YMMV / Harriet the Spy

• Awesome Music: The jazz-funk soundtrack to the 1996 movie.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Harriet setting the frog on Marion Hawthorne. Making Rachel cry by saying her father doesn't love her and cutting a chunk of Laura's hair was uncool, but Marion was leading the bullying against Harriet and enjoying her own power. Harriet goes to the park, finds a baby frog, and hides it in her desk. During the chaos, Harriet watches serenely before walking home. We find out that Miss Elson was "on the verge of a nervous breakdown" and "Marion Hawthorne went home sick".
  • Likewise, Harriet lashes out when her parents confiscate the notebook after they learn she hasn't been doing any schoolwork. When she gets home after the frog prank, her mother suffers Laser-Guided Karma for showing No Sympathy about the fiasco; she had to spend her morning at school on finding out that Harriet probably got suspended for cutting Laura Peters's hair and putting the frog in Marion's desk, and then the cook threatens to quit after Harriet deliberately ruins her cake by making a lot of noise. Mrs. Welch seems to think that it's an inconvenience to her rather than her daughter hitting a Rage Breaking Point. Harriet refuses to speak to her. When Mr. Welch tries talking to Harriet, her response is to throw a shoe at his face for his No Sympathy. This gives them the memo that their heavy-handed Tough Love of confiscating the notebook didn't work; the next day, they take her to a child psychologist to actually figure out what the real problem is, and he says that she needs writing as her outlet. This convinces them to talk with the principal about a third option: making Harriet editor of the school newspaper.
• Fair for Its Day: As discussed under Values Dissonance when Ole Golly is trying to convince Harriet that girl spies need dance lessons, one could read Ole Golly's scolding as telling Harriet to "use the Master's tools" (or rather the trappings of the Patriarchy) to achieve her very unacceptable feminine goals (thus undermining it).
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Sport takes offense and joins the kids in bullying Harriet when she writes what she thinks about him having to do the housework while his dad writes. In the sequel and his A Day in the Limelight moment, we see why he prefers his dad; his mother is an Opportunistic Bastard Gold Digger that kidnaps her son for selfish reasons.
  • The film has Harriet write, "If I were the Boy With The Purple Socks, I'd hang myself," presumably just because of his socks and shyness. While Harriet's writings in both the book and film about her classmates were meant to be seen as mean, given the increase of bullying incidents due to additional bullying methods, such as written cyberbullying, to the point of kids feeling and/or being driven to suicide, words like that getting out not only raises the level of cruelty but could be perceived as a violent threat.
  • The film focusing on Carrie Andrews's ample bustline with her male classmates being interested in her physique would be harder to play today with social media and people being conscious of the dangers of sexualizing young women, especially girls who develop earlier than their peers.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Harriet has a specific journal dedicated to writing down things she dislikes about her classmates. Sound familiar?
• Jerkass Woobie: Harriet. While what she wrote in her notebook was hurtful to some people, it was still her privacy and she had every right to vent when she wants to. Also the fact her classmates went too far to get back at her for she wrote, which drove to her breaking point, and her parents didn’t show any sympathy for her by taking any her notebook, you can hardly blame her and have to feel bad for her.
• Paranoia Fuel: Anyone with any kind of secret diary or notebook will tell you this is true... thinking about your Notebook falling into the wrong hands is the stuff of this and Nightmare Fuel.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Harriet in the 1996 movie would later open a portal to a Hell dimension and screw with the rich teens of the Upper East Side.
  • Sport would fight sentient toy soldiers the next year, and be Mel Gibson's son in the American War of Independence.
  • Laura would befriend an impoverished princess and kill a velociraptor with a gymnastics routine.
  • Marion would later enforce the law with Sport and get to be Marilyn Monroe in The Kennedys.
• Strawman Has a Point:
  • When Mrs. Welch confronts Harriet for blowing off her classes in favor of writing in her notebook all the time, she says that her job is to go to school just as Mr. Welch's job is to go to the office. Harriet asks her mother what her job is as a homemaker that spends her mornings at the hairdressers. Mrs. Welch brushes her off by saying that what she does is a bunch of things that don't concern Harriet. Yet Harriet is completely on-point despite the scene noting that she can't blow off school.
  • In the film version: even if Harriet was rather harsh in badmouthing Sport's father in her notebook, she was absolutely right. If he wants to be a Cloud Cuckoolander who lives off "creativity" by sticking it to the man and not getting a job, that's fine, but since he's a parent of a minor, he has a responsibility to be able to provide for all his basic needs. If anything, he's lucky that Harriet (or anyone else who knows of his situation) hasn't reported him to child services. In the book, she doesn't snark at him but rather respects him, since she wants to be a writer herself, and wonders if she will have to go through such privations before she is successful. Also, they do have a house and money for food and to send Sport to school, although Sport does all the housework and finances so his dad can focus. Most important, Sport's father does eventually sell his book.
• Toy Ship: Although there's no romantic interaction between them, Harriet seems pretty set on marrying Sport some day.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Given the book was set in the 1960s, this is bound to happen. There are Free-Range Children, Harriet likes chocolate egg creams, and everyone still uses typewriters.
  • As this blogger points out, if this were written today, Harriet would possibly be permanently deprived of writing on the grounds that she has an "addiction".
  • The animated series works around this by being an intentional period piece, albeit one with some mild modernized elements such as selfies, and the use of a pocket radio as if it were an iPod. ^note Pocket radios were the iPods of that generation. Tiny boxes with (usually) single earbuds, they were extremely affordable, and indispensable to Top 40 fans.
• Values Dissonance: Surprisingly many, believe it or not:
  • Due to the novel being set in the 1960s, it's perfectly normal for Harriet to wander for several hours after school, doing "spying".
  • Remember all you little 11-year-olds, never anger your teacher. Or she'll use your fellow students to torment and abuse you.
  • When Ole Golly manages to convince Harriet to take dancing lessons by telling her that dancing is a crucial skill for spies like Mata Hari, Harriet claims that spies are also required to learn skills like languages and martial arts, but Ole Golly dismissively responds, "That's boy spies, Harriet. You're not thinking." Considering all the developments in feminism since 1964, the remark seems a bit less innocent today, let alone the fact that she could have cited James Bond as a boy spy who was an accomplished dancer.
  • In the 1996 film adaptation, after Harriet's classmates torment her, she carves a revenge list into her desk, and her teacher makes no comment about it. Nowadays, after all of the shootings that have happened in American schools, Harriet's list probably would have gotten her into much more serious trouble. Tangentially related to this, in 2010 a kid was led away in handcuffs by a police officer after doodling on her desk with washable marker. It's hard to believe nobody would say anything about her carving anything into the desk, regardless of what it was.
  • When a group of students are discussing games to play, one of them says "that's retarded" to one of the suggestions. 1996? Socially acceptable enough to be in a kids' movie. Today? Would draw ire even in a movie for adults.
  • While probably seen as just deserts for a mean girl at the the time the book was written, Harriet telling Rachel that her father left because he didn't love her comes off as extremely cruel nowadays, and not the sort of thing you'd expect a sympathetic character to do.
• The Woobie: Beth Ellen Hansen, even more so in The Long Secret. Her mother flits around Europe, and when her grandmother announces that she's coming back, Beth Ellen doesn't know what to feel. She hasn't seen her mom since she was five and never knew her father, who left before she was born. Her mother's abandonment and her grandmother's stodgy (though well-meaning) care seem to have taught her that she should not feel or want anything, which causes Harriet continual frustration that Beth Ellen never seems to think of anything. The key word being seems.

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