The “Mean Girls” are starring at a Colorado college — and you can even get class credit to study them.
Sandor Teleki, a 19-year-old freshman at Colorado College, said he learned an important lesson while taking the course, “Queen Bees, WannaBees and Mean Girls’’ with the school’s Comparative Literature Department this winter.
“When it comes to guys, if you want to be mean to someone, you will do it openly and get it over quickly,” Teleki said. “In the girl world, you have to be sneaky.”
CompLit Professor Lisa Hughes, who teaches the course, focuses among other things on Tina Fey’s hit 2004 movie “Mean Girls” starring Lindsay Lohan.
The class was designed to explore the “motives behind why women seek authority and the actions they are willing to take in order to hold onto it,” according to a course description.
The 13 students wore pink on Wednesdays but also had serious discussions comparing the teen comedy to Machiavelli’s “The Prince” and Ancient Greek mythology.
The class enrolled 10 women and three “courageous men,” Hughes said. The number is average for the Colorado Springs liberal arts school of just over 2,000 students.
For their final exams last week, students chose a scene from the films they watched in class, including “Mean Girls,” “Bridesmaids” and the 1955 flick “Queen Bee” with Joan Crawford, to dissect.
The students ran with the idea that “Mean Girls” is a Greek myth cloaked in modern trappings of Fendi purses and Lexus convertibles when they discovered that Fey named her youngest daughter “Penelope Athena.”
Two students focused on the moment in “Mean Girls” where Lohan’s character, Cady, is wresting the “Queen Bee” position away from the bitchy blonde, Regina.
The students noticed that Cady has a golden apple on her lunch tray signifying The Judgment of Paris — the famous Greek myth that features the three goddesses, Hera Athena and Aphrodite, vying for a golden apple.
A senior named Kendall Rock picked up on the fact that toward the end of the movie, when the fallen Regina is getting dressed for the school dance, there is a statue of a headless Aphrodite in her bathroom.
The 2014-2015 class coincided with the tenth anniversary of the film. Fey and her composer husband are working on a musical adaptation.
Fey’s spokeswoman said she couldn’t be reached for comment.
Additional reporting by Caroline Treadway
