By John Corrado

Today is October 3rd, which fans of the movie Mean Girls know to be the day when new student Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) was asked by her popular classmate and secret crush Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett) what day it was.

While last year’s Mean Girls Day was extra special because it actually fell on a Wednesday, like in the movie, this year the day coincides with the 15th anniversary of the 2004 high school classic. Earlier this year, Paramount released a new Blu-ray edition of the film to celebrate this milestone.

To offer a brief recap of the plot, the film opens with Cady being sent to high school for the first time after having been raised in Africa and homeschooled all her life. It’s here that she falls in with “The Plastics,” a clique led by mean girl Regina George (Rachel McAdams).

Cady initially gets close to Regina and the Plastics so that she can mock them with her outsider friends Janice (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese) – a flamboyant teen boy whom Janice has dubbed “too gay to function,” something that only she can get away with saying. But Cady quickly rises through the ranks of the clique in her attempts to take down Regina, becoming the very thing that she used to hate in the process.

The cast is all at the top of their game here, and that is a big part of why Mean Girls works so well and has endured over the years. Lohan carries the film with a finely tuned comic performance that is easily her most iconic role besides The Parent Trap, and she is supported by a great ensemble cast that also features memorable appearances from a pre-fame Amanda Seyfried as one of the other Plastics, and Amy Poehler as Regina’s tacky mother.

With a sharply written and highly quotable screenplay by Tina Fey, who also appears in the film as the wise and understanding teacher Ms. Norbury, Mean Girls has firmly established its place in the pop culture lexicon over the past decade and a half. The film still holds up quite well as a biting and very clever satire of the social hierarchies that exist within high school, and in some ways has only revealed itself to be more accurate and relevant in the years since its release, with a strong message about non-conformity and standing up to bullies.

For all of these reasons, Mean Girls is a true teen classic of the modern era that, in its own way, has proven to be just as generation-defining as previous teen classics like Sixteen Candles and Clueless were to their respective audiences in the 1980s and ‘90s. This is a touchstone film for my generation of young adults, and one that, at fifteen years old, remains just as fresh and entertaining as it ever was.

The Blu-ray also includes a commentary track featuring Tina Fey joined by director Mark Waters and producer Lorne Michaels, the three featurettes Only the Strong Survive, The Politics of Girl World and Plastic Fashion, as well as a blooper reel and a selection of deleted scenes with optional commentary by Fey and Waters. The disc comes in a bright pink plastic case, which is a nice touch for collectors.

Mean Girls: 15th Anniversary Edition is a Paramount Home Media Distribution release. It’s 96 minutes and rated PG.

Street Date: June 11th, 2019