Valley Girl

"Okay, fine
Fer sure, fer sure
She's a valley girl

And there is no cure"
—Frank Zappa, Valley Girl

Oh my God! I am like—so totally glad to see you!

Except you. Put some pants on, already! Gross!

Like, anyway, I'm what some of you, like, call a "Stalk Parody Character", and yes, there are some totally creepy guys who—Oh, "Stock Parody Character"! I am SOOOOOO completely embarrassed! I gotta watch out for homophobes. Wait, that's, like, something else.

So if you want to, like, put someone like me in a story, you need these four totally important traits. Leave one out, and you just have some cheap knockoff of me, and that would just be, like, so tacky. Oh my God.

  1. The way I talk is, like, way important. Aside from my fabulous clothes, it's the easiest way to tell it's my hot self. You can do, like, degrees of it, but if I don't hear a hint of it, you're not truly from The Valley. Go, like, screw yourself, impostor!
  2. I am so fashion conscious, everybody. See what I'm wearing? Does any of it, like, clash? I don't think so! Unlike those skanky bitches on Sex and the City, I don't throw on just anything I feel like. A dress isn't like a car. You can't just, like, turn the key and drive off. It's like the space shuttle, or something. Everything has to be, you know, totally perfect before takeoff.
  3. Some people say I'm dumb, and I say those people are fat. But I just, like, don't have room in my head for too much. I mean, The American Revolution was what, like, a hundred years ago? All the available Revlon lipstick colors are around right now. I think we all know which is more important.
  4. ...right? Yeah, 4. Being rich, is like, totally awesome, but you just need a good credit card. And if there isn't a mall to hang out, there should be some good stores around to shop in. If there isn't either, you totally have my sympathies. Heck, give my friends and me a call. We will help you move. I am so dead serious. Towns like that are for, like, no one.

Okay, even though I'm best known for being from California, I can be, like, global, or something. The Valley isn't like, just in the Valley. Oh my God, was that like, totally deep or something?

Oh, and I totally know that I'm, like, not a real person in real life, or anything. I'm some kind of stereotype, you know, like parroting teens in The Eighties and The Nineties, or some junk. Sometimes people like to use me as like, an example for like, how kids don't know how to, you know, speak well, or something? And I'm also, like, intertwined with the Dumb Blonde troop now, I mean trope. And I don't care what what Mitzy Connor said, this is NOT a dye job! Puhleez!

Anyway, compare Totally Radical, The Ditz, Surfer Dude (who is, like, totally hot, could you just die?), Brainless Beauty, Rich in Dollars, Poor In Sense.

Also, totally not related to that Uncanny Valley Girl. She's, like, 'soooooo weird. For sure!

Like, Examples of, like, Valley Girl, like, include:

Advertising

  • Played with in Paris Hilton's parody presidential campaign.
  • Some advertisements in the UK promoting imported American teen dramas will use Valley Girl-esque voiceovers. Can get very annoying when they're on every ad break.

"HellooOOOOooo it's your mom!"


Anime & Manga

  • The NA dub of Sailor Moon used valley girl slang for the first two seasons. "I'm outie!" and "Whatevah!" were frequently uttered, to the chagrin of the viewers. Then the next two seasons switched to gangsta . . .
  • In the English dub of D.N.Angel, Mio Hio was given a Valley Girl accent as a substitute for the character's Gratuitous English dialogue in the Japanese.
  • Poland from Axis Powers Hetalia has a Nagoya schoolgirl dialect in the original Japanese strips, and this was translated into Valley Girl speak as the closest English equivalent in the scanlations. It totally fits with his crossdressing habits and Ambiguously Gay bearing. Also his being somewhat of a Dumb Blond.
  • Misty's sisters talk like this in the English dub of Pokémon.
  • Rather annoying, the Viz Media translation of Hot Gimmick turns Hatsumi (and every other female character) into a Valley Girl even though she is a quiet, unconfident and rather poor Japanese teenager (seeing middle-aged conservative Japanese housewives saying "oh my god, Asuza is, like, such a hottie" is very, very jarring).
  • To translate her idiosyncratic way of speaking, Tsuruya-san in the Suzumiya Haruhi dub is given this type of accent.
  • A couple of minor duelists in the English translation of Hayate X Blade use Valley Girl speak.
  • In Fairy Tail, Lucy at some point finds out that she just lost her father. After visiting his grave, she goes for a walk with Natsu and Happy. As fate would have it, two Valley Girls appear soon after and bitch about how they hate their stupid, bossy, smelling fathers - right in front of Lucy who is so sad that she is not even able to cry. Natsu does not take it well.


Comic Books

  • Tabby Smith of Nextwave.
  • House of M featured a story involving the New X-Men as being part of a private academy. While many characters had similar personalities as their main universe selves, Sooraya Qadir is a radical departure as she goes from a modest, fundamentalist Muslim to a quintessential valley girl that rivals Tabitha "Boom Boom" Smith in vapidness.
  • Comet Queen from Legion of Super-Heroes is a 31st Century version of a valley girl, one that speaks her own brand of slang, much to annoyance of nearly everyone she's around because half the time they have no idea what she's talking about.


Films

  • The movie Valley Girl, of course!
  • Cher from Clueless
  • Romy of Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion is a born-again member of this group, since she walks the walk, talks the talk, but isn't rich and is actually from Arizona. (Michelle does the same things, but doesn't sound so, like, totally Valley, dihoood).
  • Buffy in the original film incarnation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
    • In the first couple of episodes of the TV series the girls at Sunnydale High spoke like valley girls. ('Neg!' 'Pos!!') Thankfully dropped in favour of Buffy-Speak.
  • The three Alpha Bitches in Mean Girls.
  • The Star Wars fan-film Pink Five, a hilarious look at what happens when you send a Valley Girl to attack a Death Star.
  • Elle and her two girlfriends in Legally Blonde.
  • Samantha from Night of the Comet. Her only concern throughout The End of the World as We Know It is whether or not she'll get laid.
  • For some reason, the three main girls in the Halloween remake were turned into this. Particularly Lynda, who added "like" and "totally" to every other sentence.
  • All the girls in White Chicks had some form of this throughout the film. Including the Wayans. Karen, Lisa, and Tori to a lesser degree.


Literature

  • Goss and Kylie in the Corinna Chapman series are Valley Girls, but they do actually help the protagonists occasionally.


Live-Action TV

  • Jennifer from Square Pegs.
  • Parodied in "deleted scenes" from House where actresses Lisa Edelstein and Jennifer Morrisson perform some of their scenes together while speaking and acting like valley girls.

Cuddy: You just go and you, like, write something. And then, like, you end up in this really fancy office with like a huge desk and fancy shoes and, like, people will call you and they'll be like "Omg, we like totally wanna work with Eric Foreman", and you'll be like "I have so many totally mean things to say to you."
Cameron: I get, like, fancy shoes?
Cuddy: Yeah, that's the best part.

Shop owner: What's the dress for?
Dharma: For, like, my body.

  • Jackie from That '70s Show has elements of this (though she's from Wisconsin).
  • Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess portrayed the Love Goddess Aphrodite as a Valley Girl played by Alexandra Tydings.
  • In the episode Boston Tea Party from The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, Zach dreams he and all his friends were the ones that participated in the titular event. In this dream, the cast is talking about the skyrocketing taxes, only for Maddie to exclaim that she may not afford the down payment on her used horse. Then she gives us this tidbit:

Maddie: And I'm totally getting my license, like, this year!

    • Lampshaded by Esteban when Moseby gives a skeptical look

Esteban: She's a Valley Forge Girl.
Moseby: Ah.


Music

  • The Frank Zappa song "Valley Girl" like, totally counts. It's, like, totally the Ur Example fer shure!
  • Ke$ha's "Tik Tok", which is literally the Valley girl anthem. Her voice even has the trademark inflection, with autotune added for some reason. This doesn't mean she actually is one herself, though.
    • Ke$ha does this to almost all her songs.
  • And then I went to TV Tropes, like, totally expecting this one in the list, but you're all like 'eeeghhn'...
  • "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-a-Lot opens with two girls talking about another girl's big butt. "Oh my god Becky, look at her butt. It is like, so big."
  • "Stupid Girls" by P!nk is about these. She even appears briefly (and convincingly) as one in the Music Video for the song.
  • "Laura Pérez, la sin par de Caurimare" by Venezuelan comedy group Medioevo, shows a portrait of a local specimen as they were in the early 1980's. The song is from the perspective of the titular Laura, trying to fend off the accusations of being a "sifrina" (the local word for this trope, albeit with insulting connotations) while demonstrating every and each one of the associated stereotypes.

Videogames

Webcomics

Web Originals


Western Animation

  • The Simpsons episode, "Summer of 4 ft. 2", has Lisa befriending a group of cool surfer kids on vacation. Besides dressing in hippy/surfer clothes, Lisa uses valley girl speech to disguise herself as one of them, instead of a shy nerd . . . like, you know, whatever.
    • In "Lard of the Dance", the new student, Alex Whitney shares this trope.
  • The girls of Totally Spies!, especially Clover.
  • This is why the X-Men: Evolution version of Shadowcat is, like, way infamous. (Fortunately, she shed this habit by the end of the first season.)
    • Ironically, the comics had a perfectly good Valley Girl in the form of Jubilee—who doesn't talk this way when she shows up in the series!
  • Debbies from The Oblongs.
  • Shirley the Loon from Tiny Toon Adventures is like, a mondo primo example. If only she had more fashion sense instead of, like, being a hippie new age girl, or some junk. Cha.
    • It should, like, be noted that the voice actress who did Shirley's voice is one Gail Matthius, a cast member from the sixth season of Saturday Night Live (which nobody likes or remembers because it was around the time that Lorne Michaels and the remnants of the original cast left the show and a new producer and cast were hired in their places) who had a recurring character who was a Valley Girl named Vicki (duh!). She also used this character on a syndicated sketch show called Laugh Trax. The last anyone's heard of Gail Matthius was during the nineties when she did voicework in cartoons, often as a Valley Girl.
  • Kelly, Bobby's sister in Bobby's World.
  • Like, Jett from Beverly Hills Teens, fer sure.
  • The "tweevils" from the Bratz TV series and (animated) movies (there are no dolls of the tweevils).
  • Claire Brewster from the Beetlejuice cartoon.
  • The two mermaids from Barbie Mariposa.
  • Veronica in The Fairly OddParents.
  • Ditzy June (in KaBlam!!'s first season) had a slight Valley Girl accent in the very early season one episodes, dispite her being a huge tomboy.
  • There's an episode of Garfield and Friends where Garfield encounters a niece of Jon's who is explicitly referred to as a valley girl. Her accent is so bad Garfield even hires a professional linguist to add annotations explaining what she's saying to the audience. See the full episode here.
  • Adventure Time has Lumpy Space Princess, and pretty much everyone else from Lumpy Space for that matter.
  • Total Drama Island had dear sweet Lindsay. Although she took a lesson in badass when she cussed out Heather in season one just before getting eliminated, she reverted back to herself right after word.
    • Heather started as one, and there are still traces of it, but it's less noticeable in later seasons.
  • The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy has Mindy. Also, Eris started out as one.
  • Brattina from Pound Puppies, with her constant use of the term "mummy dearest" and referring to practically everything doesn't like as "icky".
  • Ophelia from The Life and Times of Juniper Lee would occasionally talk like a valley girl despite being a gothic punk girl.
  • Ty Lee of Avatar: The Last Airbender has been described as the Fire Nation version of this. Her best friend is a snarky goth.
  • Recess has this with The Ashleys. "SCANDALOUS!"
  • Debbie from The Wild Thornberries
  • A rare male example, but Jinks fits this perfectly, "Like are you for sure,there."
  • The My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic episode "Putting your hoof down" like, featured a couple of fillies like this. Though their manes were, like, soooo 1980s ago!


Real Life

  • If you, like, actually think we don't exist in Real Life, you can, like, go to hell, or something. Oh, and, like, watch this video. You can totally see one of us about, like, a minute in.
  • Kogals, the Japanese counterpart. There's also Ganguro, which is Valley Girl taken Up to Eleven with heavy tans.
  • The British equivalent is the Essex girl, although it's more insulting as it focuses more on being sexually promiscuous and unintelligent (very much like the Dumb Blonde).
  • The Mexican equivalent is the "Niña Fresa" (Strawberry Girl) or "Chica Nice" (Nice Chick/Girl)
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