Mallrats Was Filmed Where I Was A Teenage Mallrat

News of Shannen Doherty's death over the weekend sparked this memory

Let me start off by saying I was never a huge 90210 fan. At the peak of its popularity in the early ‘90s I sporadically tuned in, too emotionally uninvested in the characters or the plots to care about the episodes I missed. I was mildly intrigued by the fact that Shannen Doherty’s “Brenda” and her brother “Brandon” were from Minnesota, but was otherwise bored by the teen melodrama. Little did I know at the time that in just a few short years, Doherty would be at the mall up the street from our home in Minnesota filming a movie.

Like most Gen-Xers, I was a mallrat. From 6th to 9th grade, I practically lived at Brookdale Mall, where I’d meet a friend or two for shopping, shenanigans, and Rocky Rococo’s Pizza. In the Twin Cities, where temperatures get dangerously low during the winter, Minnesotans were quick to realize strip malls suffered low sales during the brutally cold months and people would go shopping more often if they could go from store to store without risking frostbite, so we built the first entirely enclosed shopping mall in the United States (Southdale Mall in Edina). This meant teenagers could spend all day having fun and staying warm indoors, even if we were too broke to shop. Naturally, Minnesota is also home to our country’s largest indoor mall, the Mall of America (if you haven’t visited this beast yet, I highly recommend it).

Before the Mall of America opened during my senior year of high school, Eden Prairie Center was my main squeeze mall. Unlike other shopping malls, it had these tall, neon, fake palm trees near the food court, giving off summer vibes during our depressingly gloomy winters. It also had my favorite Chinese restaurant. It was pretty badass, before the GOAT Mall of America stole some of its popularity.

My sister Sarah and I often walked to EPC, that’s how close it was to us. Sometime in late ‘94 or early ‘95, we started noticing odd changes in the mall. One of them being the “new” storefronts that appeared in some of the empty spaces but weren’t actually open. “That’s got to be a fake store, right? ‘Fashionable Male’? ‘Popular Girl?’ What the fuck is going on here” we wondered aloud. The store’s names reminded me of the Acme Company in Looney Tunes.

Soon after that, film crews showed up to rope off the entire middle section of the mall and fill it with equipment. From the second level overlooking the chaos below, my sister and I watched, mesmerized by the action. That’s when I spotted Kevin Smith.

Clerks is one of those comedies my sister and I must’ve watched a bajillion times. Not only could I relate to Randall and Dante’s grievances about customers (omg the stories I could tell), I was fascinated with this grimy independent film’s frank sex talks, witty banter, and hilariously absurd scenarios. I’d never seen anything like it. I was an instant fan.

After discovering the movie being filmed at my mall was by archetypal GenX director Kevin Smith, I was there every single day to watch. Sarah learned they were looking for extras so she checked out how to get in on that fun but I couldn’t because you had to be available during times when I would’ve been at work. I remember seeing all the stars at one point or another, except Ben Affleck, I don’t know where that slippery mothertrucker was. I would quietly observe the filmmaking process from a distance and was surprised how often it was actually boring. Apparently, standing around waiting while crewmen set things up and repeatedly shooting the same scene was a typical day in moviemaking. On a few occasions I spotted Shannen Doherty and admired her outfits, which stand out now as the epitome of what was sexy in the ‘90s but at the time I just thought she looked cute.

I didn’t get to do the fun stuff she does in that elevator, if you know what I mean

I never lingered in the hopes I could meet any of the stars, never brought a camera to snap pictures, and never shouted or waved in a pitiful attempt to get their attention. That just wasn’t my jam, I guess because I never wanted to be that annoying fan celebrities complained about in magazines.

Jason Lee is like “Hey Eden Prairie babes, here I am”

Mallrats might have introduced Shannen Doherty to some Millennials, but most Gen-Xers knew her first as “Jenny” on Little House on the Prairie. I most associate Doherty with her role as the spunky little sister in Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, another ‘80s comedy I’ve seen too many times to count, and as one of the mean girls in the dark comedy Heathers.

I would’ve killed for their wardrobe back then, and by “killed” I don’t mean in the Heathers sense of the word

Doherty had been battling breast cancer for years now, even having a brain tumor removed, but the disease won. She was 53 years young, but forever immortalized in tv and film as some of the most memorable characters we grew up watching.

Mallrats is an underrated classic that was ahead of its time and if you disagree then I say “snootch to the nootch”, whatever the hell that means