Readers of The A.V. Club will probably be familiar with the work of Isabel Custodio, the film critic who most frequently posts on YouTube as Be Kind Rewind. (This very writer chose her channel as a staff pick a few months ago.) She shares work consistently, but this week brought an especially fun and timely little deep dive: an exploration and comparative analysis of every version of Freaky Friday, starting with Mary Rodgers’ original 1972 novel and ending with the past summer’s Freakier Friday.
Freaky Friday fans are obviously familiar with the Lindsay Lohan/Jamie Lee Curtis films, and likely familiar with the first adaptation in 1976 that starred Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris. Perhaps less remembered is the 1995 TV movie starring Gaby Hoffmann and Shelley Long, which aired during the Wonderful World Of Disney; and perhaps most bizarre is the 2018 Disney Channel original movie musical based on the 2016 stage musical (that never quite made it to Broadway). Despite all four being a version of the same story—a mother and her teenage daughter swap bodies—Custodio makes the case that every movie is reflective of the time in which it was made.
For example, while a central element of the 1976 movie was the mother (here called Ellen) having to take care of her husband’s needs as one might a child, the later versions depict a single mother dating (in 1995) and being engaged to a new man (in 2003). In 2025’s Freakier Friday, Lohan’s Anna, now a mom herself, makes a point to say that she chose to be a single mother. You can check out the whole video, which also includes a look at the body swap comedy boom of the 1980s, below.
