A few days ago, Netflix released He’s All That, a gender-swapped remake of the 1999 classic, She’s All That. As a general rule, I’m not the biggest fan of remakes (I talk about that subject more in-depth here with my good friend Kira. Subscribe to In Too Deep!) But He’s All That made me realize that we’re missing an opportunity to remake a different early-aughts classic that would actually lend itself well to the form: Not Another Teen Movie.
Not Another Teen Movie came out in 2001 through Sony Pictures Releasing and it is pure, unfiltered parody. The film is a conglomerate of tropes, cliches, quotes, character archetypes, and plot points of classic teen movies, including but not limited to She's All That, Varsity Blues, 10 Things I Hate About You, Can't Hardly Wait, Pretty in Pink, American Pie, Never Been Kissed, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and The Breakfast Club among others.
The film plays with a wide variety of comedic forms — from slapstick to sight gags — but every joke is squarely aimed towards their satirical target. The setting is John Hughes High School, the protagonist Janey (Chyler Leigh) reads from a book called “How To Get The Popular Boy Without Compromising Your Unique Rebelliousness” (her male best friend reads from the book “How To Get The Uniquely Rebellious Girl Whose In Love With The Popular Boy”), and the football players wear letterman jackets that spell out J-O-C-K-S. Characters are overly explicit about themselves and their actions, like in the below exchange:
Ricky: I’m the best friend, and I have been in front of her face the whole time, and she just… hasn’t really realized it yet, but she will.
Jake: Well, I’m the reformed cool guy, who’s learned the error of his ways. She’s gonna forgive me for my mistakes, and realize that I really love her.
Ricky: …Dammit, that’s true.
Basically, it’s a lot of broad, in-your-face jokes that will land whether you know everything about romcoms or only know about them in passing. I have to note though that a lot if Not Another Teen Movie is unwatchable now. There is offensive content about people with disabilities, nudity (particularly female nudity) is often used as a punchline, and there are uncomfortable moments of racially offensive accents and slang, among other issues. I’m not suggesting that we reboot the film so that we can regress into that kind of punching down. What I am suggesting is that we take that structure — a pastiche of mockery that celebrates the tropes of a genre — and we recreate that for our contemporary flicks.
A lot of recent reboots have attempted to alter older works to make them fit into our current culture. We make Gossip Girl more diverse, we gender swap She’s All That, we make Cinderella a girlboss, but often it feels like that media still exists within the shadow of its original program. I don’t just mean we compare it to its original, I mean that these reboots have to exist within the structures of their former selves, otherwise they can’t claim their namesakes. A Gossip Girl remake has to be about spoiled rich kids in Manhattan because otherwise it’s not Gossip Girl. A She’s All That remake has to be about a bet, a makeover, and a reconciliation, because otherwise it’s not She’s All That. Remakes and reboots can only stray so far from their source material, the central conceit always remains.
Yet the core concept of Not Another Teen Movie isn’t a particular plot or character type — it’s contemporary media itself. Because the film is entirely made up of references and jokes, it doesn’t have a predetermined identity that a remake would have to copy. A current version of Not Another Teen Movie would only need to imitate the parody structure, everything else can come from our media. There is no shortage of kitschy romcoms that a remake could pull from, like To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before, The Kissing Booth, Set It Up, The Princess Switch, The Perfect Date and any other Noah Centineo-driven flick.
Right now, the majority of comedic content inspired by those films exists in the form of tweets, online pieces, and parody videos. This isn’t a bad system per se — people interpret art in different ways, therefore audience-created parodies can represent a variety of different critiques. But Not Another Teen Movie made fun of teen movies in their very own format. It was another level of self-mockery. The same type of studio that created 10 Things I Hate About You and She’s All That was creating a piece of art that made fun of those very films. Even as it mocks the genre, the film becomes part of the teen romcom canon. Essentially, something that we are able to watch now and appreciate as a definitive product of its time period.
Not Another Teen Movie was never trying to usurp any of the iconic movies it skewers. It was never going to make The Breakfast Club less iconic, or convince people not to watch 10 Things I Hate About You. Not Another Teen Movie has so many inside jokes and tiny references that it’s clear the creators have a deep love for the teen romcom genre. It’s a contradiction that often comes up in media consumption — we love something in a truthful and earnest way and still know that it’s silly and trite. Our enjoyment of a piece doesn’t have to hinge on its perfection. Critiquing a piece of art doesn’t mean that it has no value, it means it has so much value that we can’t help but dissect, analyze, and discuss it.
So bring it (the reboot, I mean).