Rydell High is back in-session in first trailer for Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies
The Paramount Plus prequel series follows the early beginnings of everyone's favorite pink-jacket wearing girl gang
Aux News Grease
While it’s hard to believe there was a time before Rizzo (Stockard Channing) and her gang of Pink Ladies ruled the hallways of Rydell High, Paramount+’s first trailer for Grease: The Rise Of The Pink Ladies shows us how the group of rule-breakers rose up in the California school.
Taking place in 1954 (four years before the events of Grease), the ten-episode prequel series returns back to Rydell High with a new cast of characters ready to upend the status quo. Nancy (Tricia Fukuhara), Jane (Marisa Davila), Olivia (Cheyenne Wells), and Cynthia (Ari Notartomaso) make up the original class of Pink Ladies, who we can see throughout the trailer getting into a bit of good trouble along with their T-Bird counterparts.
“Maybe sometimes, you gotta be bad to do good,” says Davila’s Jane in the trailer, giving us a certified motto for this iteration of Pink Ladies that are ready to make some changes at Rydell.
Also seen in the trailer: big musical numbers! It couldn’t be a Grease prequel without there being a musical aspect, and with what looks like a few huge dance set pieces (including a similar “Greased Lightnin’” garage number) with original songs by pop songwriter Justin Tranter, it looks like we’ll get that carry-over from the original stage musical.
Joining our new Pink Ladies is a cast that includes actors Shanel Bailey, Madison Thompson, Jackie Hoffman, Johnathan Nieves, Jason Schmidt, and Maxwell Whittington-Cooper.
Annabel Oakes, who recently worked on Minx and Atypical, is helming the series for Paramount+. Alethea Jones (Made For Love) will direct the series pilot and two other episodes of the series, as well as executive produce.
We’ll see if Grease: Rise Of The Pink Ladies will electrify screens when it starts streaming April 6 on Paramount+.
41 Comments
Not once have I ever thought, “I wonder how the Pink Ladies from Grease became a gang?” The music better be kick-ass, because I can’t imagine too many other people have ever thought that, either.
I assumed it was more than four years prior, anyway. One of these girls could be Rizzo’s older sister.
Liz. Liz Rizzo.
Given Stockard Channing was 34 when Grease came out, I’d always assumed she’d been repeating her final year for over a decade, so could easily be included in this show.
She’s been going to that school for 12 years. She’s no dummy.
Did anyone really wonder what happened to that Sky-kid after he blew up the Star of Death and got the medal?
More than I cared about him building a droid when he was little.
No, but the mean man with the black penis helmet went flying off in his space helicopter and if you know anything about me you know big black penis will keep my attention so I guess if they make another one I’d watch it?
After? Yes.Before… especially Vader before? Nah.
The sad part is that from the description, it also sounds like maybe they’re gonna mess up even this milquetoast premise.They’re a gang because it’s fun to hang out with your friends. No deeper meaning needed. But somehow I suspect they’ll try to make it have some social message about feminism, the patriarchy, and upending the status quo and kill even the minor joy of just seeing teenage girls have fun for funs’s sake.
Welp, judging by the cast, super white (and common for the time) Rydell has a new host of racial diversity that will magically disappear four years later. I wonder if the Black Cheerleader will experience Difficulties While Black? Will the Japanese American have to deal with the predjuces of a high school and country that remembers recent war? Given the time period and the makeup of the Pink Ladies in the next two installments, at least a generic feminist angle would fit. Even the original musical and film paid lip service to how Rizzo was viewed as opposed to Danny or Kenickie, despite them being the same level of “rebel.” “Being yourself despite the social mores and pressures around you” isn’t a new premise, but it at minimum wouldn’t inject an out of place element into what we know. And slight ramble, but the A League of Their Own series did a pretty solid job of interjecting new commentary into the world without it seeming out of place or forced. So, maybe they’ll hit the mark here as well? Not holding my breath, but maybe?
No question. It’s 100% in the trailer.
There’s also the fact that the Pink Ladies were kind of… not very nice people. They were basically an exclusionary high school clique. No, they weren’t flat out evil villains, but they would be the antagonists in any high school movie set in the 1980s or later.
No one at that school was very nice. You know Patty Simcox grew up to be a mega-Karen. The Pink Ladies weren’t any worse (or better, except for maybe Frenchie), than anyone else there, they were just kids. But they were probably looked down on for things like “being loose” or coming from lower class backgrounds and took up a defensive posture because of that.
Interesting that in the original musical, the whole school was basically working class Polish/Italian in Chicago. The Pink Ladies would not have stood out as being of particularly low economic status…… which kind of gets me thinking, in the movie, we really don’t know anything about their economic class status, other than that they hang out with the explicitly lower class T-Birds (Burger Palace Boys in the original musical). And the only one who is really known for being “loose” is Rizzo.
My mom’s family didn’t have much when she was growing up, and they still managed to look down look down on my dad’s family and think mom was marrying beneath her. All it takes is one alcoholic parent (not the case for my dad, just an example) or scandal for an entire family to be stigmatized, especially back then.Frenchie didn’t seem to think she had much in the way of professional prospects and thought dropping out to go to beauty school was her best option, which seems to imply she’s from the lower end of the economic scale. But she and Rizzo are the only ones who get any real fleshing out. In the movie, at least, Patty and Sandy both read as pretty middle class. In the movie, Sandy definitely is. Her Australian family vacationed in the US and then moved there. Aside from creating a backstory my where they’re down-on-their-luck, and a wealthier family member arranged all that to help them out, you have to assume they have some means.
Same with Marty and Jan. We really don’t know too much about their background. We at least see that Marty manages to avoid being seduced (and possibly drugged) by a creepy older TV presenter.
Jan strikes me as just generally being a bit of a weirdo, maybe ending up in the Pink Ladies because that’s where the anti-socials just found themselves. I could totally see Marty slumming it (not a great term, I know, but I’m unaware of another phrase that captures that particular behavior). Jan does imply that Marty’s not a virgin, so maybe she falls into the “loose” category as well. Then again, it could all be ruse and she just talks big to piss off her “square” parents. Her last name is “Maraschino” after all, maybe a clue that she actually still has her V-Card but still dresses like a vamp to project a certain image?
To be fair, was anyone clamoring for a feature film about Lego in 2014?
I’ve heard of this intellectual property! Now is the perfect time to jump in on that nostalgia for 70s nostalgia for the 50s!
Have you heard about that new Hulu series Pre-Fonzie? It’s about a zygote that wears a leather jacket!
Naw, the prequel’s about the shark he eventually jumps.
Showaddywaddy are already on it.
What a weird thing to read about today. I really liked Grease, but what’s happening with streaming networks right now is all just shenanigans.
“RISE, ye Pink Ladies, and do my bidding!”
If there is no Palpatine-like principal, PASS!
I was actually thinking of The Master, from Manos.
Oh thank God. We all desperately needed more Boomer nostalgia.
now with revisionist history with a 1954 where the people with Asian surnames are treated non-horribly!
It’s a thing now where you have to balance representation in casting with accurate portrayals of history. It doesn’t matter in something like The Green Knight where you might complain about medieval England not actually being diverse as the cast except that it’s a fantasy and you can do whatever you want with it. But displaying an interracial social group in 1954 America where it’s all just hunky dory could get into whitewashing territory easily despite best intentions. We’ll see how they handle it of course.
Well I am just learning about this show for the first time, but I liked the trailer. It looks fun! And gay. I’m in.
Enough with this silly prequels/reboot trend! Haven’t they run their course by now?
can we dispense with the “rise/rising” subtitle once and for all?
A million times, yes.
Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies…?If anyone is wondering how tired this naming convention has become, I’ve compiled a bit of a list, so please sit back and enjoy.• Minions: The Rise of Gru• Transformers: Rise of the Beasts• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker• R.I.P.D. 2: Rise of the Damned• Scorpion King 2: Rise of a Warrior • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines• Underworld: Rise of the Lycans• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer• Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty• Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra• Trollhunter: Rise of the Titans• Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan• Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist• Blue Mountain State: The Rise of Thadland • Cyrus: The Rise of Empire• Cross: Rise of the Villains• Pokémon: The Rise of Darkrai• Gamestop: Rise of the Players• Power Rangers: Rise of the Ninja• Boudica: Rise of the Warrior Queen• Dominique: Rise of the Phoenix• Time Machine: Rise of the Morlocks • Rise of the Planet of the Apes • Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles• Rise of the Guardians • Rise of the Legend• Rise of the Footsoldier• Rise of the Krays• Rise of the Zombies• Rise of the Dinosaurs• Rise of the Black Bat• Rise of the Catwoman• Rise of the Fellowship• Rise of the Clans• Rise of the Warrior Apes• Rise of the Machine Girls• Rise of the Mummy• Rise of the Tarragon• Rise of the Gargoyles
Hey guys would you like a series about the pink ladies but without any of the characters you actually liked? Wait! Where are you going! It’ll have songs! Come back here!
A pink lady sequel series where all their kids get drafted would be way better.
I would watch Rizzo in Nam.
I thought they already made Glee