Remaking Charlie's Angels

Abstract

From their initial appearance on US broadcast network television in the mid-1970s to their feature film incarnations in 2000 and 2003, the characters known as Charlie's Angels have been at the center of American popular culture's negotiations over feminism, femininity, and the relationship between the two. This article analyzes the “remaking” of Charlie's Angels over the past 30 years as a means of considering the “remaking” of discourses of feminism and femininity in a changing historical context. In addition to considering the original television series, this analysis also examines attempts to “clone” the series in late 1970s TV, parodies of and homages to the series in 1990s television and film, and the twenty-first-century feature films. I argue that analyzing the various re-imaginings and remakes of Charlie's Angels can be a means of revealing how post-feminism, as a series of cultural responses to feminism, has wound its way through American popular culture over the past 30 years, achieving an increasingly naturalized, and thereby more hegemonically entrenched, position over time.

Keywords:

• Charlie's Angels
• post-feminism
• Spice World
• Baywatch
• femininity
• feminism

Notes

1. For one description of the pervasiveness of contemporary post-feminist popular culture, see Levy (2005).

2. Taft (2004, pp. 69–70) sees even less feminism in the girl power discourse of the 1990s, although her conception of the phenomenon is generally quite similar to my own. She argues that such discourse articulated girl power to anti-feminism, post-feminism, individual power, and consumer power.

3. The late 1990s also saw the creation of a Spanish-language remake, titled Angeles (1999) and broadcast on the US broadcast network, Telemundo. The different cultural context in which this series appeared makes it too complex a case to fit easily into my discussion in this article. See Levine (2001) for a more detailed analysis.