Headscratchers / Josie and the Pussycats

• What is Alexandra doing there anyway? She's not a band member, she doesn't work for them, and she doesn't serve any useful purpose. She mainly causes trouble and throws herself at Alan. Why hasn't she been shipped home?
  • She was in the comics.
    • But so was Pepper, Valerie's predecessor, yet she's not in the cartoon. There's no in-story reason for Alexandra tagging along.
    • Maybe she's there because it would be too much trouble to make her quit following them around?
    • Maybe she bullied her brother into it.
    • She's the owner of the band's mascot, perhaps?
  • I always thought it was because her brother was the band manager, like that maybe there was some unstated reason he had to let her tag along. My best guess is neither of them owned a house but he was unwilling to just kick her ass out on the street, so she gets to travel with the band (and this is totally Wild Mass Guessing but maybe Alexandra has a better relationship with her brother than with her parents).
• Why does Valerie play tambourine as opposed to, say, guitar or keyboards?
  • Presumably because every cartoon band of the time had a tambourine. The 2001 film at least had her be the bassist.
  • It's interesting to think about What Could Have Been it seems most of the "who plays what" in these cartoons were made via animation decisions (the tambourine is a pretty easy instrument to animate someone playing, etc) even though it rarely reflected what the actual musicians they had record the songs were using. Given the multitude of people good at music at Hanna Barbera, there really is some lost potential that they probably could have made some odder arrangements and rocked them.
• The Pussycats were objectively not bad musicians. How did NOBODY even take slight interest in them at any of their gigs?
• When Du Jour landed the plane in the parking lot of a Metallica concert... why did the concertgoers beat the crap out of them? Sure, it wasn't their style of music, but that's no excuse for beating up 4 innocent people who'd just safely landed a plane after their pilot and manager bailed. You'd think someone would've listened to them.
• Drums are EXTREMELY hard to play. So how is it that Melody- a girl so stupid she's lucky she remembers how to spell her own name- is such an expert on them?!
  • This isn't even unrealistic. Things like talent, or idiot savants, do exist. Idiocy itself isn't a one-way street, its possible to be unable to understand most things but then perfectly grasp specific things.