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It’s been a great time for comic book movies. Since Iron Man kicked off the Marvel Cinematic Universe nearly 20 years ago, there have been seemingly no shortage of quality, entertaining comic book adaptations hitting the big screen. But 2008 wasn’t the beginning of things. The 2000s in general have been a great time for comic book adaptations, not all of them centered around superheroes. The Losers, Kingsman, Ghost World and more are all based on comics and nary a superhero in sight. But there’s one comic book movie to grace the big screen in the past 25 years that didn’t get its due when it came out and now it’s streaming on Prime Video.
Released in 2001, Josie and the Pussycats has become something of a cult classic. Based on the Archie Comics series and the Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the same name, Josie and the Pussycats was written and directed by Harry Elfont and Deborah Kaplan and had a solid cast that included Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid, and Rosario Dawson along with Alan Cumming, Parker Posey, and Gabriel Mann. But the film about a girl band that suddenly becomes popular overnight with a massive number one hit and ends up in the middle of a conspiracy about subliminal messages was a box office bomb. Audiences and critics alike weren’t exactly wowed by the film, but a quarter century on, it turns out that the movie was just wildly misunderstood and worth watching on streaming.
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Josie and the Pussycats Is Actually Clever Satire
When Josie and the Pussycats was released, one of the major criticisms of the film was that it was a vehicle for consumerism and it’s easy to see why. There is a lot of product placement in Josie and the Pussycats. Target, Tide, Coke, Apple, T.J, Maxx, even Tidy Cat and American Express are just a few of the many brands that end up appearing in the film. On the surface, it looks like the movie is doing the very thing that it is supposed to be calling out. You see, the plot of the movie involves how the government has conspired with the music industry to put subliminal messages into pop music to get teens to buy consumer products on an ever-changing weekly trend cycle as part of a scheme to pump up the economy. There’s a sinister twist to it, as musicians who discover this are made to disappear. For a movie about sinister subliminal messaging about consumerism, the movie having a ton of obvious product placement just seems counterintuitive.
However, the brilliance of Josie and the Pussycats is that it’s all a part of clever satire. While there is a lot of brand product placement, it’s strategic. The detail is in the placement. Almost all of the products are prominent in spaces that the main characters do not control. Specifically, it is the personal, home spaces for the characters that are largely absent of the obviously branded items. It subtly shows the difference between what is real and what is forced upon them — and consumers — by corporations. The movie does this all against a backdrop of what can only be called pop culture hysteria. The fans of the different bands in the movie — which are treated as interchangeable by the record label — highlight the frenzy of fan culture and how easy it can be for a message to be lost in hype. It is, in a sense, what happened with the movie itself.
In retrospect, Josie and the Pussycats was a lot sharper and more intelligent than it appeared when it was released. It is also a movie that still holds up. With social media and influencer culture a huge part of the landscape, the idea of how easy it can be to manipulate the consumer with product placement is as timely as it has ever been. Between the message and the movie’s great soundtrack, Josie and the Pussycats is worth a watch now that it’s streaming on Prime Video.
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