They Thought I Was You Becca Roth & Lani Harms

We can't believe we're finally here. Our final Mary-Kate and Ashley movie review. And just like we suspected: it's a two part episode.

On May 7th, 2004 (exactly 20 years ago today), Mary-Kate and Ashley's final film together, New York Minute,  was released in theaters. The movie had an impressive cast including Eugene Levy, Andy Richter, Jared Padalecki, Andrea Martin, Darrell Hammond, and the most 2004 cast member of all: Jack Osbourne. The movie follows Jane Ryan (Ashley) and her twin sister Roxy (Mary-Kate) as they venture into New York City on separate missions, bickering the entire way. Roxy is a rocker, and Ashley is a Republican, so they couldn't be more different! Chaos ensues.

For today's episode, we start by remembering where we were 20 years ago when this movie came out and how we felt about it back then. We discuss what it meant for Mary-Kate and Ashley to have this kind of wide spread movie release and what we remembered about watching it for the first time. And since neither Becca nor Lani has seen this movie in the 20 years since, we talk about why we felt so nervous before pressing play.

Then, we dive in deep. We get through about half of the movie in this review before going on a tangent about where New York Minute fits in the Mary-Kate and Ashley Universe, so make sure to tune in next week for part two! We hope you enjoy this beginning to the end of an era, and HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO NEW YORK MINUTE!

You can watch the video version of this ep and get more bonus content by subscribing to our Patreon here.

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Becca: @beccaroth
Lani: @laniharms

Email us at: theythoughtiwasyou@gmail.com


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On Saturday, May 15th, 2004, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen had a decision to make: they could either attend their senior prom or host the season finale of Saturday Night Live. As you probably guessed, they chose SNL.

And as a consolation for missing their high school prom, Jimmy Fallon, Will Forte, Maya Rudolf, and Amy Poehler gave Mary-Kate and Ashley a miniature prom during their 5 minute monologue on the stage of Studio 8H. The rest of the night featured Mary-Kate and Ashley playing paparazzi, selling perfume, selling backpacks, spoofing The Swan, enduring Jimmy Fallon, and playing as angsty teens on home video.

So today, Becca and Lani give their review of the episode sketch by sketch* and discuss what the significance was of Mary-Kate and Ashley hosting Saturday Night Live. We are also painfully reminded of just how long ago 2004 was with how wildly racist, sexist, and homophobic so many of the jokes are. At least there was one sketch in this episode that we both agree was utter perfection (can you guess which one?)

We hope you enjoy this deep dive into this culturally significant moment in television and allow us to geek out over the construction of sketch scene (it's our expertise, after all). But most of all, we hope you join us in celebrating Mary-Kate and Ashley for successfully accomplishing the enormous feat of hosting this insanely difficult show on live television. 

You can watch the video version of this ep and get more bonus content by subscribing to our Patreon here.

If you don't have Peacock, watch (most of) the SNL episode here:
Mary-Kate and Ashley Host SNL part 1
Mary-Kate and Ashley Host SNL part 2
Mary-Kate and Ashley Host SNL part 3
Mary-Kate and Ashley Host SNL part 4

Find us on Social Media!
Instagram: @theythoughtiwasyou
TikTok: @theythoughtiwasyou
Becca: @beccaroth
Lani: @laniharms

Email us at: theythoughtiwasyou@gmail.com
*We just learned that we missed the "Bloater Brothers" sketch during our review so here it is: bad sketch, but Mary-Kate and Ashley do a great job. And they look SO cute in 70s clothes & hair, OMG!
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We're counting down the days to New York Minute's 20th anniversary, but before we get there, we have to talk about another countdown that is unfortunately a touchstone of this era in Mary-Kate and Ashley's careers: the countdown to their 18th birthday.

During the press tour for New York Minute in 2004, which opened just one month before the girls turned 18, the media became fascinated with a new trend of websites dedicated entirely to counting down the days, hours, minutes & seconds to when Mary-Kate and Ashley would become "legal." This type of discourse has been around since Hollywood has had child stars and 40-something creeps have had air to breathe, but one thing was different about 2004: the internet. As many of our sources mention, only a little over a dozen Mary-Kate and Ashley "countdown" sites were created, which by today's standards would hardly warrant a thought, let alone a news segment. But during the early days of the internet and with the world's most famous twins at the center of the story, this became a cultural fixation.

Mary-Kate and Ashley even had to address this fixation themselves when they hosted SNL, with Mary-Kate signing off the show saying, "and remember, we're legal in 4 weeks!" So today, we're talking about what we remember about this time, how we feel about it now, and why why WHY does stuff like this happen? There are times when this topic gets difficult to talk about, so like for many of our podcasts during this time, please take care while listening.

As promised, here are the links we talk about in this episode:
Quick tiktok
Another tiktok
An old countdown website
A gross forum from 2003
Eminiem song "Ass like that" (MK&A part starts at 2:21)
E! Online blurb from 2004
Article written for The Pool in 2018 with a lot of research on the history of celebrity women's "countdown"s

Non-countdown related videos:
Regis and Kelly 2004
The Today Show 2004
Access Hollywood 2004
Entertainment Tonight 2004
MTV "Home Video" 2004

You can watch the video version of this ep and get more bonus content by subscribing to our Patreon here.

Find us on Social Media!
Instagram: @theythoughtiwasyou
TikTok: @theythoughtiwasyou
Becca: @beccaroth
Lani: @laniharms

Email us at: theythoughtiwasyou@gmail.com
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Today we reckon with one of the most infamous Mary-Kate and Ashley interviews of all time. On April 28th, 2004, Oprah invited Mary-Kate and Ashley onto The Oprah Winfrey Show to discuss their upcoming film New York Minute, to ask about their plans after graduation, and to address the rumors that had been hounding them in the tabloids.
 
And it's that last point that made this interview infamous. While Mary-Kate and Ashley calmly tried to cool the temperature on the tabloids' relentless speculations over Mary-Kate, Oprah bluntly asks the seventeen year olds their dress size. It's painful and uncomfortable, so much so that the clipped resurfaced on TikTok in 2021 and created such an uproar, that the full video of the interview is nearly impossible to find online anymore.

So for this episode, we piece together the scraps of this interview we could still find and discuss them in depth. We discuss the weird parts of the interview aside from "the moment," the difference between tacos in 2004 and 2024, and the cultural significance of Oprah in the early '00s (with a surprise guest appearance by our good friend, Jessica Charles).

We also touch on Mary-Kate and Ashley's followup interview with Oprah in 2008, and the remarkable rate at which Mary-Kate and Ashley became two wise women in four short years.

Here are the links we discuss:

2004
"Opening": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQn68nu_BbM&t=22s
How to tell them apart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eucwHCNimY
College: https://youtu.be/5wbJfnbyjE4?si=hdnMNp65XUCMaU_q
Allowance: https://youtu.be/bwG_zh2XWKU?si=Pc70FpuDrviR8XXR
Favorite tacos: https://youtu.be/YKgSNRi-Ck8?si=bTDmOdnD4EhSv3Bv
Two different people: https://youtu.be/r4_bX1ttaFg?si=35l0SYHcnZgf9YX0
THE moment: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTUTbUW/
Another NY Minute interview just for fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Koa4jVoX0Nk
2008
Video of MKA interviewing each other: https://www.oprah.com/own-oprahshow/the-olsen-twins-interview-each-other
Oprah article summarizing the interview: https://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/millionaire-moguls/all

You can watch the video version of this ep and get more bonus content by subscribing to our Patreon here.

Find us on Social Media!
Instagram: @theythoughtiwasyou
TikTok: @theythoughtiwasyou
Becca: @beccaroth
Lani: @laniharms

Email us at: theythoughtiwasyou@gmail.com
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The countdown to New York Minute continues! And today, we're examining all the late night interviews and talk show appearances that Mary-Kate and Ashley did to promote their action comedy feature, New York Minute (excluding their appearance on Oprah, that will be its whole own episode). 

Many of these interviews happened just days apart, but watching them all in sequence feels like watching a lifetime go by. In their first interview with Letterman, they're poised, well trained, and eager to promote their SNL episode and upcoming film. The next day at their TRL appearance, they're goofier, loose, and casual, clearly trying to relate to their fellow teens. Then, while hosting  "25 hottest under 25," we see them hollow, bored, and aloof, seemingly trying to fit into the '"sexy" MTV aesthetic of the 00's. 

All of these appearances seem to demand something different from them, and on top of that they're also in the throes of graduating from high school, getting ready to host SNL, and somehow trying to celebrate an 18th birthday that the world keeps counting down to. To say they were under pressure would be a wild understatement.

We discuss each of these appearances and what stood out to us, and also try to figure out if they knew before this press tour if they were going to be firing their team as soon as they turned 18, or if this grueling schedule brought them to that decision.

We hope you enjoy, and if you'd like to follow along with the videos we discuss, here are the links:
Letterman, May 3rd 2004, LettermanTRL, May 4th 2004: Pt 1 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTNPUPC/Pt 2 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTNUYB4/Pt 3 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTFgnVP/Pt 4 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZPRTNgpmc/ "Olsen Eye for the Video Guy" Jan 2004 (not NYM promo, but we're obsessed)Teen People's 25 Hottest under 25Rove Australia (just Ashley) June 2004VMA’s, September 2004You can watch the video version of this ep and get more bonus content by subscribing to our Patreon here.
Find us on Social Media!
Instagram: @theythoughtiwasyou
TikTok: @theythoughtiwasyou
Becca: @beccaroth
Lani: @laniharms

Email us at: theythoughtiwasyou@gmail.com


Support the Show.

We are officially on the road to New York Minute! In our next few episodes, we will cover the press & publicity tour that Mary-Kate and Ashley went on in 2004 ahead of their much anticipated theatrical release, New York Minute.

And our first stop is the press that Mary-Kate, Ashley and their team didn't have much control over: the tabloids. In 2004, celebrity gossip magazines were at the peak of their popularity and ruthlessness: Britney Spears was dating Kevin Federline, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston were about to get divorced, and Paris Hilton was Hollywood's it-girl. The profits were white hot, and they had their eyes set on their next targets: the Olsens.

Since this is an extremely delicate topic that we weren't thrilled about diving into, we decided the best way to approach it would be to go directly to the source. We purchased 6 tabloids from 2004 on eBay and thumbed through each one to examine *how* the tabloids talked about Mary-Kate and Ashley instead of dwelling on *what* they talked about, since we all know it was all trash. We track the progression of the stories, the sources they site, and the pictures they pull. We also contemplate the legality of talking about the sexuality of minors-- seriously, how is it legal?

We also take care to burn sage before and after opening these magazines, being mindful of the dark energy they possess. Please take care while listening to this episode.

You can watch the video version of this ep and get more bonus content by subscribing to our Patreon here.
Find us on Social Media!
Instagram: @theythoughtiwasyou
TikTok: @theythoughtiwasyou
Becca: @beccaroth
Lani: @laniharms

Email us at: theythoughtiwasyou@gmail.com
Support the Show.