Charlies Angels: The Collapsening

A soft-landing meteor. An atheist Easter. A smart Progressive. A feminist Charlies Angels.

Some things are just a contradiction in terms.

Charlies Angels started life as a vehicle for Kate Jackson, who had acquired something of a following as the Nurse on The Rookies.

Then she cut her hair, became a women’s Libber and started wearing pantsuits.

Never mind, it turned out that Steve Austin’s wife had tons of hair to spare.

Charlie’s Angels started life as a project that let Hollywood Liberals pretend they were making a show about female empowerment while at the same time treating the actresses in it like walking meat puppets.

And I’m not going to pretend that I minded.

The show itself is boring and unwatchable by today’s standards. In truth, it was pretty dull when it first aired as well but let’s face it, the core audience was really just in it for the pretty girls. This Women’s Lib show had an audience that was 99% male and they were only tuning in each week in the hope that tonight’s episode would take place on the beach.

While all of the girls in it became famous none of them had much in the way of careers after Charlie’s Angels was axed. Possible exception being Kate Jackson in Scarecrow and Mrs. King.

However, despite all of its obvious weaknesses, Charlie’s Angels easily pass the test when it comes to the Pop-culture Blurring Effect.

  My regular readers can skip over this next bit.  It’s my Pop-culture Blurring Effect spiel.

Did you know that 94% of all new movies last year were franchise releases of some kind or another? I didn’t make that statistic up. Almost everything now is a sequel, a reboot or came from another pre-existing media source (Comics, YA lit and so on)

Because of Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Crackle, Shudder, Disney Plus, and about a billion cable channels, there has now been a blurring effect in pop culture entertainment. When Ghostbusters came out you could hype the hell out a new property and buy back your percentage through heavy marketing. One well placed TV ad could reach tens of millions. You could spend your way to cultural impact. That sure as hell ain’t happening anymore. It just isn’t possible to reach that big of an audience.

Movies are a business and in a business, you need to minimize risk. The surest way to do that is to pick a property that is immune to the Blurring Effect. You pick something that already has a cultural impact.

Anything made before 1995 that was popular fits the bill.

Spiel concluded. 

And Charlies Angels was clearly a pre-Blurring Effect property. So in 2000, a reboot was launched in the theaters. And it was a hit. The reasons for that had nothing to do with the script and everything to do with the casting. They were the flirtiest, sexist most fun actresses that were in their mid-twenties that year.

The girls looked over the script, figured out instantly that they wouldn’t be taking home any Oscars for this flick and decided to just have fun with it. The on-set chemistry translated to the screen.

They couldn’t recapture the vibe for the second film and it flopped big time. Franchise buried again.

There was a reboot series in 2011 that I didn’t even know existed until just now, again the blurring effect.

By 2019, the core audience for this property was non-existent. It was primarily Gen-Xers, to begin with, and we’ve hit the point in our lives where we’ve pretty much stopped going to movies.

Charlie’s Angels had always been about light dumb fun that appealed to the male gaze. The drive to change that into something that would smash the “Patriarchy” was as instinctive in feminists as it is in a beaver build a dam.

I’ll turn this next part over to Drinker since he actually saw the fucking thing.

I’d say, save your money, but I’m pretty sure you were planning to do that already.