What’s Aged the Worst?
Parts of the soundtrack, including the One Week remix and an unironic Smash Mouth cue; the school's lax discipline, from the flashing to the sausage prank, the arrow and the golf balls; Kat's crop tops and platform flip-flops
In the discussion (5)
Approx. transcript time · 00:15:52Read transcript
- Some of the soundtrack has aged worst: the film opens with a remix of Barenaked Ladies' One Week, disputed as a remix, positioned as the popular girls' music that Kat drowns out with riot grrrl; a very unironic Smash Mouth cue feels corny, and Smash Mouth, who also covered Can't Get Enough of You Baby for Can't Hardly Wait, were a nineties soundtrack staple who no longer are.
- Some soundtrack bands now read as jokes, such as Daz by Brick and Saturday Night by Tagana (as transcribed), though George Clinton and the Cardigans are also on it; one host realized they spent a lot of time with the CD as a teenager and saw Barenaked Ladies and the Cardigans at Atlanta's Jingle Ball.
- Flashing a teacher to get someone out of detention would be received differently now, and the teacher would fear for his job; the school's discipline is lax overall, with Miss Perky merely telling Patrick Verona not to do it after his sausage prank on a lunch lady, Bianca shooting a teacher in the rear with an arrow, and a character firing golf balls into a crowd with no consequences.
- The persistent trope of nerds getting away with things because they are smart, as in Stranger Things, appears here when Joseph Gordon-Levitt and David Krumholtz descend into a nerd lab like a parallel society.
- Bianca's outfits are good but Julia Stiles' are poor: crop tops that are not coming back and platform flip-flops from Delia's that date it to a specific moment, though platforms are back on the market and slides were everywhere; the sisters have similar styles executed differently.