Mean Girls Snuck In An Avatar: The Last Airbender Easter Egg (But TikTok Found It)
It's a teeny, blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, but 2024's "Mean Girls" does feature a tiny clip from "Avatar: The Last Airbender." It's such a quick moment, it took the eagle-eyed viewers from TikTok to spy it. User @alwynhamilton notes that during the montage where Regina George (Renee Rapp) is castigated via social media for falling during her performance at the school talent show's "Jingle Bell Rock" performance, a clip of Toph Beifong from Book 2, Episode 6 of the animated program can be seen. It's an iconic moment in which Toph uses her earthbending powers to slam an opponent into a wall. In the film, it's seen as an animated gif — with Toph's enemy labeled with Regina's name.
The presence of the "Avatar: The Last Airbender" clip in the film first gained the attention of TikTok audiences when @katelivingoutloud noticed that in the film's credits, there is a brief credit mentioning that footage from the animated series was used with the a permission of Nickelodeon. "Avatar" fans soon went wild searching for the clip until they finally found it. But even beyond that one unifying moment, it turns out this version of "Mean Girls" and "Avatar: The Last Airbender" have something interesting in common.
Avatar: The Last Airbender and Mean Girls share a production company
This quick cameo in "Mean Girls" isn't the only thing the musical hit and "Avatar: The Last Airbender" have in common. "Avatar: The Last Airbender" is a co-production from Nickelodeon — and Nickelodeon is a sister company of Paramount Pictures, which released both versions of "Mean Girls." That means that the cartoon and the film franchise sit under the same production umbrella, and that likely made getting legal access to that clip of Toph a whole lot easier. It also means there could be a much longer crossover between the characters from "Mean Girls" and "Avatar: The Last Airbender" in some venue — though that seems unlikely to happen.
Nevertheless, with a Netflix-exclusive "Avatar: The Last Airbender" series already in the offing, perhaps the characters from one of Nickelodeon's greatest cartoons might someday appear in other Paramount-related properties. A "Star Trek" crossover movie, anyone?