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11 Things You Totally Forgot About The Spice World Movie

11 Things You Totally Forgot About The Spice World Movie
Carly Jacobs

I’ve been intensely sick this week – struck down with some kind of horrible debilitating illness that left me couch bound for almost a week. After a few days of feeding my Bene-addition (severe addiction to Benedict Cumberbatch) with Parade’s End and Star Trek Into Darkness, I thought I’d take a break with something a little lighter. The answer, my friends, was Spice World. It’s such a brilliant, mindless and completely idiotic work of art it begged for a blog post all of it’s very own so on that note, I give you 11 things you totally forgot about the Spice World movie.

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1. Victoria Beckham can’t sing or dance

I love Posh, I do but she’s a pretty terrible performer. There’s a reason why she rarely sings solo and why they pan the camera past her really quickly and settle on Mel B who can shake her money-maker like nobody’s business. She just kind of twitches in the background like a sexy praying mantis. It’s possibly the best thing about the movie.

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 2. The ‘inside’ of the bus would not actually fit inside the bus

I don’t know whether or not that was supposed to be a joke or if they actually didn’t care but it’s mathematically impossible for the inside of the bus scenes to actually be the inside of the bus they showed.

 3. It doesn’t matter though because the inside of the bus was fucking awesome

Remember how each girl had her own area? Baby Spice had the swing with all the stuffed toys and Scary had the animal print bean bag and Sporty had her own gym? And Posh had the mirror where she could choose ‘The little Gucci dress, the little Gucci dress OR the little Gucci Dress?’. OMFG I love this movie.

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4. All the amazing cameos

Alan Cumming, Elton John, Robbie Williams, Stephen Fry, Bob Geldoff, Jennifer Saunders and Meatloaf to name a few. I’m pretty sure I recognised none of them the first time I saw it which made it even more delightful the second time around.

5. This line from Posh Spice that makes absolutely no sense  (not helped by the fact that she exaggerates every second or third word for no apparent reason)

‘And THEN there’s the little GINGER one that’s FULL of USELESS infor-MATION about MANTA rays!’ 

I’ve been using this has a non-sensical haughty reply every time Mr Smaggle asks me to do something I don’t want to do.

Mr Smaggle – ‘Can you put a new garbage bag in the bin?’

Me – ‘And THEN there’s the little GINGER one that’s FULL of USELESS infor-MATION about MANTA rays!’ 

Mr Smaggle – ‘Why do you keep saying that? You’re not making sense.’

Win.

6. That bit when Scary Spice calls their manager a ‘div’

I looked it up and apparently it’s short for ‘unemployment dividend’ so it refers to people on welfare. Kind of like the English version of the Aussie ‘pov’ shortened from ‘poverty’. Ah the 90s. Back when it was acceptable to shorten welfare terminology to slang that means ‘a bit shit’.

7. Platform sneakers

I for one was delighted when these made a resurgence in the last few years but I have to admit I was a bit devastated that I couldn’t get any that were as badass as the originals.

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8. That weird bit with the aliens

I was about 14 years old when the Spice World movie was released and I can’t remember thinking that the alien bit was at all out-of-place but re-watching it again as a grown up, it literally comes out of no where. There’s no explanation for it. The girls all just pile off the bus for a mass public side-of-the-road-wee and these aliens show up. It’s ridiculous and supremely excellent. Especially when Geri kisses one.

9. The haunted mansion

Again with the weird story lines. I’m not sure if I missed some in-joke about the shaky-ness of the plot (there is a plot-within-a-plot though where there’s a dude pitching bogus ideas for a Spice Movie but the link is pretty weak) but they all of a sudden end up at a weird haunted mansion place. I feel like the writers all got drunk, wrote down their ideas on a bunch of cocktail napkins, threw them up in the air and shot the film in the order that they fell without making any cuts or changes. It is a perfect example of cinematic fuckery and I love every second of it.

10. Posh Spice wearing that super classy camo dress in the boot camp scene

When I was 14, I don’t think I’d ever seen anything that glamorous in my entire life. If you’ve invited me to a wedding this year I’ve got my outfit SORTED. Boom.

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11. The flashback to Wannabe in the cafe

That lovely scene where the girls are all sitting around and scraping together their pennies for a cup of coffee at the local cafe and performing the song ‘they just wrote’ which was Wannabe. Ah memories. That scene would have been a whole lot more meaningful if we didn’t all know that they were the commercially formed and highly profitable brain child of Herbert band management in the UK who assigned them each their Spice personas which actually had very little to do with their true personalities. Cute story though.

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Were you a Spice Girls fan? And can you still remember every single move to ‘Stop’ even though it was released almost 17 years ago?

36 Comments

  1. Christine 10 years ago

    Spice girls never really hit our house, which is unusual because at the peak of their powers we had a tween and a teen girl. Songs etched in my brain from that era “teenage dirtbag” and “skater boy”. Apologies if those are not the correct song titles. Hope you’re well and truly on the mend, Carly. Xx

    • Author
      Carly Jacobs 10 years ago

      Oh yes! Teenage Dirtbag! I loved that song. Quite hilariously I think you’ll find it’s ‘sk8r boi’ or something weird like that. Feeling a little bit better… Just all kind of fuzzy and woozy from my antibiotics. 🙂

  2. Amanda @ Gourmanda 10 years ago

    DO I KNOW THE MOVES TO STOP?! What kind of ridiculous question is that? Spice the album is still on high rotation at my place…

    • Author
      Carly Jacobs 10 years ago

      I’m not going to lie, sometimes my bestie and I pop it on after we’ve had a few cocktails – it’s so funny how your muscle memory just takes over when it comes on!

    • Chris 8 years ago

      Stop was on the Spiceworld album, not on Spice.

  3. Kristie B. 10 years ago

    I was in third grade when I discovered them and had my walls papered with posters and cut-outs from Teen Beat. I wanted nothing more than to BE Baby Spice and frequently went as her to Halloween parties until about high school. I loved this movie then and I love this movie now. My getting-ready jam is usually Spice Up Your Life. Still got those dance moves down. Haha.

    Also, I always feel so bad for their pregnant friend in the movie! However, the labor scene on the bus is hilarious.

    Ginger: “The first thing to do is, uhhhh, put your legs together.”
    Scary: “Well that’s a bit late. She should have done that months ago.”

    Classic.

    • Author
      Carly Jacobs 10 years ago

      I actually thought that story line was quite adult consider that their target market was tweens. Single pregnant friend and the baby daddy has taken off… no beating around the bush with that kicker!

  4. Michelle... 10 years ago

    I was totally a Spice Girls fan. I was in my first year at uni when they really hit it big and I loved them in a completely non-ironic way (which was kinda hilarious cos I was totally into grunge (music and clothing) otherwise)

    GIRL POWER!

    • Author
      Carly Jacobs 10 years ago

      I actually can’t remember anyone really hating them… I mean I’m sure there were people who did hate them but most people just kind of embraced them. Their girlpower message was pretty rad back then. GO GIRLS!

  5. You make me want to watch Spice world!

    • Author
      Carly Jacobs 10 years ago

      You totally have to watch it. It’s amazing and crap.

  6. Tine 10 years ago

    You make me wanna sing the entire rap part of Wannabe to you which I know every word to, thank you very much!

    The show was such a guilty pleasure of mine. My friends at that time thought it was “so lame” so I never admitted to them I absolutely love the movie. Now I wanna tell them that it was a bloody awesome movie, I can sing Wannabe from start to end and that they can suck on that. 😛

    • Author
      Carly Jacobs 10 years ago

      The Spice Girls were strangely ironically cool when I was in school. There was a chick in my year who used to draw these really cute pictures of them and everyone had them drawn inside their pencil tins. It was a whole thing,

  7. Tamsin Howse 10 years ago

    Dude, that posh spice line totally makes sense in context! Mel B is likening people to fish as “The spotty one that’s wacky, the fluffy one that’s cute…” And ginger interrupts with useless information about manta-rays!

    • Author
      Carly Jacobs 10 years ago

      Oh I know she’d just interupted about manta rays but I thought Posh’s line was just weird and unessessary which is why I like it so much. 🙂

  8. hailz 10 years ago

    Did karaoke on Saturday night, hell yeah there was ‘Stop’ complete with dance moves!

    • Author
      Carly Jacobs 10 years ago

      Freaking awesome. It’s amazing how all the moves are just permanently imprinted on the minds of any girl born in the 80s.

  9. Tahlia Meredith 10 years ago

    I’m pretty sure I need to see this movie again very soon!

  10. Bec 10 years ago

    I totally remembered ALL those things except the ‘div’ thing, which I never noticed. Omg was I Spice obsessed or what?! My Mum bought me a camo dress from Kmart when I was a kid and I lost my shit.
    And I did notice that Posh never sung or danced because I was Posh in my circle of friends and I always kept an eye out for her and was disappointed!
    Also, I was very confused by the bus thing until my friend told me it wasn’t really the inside of the bus. Boy was my face red.

  11. DameChandra Crowther 10 years ago

    Lol ha here is the 11th thing you forgot about the movie. Cos when you mentioned cameos you didn’t say Gary Glitter. Have his scenes been cut from the modern releases?

    • Chris 8 years ago

      I thought Gary Glitter’s scenes were cut before release due to the whole thing about him being a child molester. I’ve never seen them.

      I can’t remember Robbie Williams or Stephen Fry but then it’s been years and years since I’ve seen it.

  12. Nadine 10 years ago

    Just watched it, and I actually remembered all the things you mention, apart from Robbie Williams – WHERE is he in it?!? I love him way more than the Spice Girls . . I first saw it as an adult though, not a kiddie (I’m the same age as Geri Halliwell, yo). What I noticed this time round is that Melanie Chisholm is WAY better than all the others at everything – didn’t notice in the 90s because I loved them ALL.

  13. Natalie 10 years ago

    Yep! I still remember all the dance moves to Stop, and probably 90% of the lyrics from the first two albums! When I was younger, I got the 2 stripes in the front of my hair like Geri & my best friend and I would always quote the movie. I saw THESE shoes the other day, and was quite thankful they weren’t around when I was younger cause I would have someone made my parents buy them for me!!

  14. Ashly Lorenzana 8 years ago

    To this day, SpiceWorld has the unique distinction of being the ONLY VHS tape I ever played so many times that it began to warp several scenes. True story.

  15. Julie N 8 years ago

    You missed mentioning the scene with the oiled male dancers and ‘The Compromise’!

  16. Sarah 8 years ago

    Brilliance – it has actually aged and become better I swear

  17. Sarah 8 years ago

    “Who even cares if they find a cure for Deja vu?”
    “Not me.”
    “Or even if they found the cure for Deja vu?”
    “Not me.”
    Gold.

  18. Sarah 8 years ago

    Also I’m so sorry but she called the keyboard guy a div for his finger fumble during rehearsal not her manager

  19. Sarah 8 years ago

    And lastly, (hopefully for us all) the bus is a precursor to the world of Harry Potter. That’s what i choose to believe because it makes me happy.

  20. Sarah 8 years ago

    Ok why is roger Moore feeding a pig, I can understand the aliens on some level but, roger Moore feeding the pig at the end is the real win in this movie

  21. Linmomo 7 years ago

    Div just means your an idiot it has nothing to do with unemployment dividends which we call a dole cheque or giro. Just so you know.

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