The Countdown to 18

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

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