At school she links up with best friend Penny Pingleton (Amanda Bynes), whose name is undoubtedly a tribute to Penny Singleton, who played Dagwood's Blondie. They live for the moment when the minute hand crawls with agonizing slowness to the end of the school day, and they can race home and dance along with "The Corny Collins Show," the local teenage TV danceathon. In those days, every local market had a show like that. Eventually Dick Clark plowed them under with "American Bandstand." I miss their freshness and naivete.
Corny (James Marsden) is well named, as he presides over a posse of Popular Kids known as his Council. Tracy longs to be on the Council. The star of the show and head of the Council is Amber Von Tussle (Brittany Snow), whose mother Wilma (Michelle Pfeiffer) manages the station and enforces an all-white policy for the show, except for the monthly Negro Day organized by Maybelle (Queen Latifah), owner of a record shop.
All of this is recycled from the original 1988 John Waters film, which made Ricki Lake a star, and from the Broadway musical made from the Waters movie, but it's still fresh the third time around. It's a little more innocent than Waters would have made it, but he does his part by turning up in a cameo role as a flasher (look quick and you see Ricki Lake, too, and Pia Zadora). The plot involves Tracy's instinctive decency as she campaigns to integrate the program, endangering her campaign to get on the Council.
Tradition requires Edna, Tracy's mother, to be played by a man in drag: Divine in the film, Harvey Fierstein in the musical, and this time, John Travolta, who may be wearing a fat suit but still moves like the star of "Saturday Night Fever." Wilbur, Edna's father, is played by Christopher Walken, who has a hairpiece surely borrowed from his store, which is named "Hardy Har Har," and sells jokes and novelties. Oh, how I miss the Whoopie Cushion.
The plot wheels right along while repairing one outpost of Baltimore racism, and what's remarkable is that some fairly serious issues get discussed in song and dance. Tracy is sent to detention one day and learns a whole new style of dancing from the black students there, and takes it to TV, reminding me of the days when TV preachers thought Elvis was the spawn of Satan. Now they look like him. Call in today for your "free" healing water.
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