20 things fans love about ‘Mean Girls’ 20 years later

Mean Girls managed to take a holiday song that was as old as time and breathe new life into it. Today, that routine is recreated every holiday season by everyone from fans to drag performers because it’s that iconic and notable.

Not a calendar year since Mean Girls dropped has October 3rd come around without some sort of acknowledgment on social media.

Amanda Seyfried had some television before 2004, but Mean Girls was her debut film role, and she stole the show as the wide-eyed Karen — a character that could’ve been one-note, but somehow the Academy Award nominee stole a lot of the scenes she was in. That includes during the Halloween scene when she had to explain her costume.

Teen movies not only entertain but give society a time capsule of fashion. Mean Girls delivered the upper echelon of mall fashion in the 2000s and definitely inspired some trends, but the one thing that never took off was the holes in the tank top. However, it is a very popular Halloween costume.

The giant girl fight walked so that the epic ending of 2023’s Bottoms could run.

Daniel Franzese’s Damian was a breakthrough character for a lot of reasons. One was that he was gay, but it wasn’t something that he was bullied for or that got taken advantage of plot-wise. He existed in the hellscape that was high school just like everyone else, only an outsider based on social status alongside Lizzy Caplan’s Janis Ian. Anyway, there are a lot of quotes Damian says throughout that fans still yell out today, but “She doesn’t even go here!” ranks among the top of them.

One of the rules to run with the coolest girls at North Shore High School was to wear pink on Wednesdays, and for some reason, that one rule became ingrained into pop culture. So, one of the smallest details of the movie managed to become one of the most memorable.

Lindsay Lohan’s giant pink polo was not it, but at the same time...it was everything.

Amy Poehler did what needed to be done with her few minutes of screentime, giving every mother since a favorite catchphrase.

When Lindsay Lohan’s Cady first meets her new friends and gets the lowdown on who Regina George is, every student has their own sort of story about her. So fetch.

One has to wonder whether Pop-Tarts said no to being mentioned in this movie because if they did, to quote Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, “Big mistake, huge.”

Lohan’s Cady is experiencing teen culture in America for the first time since moving there from Africa and learns the hard way that Halloween is about being hot and not scary. Luckily for viewers, that means showing up to a party in an epic, spooktacular bridal look.

Regina, girl, it was 2004. Google that.

Despite a majority of Mean Girls being about revenge and backstabbing, the girl power turnaround at the end, when Cady breaks her crown into pieces and shares it with other girls in the room, is one of the biggest reasons fans have kept this movie so close to their hearts for years.

Not every movie inspires a Broadway show and then gets a musical movie adaptation of said Broadway show. 

Janis and Damian’s purple suits stand out as one of the greatest fashion choices in teen movie history.

If not for this moment, perhaps Cady wouldn’t have gone on to be a better person in the end.

Regina George getting hit by that bus was a huge shocker at the time.

Music videos aren’t what they used to be, but there are still a handful of artists willing to go above and beyond with theirs, including Ariana Grande. She paid homage to some of her favorites like Legally Blonde, 13 Going on 30, as well as Mean Girls in her video for "Thank U, Next.”

Now that enough time has passed, can we make fetch happen?