Now that I look back, while I was growing up in the late ’90s and early 2000s, I was desperately looking to media for any semblance of female representation to reflect my inner self. Even though that’s an era from just 20-ish years ago, it already feels like things were so much different back then. A lot of leading women were fantasies that showed me I was supposed to be happy, pretty, perfect, and ambitious, with life centered around the men in my world. When I was watching Freakier Friday, I realized that while that was all true, its predecessor, Freaky Friday was a rare exception.
The 2003 Disney movie was one of the first exposures I had to women in punk rock bands (before becoming a big fan of the genre), and I want to talk about why seeing the sequel actually made that element of it even better.
Freaky Friday Was One Of The First Times I Saw A Female Rock Band
Obviously, women and punk rock have been together since the 1970s, but because I was a hardcore Disney kid when Freaky Friday first came out, I realize now that influences like it really opened my eyes to a different side of womanhood, which I would fall more in love with later on. One where women could be angry or messy and that was OK – celebrated, even.
It seems a little silly now given it’s a fun Disney comedy about body swapping, , but Freaky Friday is one of those movies from my childhood that stuck with me. I see now (yes, I recently rewatched it) that it’s because of how genuine and relatable its relationships are, especially between Lindsay Lohan’s Anna and her mom, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Tess. In the first movie, the most important thing to Anna at the time is her garage band, Pink Slip, which predominantly consists of female musicians, with Anna being the star guitar player.
Sure, Pink Slip is most definitely a Disney version of a garage band, but “Take Me Away” is kind of the perfect introduction to why I love punk music. The song, which I recently found out was written by the Aussie punk rock band, Lash, has lyrics like “I’m too thin, too fat, you ask why,” which questions why a norm exists and speaks to the feminine rage of never winning when it comes to one’s appearance. Freaky Friday was one gateway drug for me in the musical genre!
When Freaky Friday Came Out The Punk Scene Was Male-Dominated
There’ve been a lot of fictional rock bands in movies, but there’s something special about Pink Slip, because in 2003, it was pretty radical to see a female-fronted band in a mainstream movie. It was super cool back then, but when it comes to the punk/rock scene at the time (as the soundtrack reflects) male-dominated acts like Simple Plan, American Hi-Fi and Bowling For Soup were a lot more well-known and getting those big hits more than bands like Pink Slip.
Paramore would ultimately become the punk rock group of my upbringing with a female voice when their first album came out two years later, and I first heard the angst of their hit song “Misery Business” on a bus ride to school and officially started to shed my Disney icons and branch out my music taste.
Pink Slip’s Portrayal In The Sequel Shows How Far The Scene Has Come
Cut to Freakier Friday, which is out twenty-two years after the original, and is already having a good run at the box office along with being well reviewed by critics (such as in our Freakier Friday review). While some versions of the sequel might have glossed over the Pink Slip plotline and made it simply a hobby of her teenage years, the movie makes it canon that Anna and her band found success after we last caught up with them, and Anna has since transitioned into managing and empowering artists including the fictional female pop star named Ella (played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), who looked up to Pink Slip when she was growing up.
In recent years, I’ve watched the new generation of punk-influenced bands take inspiration from the women who paved the way in the early 2000s. For example, when I saw the band Meet Me @ The Altar cover “Take Me Away” in front of a crowd, and audiences freak over the Freaky Friday tune being sung. I’ve seen acts like Willow, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish and so forth cite Paramore as a band that meant the world to them, and influenced their own once-garage bands.
Pink Slip ultimately gets invited to Ella’s show at the Wiltern to play “Take Me Away”, which looks to have become a hit of the early 2000s. As a lifelong punk fan at this point, who has watched the scene grow immensely to the point where I could name beloved band after band of mine who are popular right now and feature a female front woman and/or multiple female musicians, Freakier Friday really reflects how the times have changed for the better in the music industry for women.
Oh, and finally, the soundtrack is packed full of female acts, from The Beaches, Chappell Roan, The Linda Lindas, Tegan and Sara and the Asteroids Galaxy Tour being featured in the movie. While I genuinely think both are great movies (and the first movie of a franchise will always get a leg up for me), Freakier Friday was better for how it not only made a callback to Pink Slip, but how it showed how women in music have really leveled up in the past two decades.
Nowadays, there are a ton of 2025 movies with complicated roles for women, including for young women, such as the phenomenon that is KPop Demon Hunters, for example. There’s something, though, about checking in with one that was an early favorite of mine in life, and seeing its own storyline progress to reflect the growth of something I love over the years, that really made the movie all the more amazing.
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