skeptical and she would know this whole world and like rightfully skeptical and she would know this

whole world and like it just i was very team dorothea on this watch she really cares about her kid i also thought it was really badass that she was so mean to jackal the second she met him like maybe a little bit too mean but like she i don't know i don't care but like it was she was so aggressively mean and then gallery was like you don't know who jackal johnson is and then she named 500 facts about him she's like i do know who he is i just don't respect him yeah i read she said i read and i'm like yes you do mom yes you do um yeah i mean hearkening back to like our xenon episode on the matreon where we had a big problem with the way the like Xenon's parents were treated and that like her mother was this like hysterical woman who has to put on a stress helmet. And then but her dad is like the cool dad who like gets her and like is chill and relaxed and I think they're on the on the very surface there is a similar dynamic

here in that like you have a concerned mother and then a chiller dad but I feel like it was handled way better here because you understand where the mother is coming from she's not presented nearly as much as being this like hysterical like shrew mom who's like, no! She's looking out for her daughter. She knows stuff. She knows how music is recorded. She knows about contracts. She comes in very informed.

And she's also just characterized beyond. We get to know more about her character that contextualizes why she's so concerned for her daughter and like her daughter's friends and stuff so i liked that i always get a little i mean there was a little bit of cool dad daddery going on here where the dad is the one that was like come on like it would be fun if we let her do the thing and but i but i did appreciate that you get something you don't get in xenon which is a little like look at what their relationship dynamic is you get like a sweet moment with them that doesn't seem particularly aggressive to either character and you almost like so I was

more lenient towards the way that results it wasn't just like dads of course as we know are way cooler than moms and that's why this is happening like you get a look at she gets to speak her piece say why she doesn't agree with it the dad gets to speak his piece and then they make a compromise so it's like okay this isn't the worst way that i've seen this play out in like a disney movie and it felt like both parents were coming from a place of wanting galleria to be happy and healthy, which I appreciated because the dad wasn't just like, oh, let her have fun. He was like, she has this dream. This can maybe help her achieve this dream.

And there's never going to be a point at which she is not going to want to achieve this dream. But if it falls apart now, we are here to help support her. And I think that that's important that we be here to help support her. So I thought that that was a really interesting take on it where he's like, I'm not just fun dad. I am fun dad who also wants to be able to support her when this may not work out because that happens. And she has her first situation where it doesn't work out. And we're here. So she knows that the next time how to handle it better right which is logic i can basically follow i was like okay dad has maybe not the point i agree with most but a point sure and then they

didn't just go into it willy-nilly it was like both parents came together it's like okay so we are gonna let you do this because this is your dream but i'm gonna go with you as your mother and i'm gonna make sure that you don't fall behind in your grades or anything like that like there are conditions you have to wash a dish like don't forget the capers at the store don't put your dog in a hole etc yeah i really i mean it's i originally was skeptical of that but now even as we're talking it out i'm like you know what i think it's actually fine yeah the dog in the hole the dog in the hole'm like, you know what? I think it's actually fine. Yeah. The dog in the hole? The dog in the hole.

The dog in the hole is actually fine. I was like, no, maybe they should have left him there. He was in Oz. I will never get over that. I watched that. I must have rewound that 500 times. The firefighter being like, sing faster. Sing faster.

Sing faster. It's working. It's working. Wait. Okay. Sorry. If the hole is Oz, the director of this movie is Oz Scott. The connections keep coming.

Makes you think. Oh my goodness. Is this funded by the Illuminati? Do we think that? Yeah, I think we can pretty definitively say that. Yeah. And recently we did find out that beyonce aka backstabba in karma's children is secretly italian and galleria is half what that italian item was so one of the

messiest news items of the year and that's saying something truly messier than the global pandemic is the would-be member of the house of legislature who's like did you know that beyonce is secretly italian she's not even black don't listen to any of her pro-black rhetoric because she is scamming you all it exploded my brain they're like she's working for the meatball lobby it's the spaghetti like you're just like what are you talking about oh so much so much um yeah does anyone have anything else i think that was all i had those are all my main things most importantly uh how do they make the realistic growling sounds in the handshake i think we went into that it was paste. Oh, there is a line that we have not talked about that I just think, I hold it very near to my heart,

which is after a history test. Oh, I also think this is important. Galleria calls a Cheetah Girl study session. So they are about supporting academically as well. But they talked about the Louisiana Piana purchase and chanel says are you sure the louisiana purchase had nothing to do with gumbo and i'm just like oh mrs almanac truly has failed you that was what she had to go to talk to mrs almanac about but like how would anybody buy gumbo for 15 million dollars what's the deal with that

that was the actual price of the louisiana purchase i was in a musical about the louisiana purchase so i remember many fun facts about it oh my god yes at 10 not recently you have to go into intel galleria she or not galleria chanel she was that was another there were so many like quit like i mean it's it's a service it's like an homage to the book but the quippy lines that pop up are just they're so funny and they're so weird and there's a really good one that i like sorry there's also a dog my new neighbor got a very yippy dog uh Toto. Is it in a hole? It's in a hole and it's yipping very loudly right now. So my apologies for that. But there's one line that I, my favorite line in the entire movie is when Chanel shows up at Dorinda's apartment.

And this is like her discovery of like her, you know, living in like like the supers apartment kind of thing and dorinda says oh if i would have known you were coming over i would have been rich and lived somewhere else and it's like that is very funny you should be a comedian and speaking of comedians oh my gosh okay so there's the one of the guys in the talent show is this male comedian who's talking about like he's doing a bird impression and um dying the cheetah girls are like he's so funny they love it it doesn't seem that funny but my favorite part about that is drinka is like okay you've gone over your three minutes like stop now like a male comedian's trying to go over his time and she's and drink is of it. She's like, nope, you're done now. Always leave them wanting more.

It's fine. I liked that. I just, when they cut to the Cheetah Girls losing it, being like, oh my God, he's so random. Like you're just like, oh, fully triggered by this open, this 17-year-old open mic-er. Just another fun behind- scenes fact keely williams later in her career released a song i don't know if either of you have heard of it or seen the

music video for it it's called spectacular and the original video has been taken down i believe but it's still up there in many facets and it is wildly different than you would think based on her past music um really if you've never seen it check it out i mean the chorus of the song goes the sex was spectacular well the sex was spectacular oh wow there are little like oh sounds that are delicious oh post disney music careers that has to be someone's like doctoral thesis there's there's just so much to be found it's so ripe it is a field ripe for study and it was kind of controversial when it came out people were like keely's gone wild and uh i think at this point it was like 10 or 12 years ago so it's been a while but in college that was one of my favorite videos i would watch it at least once

a month because i was just like oh this is crazy look it's aqua spectacular check it out let me know what you think as far as sex songs go that is like a pretty polite thing to say that the sex was spectacular she's using like you know a 25 cent word to describe the sex it was yeah it was a plus X, according to Keely. She's like, gotta pull up the thesaurus and see how else to describe this. But yeah, that's my last thing I wanted to say. I just needed everyone to know about Spectacular. No, I appreciate that. So as far as the Bechdel test, does the Cheetah Girls pass the Bechdel test? Every, almost every second of the movie.

Every, yeah, constantly. I don't think they mention men as existing for like a solid three and a half minutes, which is I think the longest I've ever seen a movie go without mentioning a man in the opening of it. And when they do talk about men, it's generally a reference to Jackal and it still is at least, even when it doesn't pass, And when they do talk about men, it's generally a reference to Jackal.

And it still is at least, even when it doesn't pass, it's usually still tangentially about their careers. Right. Which, yeah, yeah. This, I think, might be like one of the most Bechdel test passing movies we have ever done. I would agree. It passes the DuVernay test. It passes the DuVernay test. It passes the DuVernay test. I think it might not pass the reverse spectral test in which I don't think men or boys, Mackerel and Derek do talk to each other, but I feel like they're always, they're talking either about the girls or they're talking to the girl. Like their interactions are very few and far between on screen. And usually connected to the girls or they're talking to the girl like their interactions are very few and far between

on screen so like usually connected to the girls yeah and usually connected to the girls yeah yeah realizing that now i'd like to think that maybe mackerel's orthodontist is a woman also so even when he's in his famous line he's talking about a woman. Hell yeah. Now I have the sex was spectacular. A song I've never heard stuck in my head. You're welcome. But it's yeah, it does super pass the test.

It does it so seamlessly to where I feel like sometimes when movies pass the Bechdel test, they really like all but break the fourth wall to be like, are you happy? But this is a great I mean,regory has built a world that is so centered on female characters and their ambitions and their dreams and their conflicts that it like it's just seamless it's just built into what this world is which brings us to our nipple scale um in which we examine how the movie fares from an intersectional lens on a scale of zero to five nipples. And I would say there's a lot to consider here because, you know, you have the issue with the Dorinda character being whitewashed from the book to movie adaptation, which is upsetting. On the other hand, of the characters who you're rooting for, who get the most screen time and dialogue and narrative significance, they are predominantly

Black and Latinx women. And the fact that it's by and large a story about female friendship, female creative expression, like women making art and entertainment are they too concerned with capitalism yes but they're also 15 so maybe they'll grow out of it and you know like same thing with galleria becoming really mean the second she gets a taste of fame she doesn't handle it well but again she's 15 and then she learns and then she learns and she she understands that the important thing is her friendship with these other girls and that's the resolution of the story um so i i like that aspect of it that the the movie the story um centers around the the female friendship i would think that there is a shortage of that in

media directed to children, especially to young girls. So I appreciate that. There's a few, you know, the issues that we've talked about, like the weird romantic subplot with the kid being an asshole. I guess I'd give it like a four still I think four nipples and I'll give one to each cheetah girl I want to go four as well I was really pleasantly surprised at just on revisiting the books a little bit as well and just kind of like resurfacing all this old unused cheetah girls canon information that i had inside of my head of how much on the rewatch i did find that it was generally true to the spirit of the books it was less disneyfied than i expected again this is like some qualifying language of like wow i thought that that Disney would have really fucked it up like they have fucked up other franchises. But in general, I think that especially and I guess just jumping

off what you're saying, Caitlin, I was happy to see that the behind the scenes team was mostly black artists and people of color. I was really glad that Deborah Gregory was involved in the meaningful way and it really shows. And yeah, I mean, it's a predominantly nonwhite cast, really the only two. Well,

I guess with Dorinda, I guess she is a white coded character, but it is all the, all the authority figures that you see that you love are, are nonwhite characters. And then there's Jackal who is evil. There's just like so much that this movie is doing right in 2003 that most movies in 2003 weren't doing right so it definitely has its issues and I think that all of these issues can basically be boiled down to the Disneyfication elements that did get through the whitewashing the forced in uh love story that doesn't really belong there

um but all things considered i feel like it it was and it was a huge hit which again is just it makes it extremely apparent that the representation that this movie offers even though it is not in no way perfect was was very wanted and, and very needed. And it became this super successful franchise until Raven left. So I'm going to give it for, I still really enjoy this movie. Cinderella is a great song and I'll give, well,

I'll give, I don't want to be mean to Dorinda, but I'm going to give one to every cheetah girl but dorinda and then give that nipple to drinka sorry dorinda oh good call yay i thought you were gonna give it to angie because i know you're a big angie stan angie i well yes angie angie can share a nipple with drinka when she's so quiet she's yeah she wouldn't request more than half a nipple. I couldn't hear her, yeah. For me, I think that I, like Jamie, came back at the movie and was surprised byaddressing of classism and class issues that happen I mean that one scene with Galleria where she's like you need

to change the way you dress and she harps on the way that Dorinda dresses in a couple of scenes and that for me was just like unchecked classism part like just to a level that is unbelievable even for a teenager that is kind of not really resolved between them either right yeah so that that takes it a little bit down on the nipple scale for me but again i am very pro one also showing interracial families and these blended families and non-traditional families where they do have a single parent and it's not like the second parent is dead because that is

a huge Disney thing where it's like if it's going to be a single parent the other one's dead divorce doesn't exist you die or you're there so that's really great for me and I feel like I i'm gonna give it three and a half nipples i'm gonna give it the lowest on the nipple scale so far because that the the classism really does get me and that's i think such an important aspect of intersectionality

and a lot of people focus on the race aspect but I think, is so intertwined with that, too, and generational wealth and whatnot. So, yeah, three and a half nipples. But I really came into it looking, re-watching it for this episode. I was like, I'm only going to give it like a nipple, maybe half a nipple. And I was just like, oh, actually, maybe three, maybe four, somewhere in there. So it is a well-deserved and earned three and a half nipples hell yeah i think if i were to rate it on like how much do i enjoy watching this movie or how well do i think this screenplay is written no i would give it far lower i would give

it i'd give it 10 million i'd give it maybe like why is the climax about a dog in a hole sometimes dogs go into holes caitlin on a screenwriting nipple scale i would give it like two nipples but there there is there's more to it it's the chikovian dog in a hole i will say for me i think screenwriting definitely lower nipples. No disrespect to Alison. It is a monumental task to have to adapt and also to have to adapt a series of books. It's not just one story. It's several stories. And they do tread into territory, I think, from the first three or four books.

So that is impressive. But it didn't quite track, especially if you hadn't read the books. From an enjoyment nipple scale, I'd give it more nipples. I enjoyed it. Just objectively as something I could watch on a Saturday night. Even as a grown-up, I'm like, this is good. This is very good. It made me homesick.

I was just thinking of all my childhood friends when I was watching it. I was like, oh, it was a simpler time. Yes, the nostalgia is strong. It really is, yeah. But as we will find out as we continue into our Matreon episodes about DCOMs,

the important character in Hole is a common DCOM convention because in, Caitlin, weren't you saying at the climax of Cadet Kelly, it's Dad in the hole not dad falls it's less of a hole he falls off a cliff oh he falls into he falls there's a falling thing and that is also the climax of cadet kelly no i do remember the cadet kelly cliff thing i remember the ribbons more the ribbons were a big thing i was like i could ribbon dance i cannot i cannot do any dance is it ribbons aren't ribbons were a big thing i was like i could ribbon dance i cannot i

cannot do any dance is it ribbons aren't they flinging guns around they're like toy rifles but then they replace rifles with ribbons and that's feminism oh yes it's a metaphor early 2000s they really had it figured out back then i i wonder if there is like a style guide that if you're hired to write a dcom they're like if you're getting stuck here's what we would do are you having trouble in the third act put someone in a hole just toss them somewhere yeah have someone fall and almost die i was just watching an episode of so weird which was a disney channel show um yes and there was an episode where fee goes missing and she does

fall off a cliff and then is in a cave, which is just a very large horizontal hole. That's true. They're really just going for it with that. She's saved by Bigfoot, so that's the so weird aspect of it. Oh, that show is really fun. I don't remember anything about it except that I

liked it. It's on Disney+. You should rewatch it. Oh, okay. Alright. all right well krama thank you so much for being here thank you so much for so much fun what a wild what a wild time we've had um where where can people follow your stuff and find you online okay if you want to follow me please just do it on the internet not in real life because that's creepy but i'm at karama drama k-o-r-a-m-a drama on all platforms and by all i mean instagram and twitter because i am very afraid of tiktok i am not cool i don't understand it uh i think that it's super cool and there's so much stuff on it that's interesting they have conspiracy theorists they have like life hackers. They have education stuff and like alternative education and counter education.

But I am very intimidated by all of the dancing and the editing that happens. And I just. Oh, yeah. I love to watch other people's TikToks. I just have no idea how to produce my own content there. TikTok, I finally understand why there were all these weird people. Like I used to think people who were on Twitter that were just an egg and never said anything

were so weird. But I'm like, oh, that's literally me on TikTok. That's what I do. I just look at stuff and I say nothing. I feel like Twitter though, it's weirder because everybody on Twitter knows words. Like on TikTok to create content, there's a lot that goes into on twitter knows words like on tiktok to create content there's a lot that goes into it in terms of like yeah mise en scene and all of that stuff you know like

well speaking of twitter and social media you can follow us there at bechtel cast you can subscribe to our patreon aka matreon It's $5 a month. It's two bonus episodes every month, plus access to our entire back catalog. There is a siren happening behind me. And you can go to patreon.com slash Bechtelcast for access to that. Yeah, you can get all of our merch

over at tpublic.com slash the backslide cast we have masks i just saw someone wearing a sexy baby grinch mask and i regretted every choice i've ever made in my whole life queer icon baby grinch queer icon baby grinch uh so that is something you could do if you so choose and someone someone, in fact, did it. Yeah, we'll see you on the matriarch. We'll see you on the main feed. And thank you for being here, Karama. This was so much fun.

Please, I would love to come back whenever you're willing and ready to have me again. Absolutely. Anytime. Anytime. And this is the point where, Caitlin, would it be the most annoying thing if at the end you just edited in a really loud cheetah girl cheetah sound effect yeah I'll do my best and if I manage it it's gonna go right here

bye Kay hasn't heard from her sister in seven years I have a proposal for you. Come up here and document my project. All you need to do is record everything like you always do. What was that? That was live audio of a woman's nightmare.

Can Kay trust her sister or is history repeating itself? There's nothing dangerous about what you're doing. They're just dreams. Dream Sequence is a new horror thriller from Blumhouse Television, iHeartRadio, and Realm. Listen to Dream Sequence on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions.

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