Josie and the Pussycats

Josie and the Pussycats is a satire about corporate manipulation and consumer brainwashing that people saw as corporate manipulation and consumer brainwashing. Thankfully, Joanna Robinson and I got it as we sat down to chat all things Josie

Before Kay Hanley dubbed Rachael Leigh Cook’s voice in 2001, there was an actual Josie and the Pussycats. A real group, assembled through a nationwide talent search, who recorded a real album.

When Hanna-Barbera launched the animated series in September 1970, they wanted Josie would have an actual band behind it. Three real women, chosen from nearly 500 finalists, would perform the songs heard in the cartoon. Songwriter and producer Danny Janssen, who wrote the Partridge Family theme, and Bobby Engemann of the Lettermen were tasked with finding them, writing their material, and cutting the records.

The three they landed on were Kathleen Dougherty, a musical theater major from USC; Patrice Holloway, an accomplished R&B singer who had co-written “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy,” later a hit for Blood, Sweat & Tears; and Cherie Moor, a South Dakota native born Cheryl Stoppelmoor, who had strong stage presence and a good voice. Cherie Moor would later, using her married name, become Cheryl Ladd!

Dougherty was credited as Josie, Holloway as Valerie, and Ladd as Melody — but the credit didn’t quite match reality. Dougherty preferred harmonies, so Holloway and Ladd shared lead duties on the tracks depending on the song. The group recorded 19 songs, released a self-titled album in 1970, and put out a handful of singles. None of the singles charted.

Writers-directors Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont coming off Can’t Hardly Wait didn’t want to do another “teen movie” but were more intrigued to make a Musical. Add to the fact they were products of the grunge era and wanted to comment on the way Pop was taking over.

But for that to work they needed it to seem real which is why there is that relentless logo saturation, more than 70 brands appear and non of them approved or paid for that dubious honor. However that joke required audiences to read hyper commercialized aesthetic as parody, but the studio opted to push it as a teen comedy. Kaplan and Elfont said some test audiences were “offended”, believing the movie was trying to sell to them. We hit on a similar issue in our Walter Mitty episode. The lesson learned is that satire is only as good as your audience is smart. Some of the greats missed the message as well. Check out some selected quotes from this HALF STAR review from Roger Ebert

Josie and the Pussycats are not dumber than the Spice Girls, but they’re as dumb as the Spice Girls, which is dumb enough….One curiosity about the movie is its stiff and sometimes awkward dialogue; the words don’t seem to flow, but sound as if the actors are standing there and reciting them. The movie’s market on verbal wit is cornered by Cumming, in the Richard E. Grant role, who has one (1) funny moment in which he demonstrates how very well trained the boy band is. The rest of the time, he has the thankless task of acting as if he is funny in a plot that is not funny.…..The music is pretty bad. That’s surprising, since Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds is one of the producers, and knows his way around music. Maybe it’s supposed to sound like brainless pre-teen fodder, but it’s not good enough at being bad to be funny, and stops merely at the bad stage….Parker Posey has one of those supporting roles from hell, where she has to make her entrance as a cliche and then never even gets to play with the conventions of her role.

Rachael Leigh Cook was not asked to audition. She had previously read for the lead in Can’t Hardly Wait (Kaplan and Elfont’s earlier film) and hadn’t gotten that part, but when they were developing Josie, they remembered her. Cook was shocked because she couldn’t sing and didn’t play guitar. Kaplan and Elfont said they were casting a “screen presence and grounded warmth, not musical credibility.”

Tara Reid had a three-picture deal with Universal, and Josie and the Pussycats was the third film on the contract, following American Pie and its sequel. She was the ringer and the 1st one cast.

“For the Valerie role, they read Aaliyah, Left Eye, and Beyoncé. Kaplan called it ‘an embarrassment of riches.’ Elfont noted that casting Left Eye would have meant building in a rap break. They went with Rosario Dawson.”

Valerie was the hardest role to cast. Deborah Kaplan has confirmed that Aaliyah, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and Beyoncé all came in for the role. Kaplan described it as “an embarrassment of riches” Harry Elfont noted that Left Eye brought a particular intensity and Beyonce while magnetic but a little “too shy”.

The villain Fiona almost went to Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth but they realized Gordon was too intrinsically cool and potentially too meta. Parker Posey obviously got the role, and it’s impossible to see it differently. Posey’s predatory camp is amazing and equally matched by Alan Cumming who jumped at the chance to work with her. Together, they may be the best comedy villain duo ever.

Enjoy some of their deleted scenes…

On April 11, 2001, Josie and the Pussycats had its US theatrical premiere at the Cinerama Dome on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and it was a really an amazing collection of Young Hollywood

The film cost about $39 million and grossed just under $15 million worldwide. By any conventional measure, a disaster. Paulo Costanzo recalled understanding during production that the movie might be a “humongous flop.” Kay Hanley, who contributed enormously to the soundtrack, later said she thought the film had the potential to be great but wasn’t executed as well as it could have been. Even the sympathetic collaborators felt the final balance was precarious.

And yet the soundtrack sold roughly 500,000 copies despite the theatrical underperformance. Live performances devoted to the album kept the movie circulating through fandom. Critics at The A.V. Club and the Los Angeles Times helped keep the film alive through reintroducing to different audiences.

Then it after 20 years it became an overnight success.

In September 2017, sixteen years after the film tanked at the box office, Mondo Records organized what amounted to the first real Josie and the Pussycats concert: a vinyl release party at the Ace Hotel in Los Angeles where Kay Hanley performed songs from the soundtrack live for the first time, backed by the original sessions players, including Adam Schlesinger. Cook, Dawson, Reid, the directors, and much of the cast attended. The crowd chanted “Josie” before Hanley took the stage.

Mondo label manager Mo Shafeek, who drove the whole event, described the soundtrack as “the best debut album by a band that doesn’t actually exist.”

The reunion energy has never fully dissipated. In March 2024, Cook and Reid appeared together at Awesome Con in Washington, D.C., for a panel moderated by People magazine, marking over 23 years since the film's release.

“All rock bands get back together again, right? That happens. I think we should remake it with this cast. That would be super cool.” - Tara Reid

“You watch it now, and it so resonates with the moment that we’re in, but at the time, I think it was hard for people to totally appreciate the satire that it was.”

Twenty-plus years later, it’s easier to see it as the latter. Josie and the Pussycats was ahead of the conversation, and the conversation has finally caught up.

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