So, I realized the other day that I make a lot of references to the Babysitters Club on this blog, but I’ve never actually said anything substantial about it. And, I mean, it’s so awesome that I’m kind of surprised at myself.
See, the Babysitters Club isn’t just a series of hundreds of incredibly similar books about a group of 13-year-old babysitters who run their own business (with a crappy model – like, I don’t think they ever made any money). It’s also a series of awful Disney Channel show episodes which you can now buy on tape if you find a library that’s trying to purge itself of topically unimportant vhs tapes. And, it’s a feature-length film from 1995, starring Rachael Leigh Cook, Schuyler Fisk (you know, what’s her name’s daughter), AND Alex Mack.
Basically, the girls are 13, so they’re screechy and hysterical and loud and overly dramatic and excited about EVERYTHING and I SO wanted to be their friend when I was little.
Anyway, the books are absolutely great. Each one is written from a different girl’s perspective, in first person, and they follow the same format every time: there’s an establishing chapter; then a chapter where the girl painstakingly details the club, its inception, and each member with nauseating accuracy (which was a highly skippable chapter after you read, like, the first book, except for the fact that Ann M. Martin gave amazing clothing descriptions … I’ll get to that in a second); then the story is told interspersed with boring chapters where they talk about babysitting jobs they went on. Like, I’m reading a story about Mary Anne finally getting a boyfriend. Do I really care about the fact that a 3-year-old peed his pants and Claudia stepped on the dog, and it was such a disaster until somehow she completely saved the day by making a mural on the wall of the living room that the parents didn’t even care about?
I’m getting ahead of myself.
The babysitting wasn’t that interesting, and while it fascinated and intrigued me that these girls had basically the enitre run of the household, including the psychological development of their charges (like the time they learned all about this fat boy with wispy hair hiding food in his room, therapy-ed him, healed him, got his sister to stop making fun of him, and then didn’t even tell the parents what had went down) , I was also kind of annoyed that they were so “we’re babysitters and you’re not.” So, what I was obviously more interested in were the soap-opera-like stories that were going on between the girls. You know… Mary Anne gets a makeover and everyone hates her! Stacey gets a boyfriend and stops hanging out with the babysitters! Claudia breaks her arm and becomes terrified of children!
I thought that the Disney channel bringing the show to life was the most awesome thing ever. The girls they got to play the characters were sort of so unlike the books that it made it like an entirely different story. And the soap opera-y elements were even MORE soap opera-y (what can I say? I was watching All My Children before I was even born). Dawn and Mary Anne are caught in a love triangle! Stacey travels to New York to tell her Dad to BACK UP OFF trying to get her to move in with him! Claudia holds a seance in her attic!
Awesome.
By far, though, the best episode is Dawn Saves the Trees. The girls are supposed to be from Connecticut, and Dawn is supposed to have grown up in California, but the actress playing her has this insane midwest accent, so every time she gets hysterical (which is all the time), it sounds really funny. And she’s even more hysterical in this episode than in the one where she likes a boy who thinks he’s asking out Mary Anne on the phone and she gets totally embarrassed showing up for their date and he’s all, “You look nice. Where you headed?” Wait. I should tell you about the girls first.
That’s Dawn. She’s an environmentalist – like, an insane one that would probably grow up to blow up buildings in protest or something. And she only eats health food and she has looooooooooong, looooooooong, super light bloooooooooonde hair, and her style is “California Casual”. Whatever that means. She’s always indignant and crosses her arms a lot.
Then there’s Kristy. She’s the leader of the club, ’cause it was her idea. She’s also a bitch. And a lesbian. She coaches a softball team and is “dating” the male coach of another softball team (like, how many little league softball teams coached by 13-year-olds does one town need?). She doesn’t care about clothes! Or boys! And she doesn’t wear a bra yet! She rolls her eyes a lot, and she’s bossy and mean and doesn’t really care about other people’s feelings.
Mary Anne is Kristy’s best friend, and she’s the sappiest because her mother died when she was little, and her father, in this creepy move, made her wear her hair in braids forever (because that will keep her from liking … boys? I don’t know), but then he eased up, and now she’s getting more interested in clothes and Kristy feels left out! She cries a lot, and she’s soft-spoken to the point of frustration and she wears a lot of frumpy jumper dresses. She’s also the only one with a boyfriend, which is kind of strange.
