YMMV / Josie and the Pussycats (2001)

• Awesome Music: For the film's soundtrack, they enlisted a murderer's row of big-name '90s songwriters and producers to record the band's music, and Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo to sing the vocals. It was very well received, and certified Gold within a month and a half of its release even as the movie became a Box Office Bomb. Almost two decades later, it still held enough of a fandom to be re-released on vinyl.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The TRL scene became this over time. The scene serves no purpose except to make references to the fact that Tara Reid and Carson Daly were dating at the time. These days, you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who remembers, or even cares, that the two dated. Add to that, Aries Spears showing up just to do his MA Dtv impersonations in the middle of the fight and the whole scene sticks out like an (outdated) sore thumb.
• Cry for the Devil: The scene where Fiona meets the Pussycats makes it rather obvious that she has a really hard time making actually connections with other people. She's also a total megalomaniacal, manipulative monster who's willing to brainwash kids and commit murder in cold blood.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Seeing the Pussycats' private jet winging its' way towards New York, the (ad-covered) Twin Towers on full display. The movie was released only 5 months prior to 9/11 and in some markets like the UK and Ireland was still playing in cinemas at the time of the attack.
  • As noted on the Trivia page, Aaliyah was offered the role of Valerie, but turned it down, while Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes read for the role. Both of them would die tragically within a year of the film's release, Aaliyah in a plane crash and Left Eye in a car crash, not unlike how Wyatt and Fiona try to have DuJour killed in a plane crash and later try to have Valerie and Melody killed in a car crash.
  • The idea of a Boy Band's manager being secretly a criminal became a lot less of a joke in 2006 when Lou Pearlman, the producer who developed the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC among many other Y2K-era Teen Pop acts,^note In addition to the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, Pearlman managed the boy bands O-Town, LFO, Take 5, Natural, Marshall Dyllon (which he co-created with Kenny Rogers), US5, and C-Note, the girl groups Solid HarmoniE and Innosense (which briefly had Britney Spears as an early member), the solo act Aaron Carter, the Orlando rap duo Smilez & Southstar, and Jordan Knight's solo career. was found to be running a Ponzi scheme, having used his reputation in the music industry as the "boy band mogul" to do so. In 2008, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and he would eventually die there in 2016. What's more, with the exception of US5 and Marshall Dyllon, all of the acts signed to his label eventually sued him for misrepresentation and fraud at one point or another. A bit less cartoonishly villainous than Fiona's Evil Plan, but still.
• Heartwarming Moments: Just as Wyatt is about to talk to Josie after giving her and Mel (but not Val) an invitation to Fiona's party, we can see Mel is offering Val her invitation in the background.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The movie was dead-on in predicting the fall of boy bands and the rise of pop-punk in the early Turn of the Millennium.
  • Tara Reid and Breckin Meyer being in the same movie — back in the early 80s, they were both involved in the CBS game show ChildsPlay (Tara appeared in pre-taped footage during the main game, while Breckin appeared in person for the bonus game).
  • The Pussycats depressed that DuJour had a record deal and they didn't. Since Technology Marches On with computers and recording software, streaming services like SoundCloud and TuneCore, and video sharing sites like YouTube, staying an indie artist became more popular than the quest for a record deal.
  • Wyatt's claim that the band needs to be called Josie and the Pussycats because no one is going to watch a band just called The Pussycats. Four years later The Pussycat Dolls would have their big break with "Don't Cha", and while it's not the exact same name, it's close enough to refute Wyatt's assertion that you need a singular name in front.
• Les Yay:
  • The friendship between Josie and Valerie seems a lot more fleshed-out and real than Josie and Alan M.
  • Also, the scene with the girls in Fiona's bedroom suggests she has a thing for Josie, calling her "pretty" and giving her a shoulder massage.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Josie and the Pussycats is the Best Movie Ever Join the Army!
  • DuJour means friendship!
• Moment of Awesome: DuJour managing to land their plane safely after Wyatt and the pilot bailed, subsequently surviving an assault by angry Metallica fans and attempting to first warn the Pussycats about the plot, and when that failed, confront Wyatt and Fiona directly. That's determination right there. Even if their attempt gets hobbled by their injuries, Josie takes the opportunity to untie her friends, fight with Fiona and cause the latter to smash the Megasound 8000, exposing Fiona's true nature and ruining the brainwashing scheme.
• Questionable Casting: An unfortunate aspect that is hit by all three lead actresses: while Josie, Melody and Valerie in the cartoon were seen as a upbeat leader, the ditzy blonde and the brainy problem-solver, Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson's portrayals are more stylized as being dour/disinterested, a burnout and having a chip on their shoulder, respectively.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Tom Cruise's whiny son plays a recurring Josie fan.
  • Ginger Fitzgerald/Mary Mason is a member of the Girl Posse that goes from laughing at the Pussycats to embracing them as Teen Idols.
  • Alan M. moved to the Hamptons to help a friend get Revenge. Alternately, he's a gamma-irradiated scientist with anger issues.
• Strangled by the Red String: Alan M seems like a genuinely nice guy, and apparently he and Josie have a history full of chemistry and common interests, but most of their relationship shown in the movie is them staring deeply into each other's eyes as they realise they love each other, with none of the relationship actually visible. Which might have been intentional.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film, made in 2001, takes place in a world where boy bands and girl groups are the biggest things in pop music, the major labels wield near-supreme control over what becomes popular, MTV is still thought of as a music network first (and even features the show Total Request Live, complete with Carson Daly still hosting), and everyone gets their music from brick-and-mortar record stores. File-sharing isn't even mentioned, despite the fact that Napster was at the peak of its popularity and infamy when the film came out. Additionally, some of the brands featured very heavily in the film have faded out of relevance, such as MovieFone and America Online, both of which faded into irrelevance later in the decade with the rise of the Internet and cable ISPs, respectively, as well as the Sega Dreamcast, which had just been discontinued a week before the film's premiere (the movie was filmed early enough that the original packaging for the DC◊ is visible as opposed to the later variant◊). It also predicted that bubblegum teen pop would be swept aside by Pop Punk in the early 2000s. While the titular band's outfits and videos are reminiscent of Destiny's Child and early Britney Spears, the actual music sounds more like Avril Lavigne or Good Charlotte. This only further dates it to the early 2000s, the era in which that wave of pop-punk was at its height.
  • On a much sadder note one scene firmly ties the film to the first half of 2001. There is a shot of the Pussycat's jet flying over Manhattan, with an extremely prominent placement of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. The film opened mere months before the September 11th Attacks.
• Vindicated by History: Critics at the time generally missed the Stealth Parody inherent in its Product Placement, and consequently saw the film's anti-corporate message as hypocritical. Its satirical aims are more widely recognized today, as is its soundtrack.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: On the surface, the film is about a Girl Group and has a very lighthearted tone, and as a result seems to be a cutesy film for kids. However, the actual intent of the film was to be a satire on capitalism, something that a fully-educated adult audience would have a much easier time grasping. Unfortunately, reviewers judged it as a kids’ film, and as a result missed the deeper meaning that it was going for.

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