They may be decades and cultures apart, but Mad Men and Mean Girls go hand in hand for Taylor Pearce.
Calling herself a ‘super fan’ of both the AMC television drama and the Tina Fey authored cult classic, Pearce, who graduated from Western’s Media, Information and Technoculture (MIT) program last year, recently read an article about Mad Men, noting a passing reference to the movie. It was 2 a.m. and she saw an unlikely connection.
“I Googled ‘Mad Men and Mean Girls’ because I was sure it had been mashed up already. I found nothing,” Pearce said, noting she immediately went onto Tumblr, a microblogging platform, and made Mean Mad Men, meanmadmen.tumblr.com/, dedicated to memes combining Mad Men screenshots with memorable lines from Mean Girls.
In one meme, formerly fabulous Betty Draper, having gained weight in the last season of Mad Men, echoes the Plastics’ Regina George in Mean Girls, asking, “Is butter a carb?”
“I woke up the next morning, still thought they were funny and kept making them,” the 22-year-old said.
That was roughly three weeks ago. Within a week, the Huffington Post Tumblr reblogged one of her memes and in no time, Buzz Feed, a site that promotes viral content on the web, picked up her blog. Mashable, a technology and social media blog, also promoted Mean Mad Men; her following base has grown exponentially and the blog has since gone viral.
“It went from just my friends knowing about it to the whole Internet. I did it just to make myself and my friends laugh. What’s really cool, the Internet allows a joke among friends to have no boundaries – it wouldn’t have gone further than my friends if it wasn’t for social media,” Pearce said.
“I was in MIT for four years and we talked a lot about the impact of social media, but this is a real-life example. It’s funny how much my MIT degree has kind of helped me in this case.”
And the connection she saw between Mad Men and Mean Girls?
“There’s a commonality between the movie and the TV show, where at their base, they have great writing,” Pearce explained.
“There are these incredibly memorable lines from Mean Girls that Tina Fey has written. And the characters that Matthew Weiner has created (in Mad Men) are so richly formed that you can lay words from a completely different era, or a topic we know well, and you can hear it in their voices. It speaks to the writing,” she added.
“They’re (all) fabulous characters, so over-the-top that I think one of the things that makes it funny is that they’re so opposite, yet the same at the same time.”
Pearce said it’s relatively easy coming up with a meme that reflects this connection, noting she either picks a memorable line from the movie and looks for a screenshot from the show to match, or she will see a picture or still from the show that makes her think of a line in the movie.
“The two fit so well together and I’ll keep making them if they keep making people laugh,” she said.