That Girl - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

The show's theme song and opening visuals have been parodied in pop culture several times. They appeared as a series of T-shirts, then as a Saturday Night Live skit featuring cast member Danitra Vance in an African American remake "That Black Girl", as a sequence on episodes of Animaniacs, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Clarissa Explains It All, Arthur, Friends and Roseanne.

Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) wore a "That Girl" T-shirt in the Friends episode "The One with the Football". In the previous season during the episode "The One with the Lesbian Wedding", Marlo Thomas played Rachel's mother, as she would continue to do in future episodes.

It was also parodied in the pre-credits teaser of an episode of The Nanny where Maxwell's guest-starring mother encounters Fran at the florist; in another episode of The Nanny, Peter Bergman, playing himself acting in The Young and the Restless casts Fran in the soap by asking for a co-star like "that girl!" while pointing to Fran.

The 2011 advertising campaign for the launch of FOX's sitcom "New Girl" featured posters of that sitcom's star, Zooey Deschanel, in the make-up, pose and graphic look of Marlo Thomas from the original "That Girl" series.

An episode from Ugly Betty had Fabia forcing Wilhelmina Slater into making an exchange: she'll give up her wedding date to Wilhelmina in exchange for the services of Wilhelmina's assistant, Marc St. James, after Fabia evokes the opening lines.

In 1968, shortly after the feminist protest against bras and other feminine products at the Miss America pageant, Marlo Thomas began going braless on That Girl. "God created women to bounce," Thomas said. "So be it."