Mary-Kate and Ashley’s The Chal­lenge marked direct-to-video death for tweens

For plen­ty of young girls grow­ing up in the late 90s and ear­ly 00s, life revolved around one near-iden­ti­cal com­mod­i­ty: the Olsen twins. After mak­ing their joint debut aged nine months tak­ing turns play­ing Michelle Tan­ner on Amer­i­can sit­com Full House, the sis­ters were thrown into a nev­er-end­ing cycle of appear­ing in feel-good, trashy flicks for their equal­ly juve­nile audience.

What fol­lowed can only be described as glob­al pan­de­mo­ni­um – there were books, video games, and cloth­ing ranges that sold around the globe. Kids got their pho­to tak­en out­side Club Rush in the Bahamas after it was fea­tured in their 2001 vaca­tion caper Hol­i­day In The Sun even though they were too young to get in (…per­haps this one was just me). Regard­less of the vast dif­fer­ence in their lifestyle from almost all of their tween fan­base, Mary-Kate and Ash­ley defined a generation.

Though it wasn’t their last joint film appear­ance (this would be 2004’s New York Minute), their final direct-to-video release, 2003’s The Chal­lenge, seemed like an abrupt end to the strong Y2K girlie vibes that Mary-Kate and Ash­ley had become known for.

Set in Mex­i­co, the film fol­lows the for­mat of the then-fledg­ling US real­i­ty game show of the same name, pit­ting two teams of con­tes­tants against each oth­er to scoop the ulti­mate cash prize. Mary-Kate plays Shane, an LA girl look­ing to align her chakras and keep it real, while Ash­ley stars as Lizzie, the wound-up Wash­ing­ton DC prodi­gy who’s think­ing big and dress­ing for it too. Of course, the pair hate each oth­er after their par­ents’ messy divorce sent them to oppo­site sides of the US.

So far, it’s a clas­sic MK&A nar­ra­tive. Even their char­ac­ter stereo­types could be guessed to per­fec­tion, with Ash­ley once again play­ing the prep­py hyper-femme and Mary-Kate chan­nelling the pret­ty tomboy who plays with fire. Where The Chal­lenge begins to dif­fer is in its nar­ra­tive jour­ney. Most of the nifty 92-minute run­time is plagued by com­pe­ti­tion footage, with con­tes­tants either eat­ing raw eggs to win a wood­en tro­phy or cheer­ing each oth­er on to cross a rick­ety bridge sus­pend­ed over chop­py waters. On-cam­era game­play blurs with behind-the-scenes schem­ing, as view­ers are also intro­duced to the pro­duc­ers that con­trol the show’s out­put. Where things get real­ly meta is when we see why Shane and Lizzie are actu­al­ly there — to boost poor rat­ings thanks to their unpleas­ant fam­i­ly history.

To the 8‑year-old girls that want­ed to see the Olsen twins as life­long besties, it’s a nar­ra­tive deci­sion that prob­a­bly falls flat. For adults watch­ing with hind­sight, it’s a nasty reminder of what the sis­ters were actu­al­ly sub­ject­ed to off-cam­era. As the com­mer­cial cash cows of noughties Amer­i­ca, the Olsens were mer­chan­dised in every pos­si­ble way. Grad­u­at­ing from Full House to The Adven­tures of Mary-Kate and Ash­ley and You’re Invit­ed To… sub-fran­chis­es, their reign of mul­ti­me­dia blos­somed into shows like Two Of A Kind and So Lit­tle Time. It’s arguably their lat­er films that do the best work, from 1999’s Pass­port To Paris through to 2002’s When In Rome. A lot is achieved in a short space of time, but their for­mu­la­ic approach and the same three direc­tors on rota­tion equals profit.

Sim­ply put, The Chal­lenge is the arguable end of their tween direct-to-video pipeline because its sto­ry makes the Olsen twins unmar­ketable. Sure, watch­ing one of them eat worms is gross, pri­ma­ry school humour, but the psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare packed into the gameshow and world of real­i­ty TV are too far removed from what kids want. The entire trail­er for the real show plays out in the open­ing min­utes, mor­ph­ing into an advert for a TV series that’s look­ing to pig­gy­back off the estab­lished suc­cess of the Olsens. Mary-Kate and Ash­ley are clear­ly itch­ing to play with nuance and grav­i­tas, their now 17 years of age push­ing them toward big­ger artis­tic curiosi­ties. Com­bined with the Olsen’s grow­ing dis­com­fort with their posi­tion, audi­ence and cre­ator can no longer serve each other.

That being said, the film still holds key Olsen moments, and each is when The Chal­lenge is its strongest. It uses the ​“twin 1 is X and twin 2 is Y” theme to its advan­tage, ulti­mate­ly mak­ing the unit stronger than ever, as we knew it would. The girls frol­ic to upbeat music and go a lit­tle boy crazy like in all MK&A films, mak­ing us hark for the glo­ry days when all seemed well. The film is self-aware too, act­ing as a sign-off that brings past film boyfriends back for one final hur­rah. Iron­i­cal­ly, if the film was removed and iso­lat­ed from both the sup­ply and demand of 00s tweens and the Olsen canon, it’s actu­al­ly not that hideous.

Even so, The Challenge’s sig­nif­i­cance as the end of an era makes a lot of sense 20 years on. At the time, gen­er­al DVD sales were just about to nose­dive to lev­els that nev­er picked up again, which wasn’t helped by the intro­duc­tion of Blu-Ray in 2006. As DVD sales peaked in 2005, it’s pos­si­ble that Olsen tween movies might have had a few years left, but the change in indus­try pace coin­cid­ed with Mary-Kate and Ashley’s com­plete with­draw­al from act­ing alto­geth­er, instead opt­ing to focus on fash­ion design (their sig­na­ture brand, The Row, is a go-to among the A‑List). Both things hap­pen­ing at once was a turn­ing point in ear­ly 2000s cul­ture, as net­works piv­ot­ed to more on-chan­nel tween film releas­es like The Chee­tah Girls and High School Musical.

Their final film, 2004’s New York Minute, brings these super­fi­cial­ly fun themes back to the fore, and the girls bow out in style. The Olsen furore might have died slight­ly after The Chal­lenge, but the direct-to-video release sig­ni­fies the true end of their act­ing career – and how a gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren con­sumed their icons. We might now only pick up one of their DVDs if we’re vis­it­ing our par­ents and don’t have the WiFi pass­word, but for a gen­er­a­tion of adults, Mary Kate and Ashley’s direct-to-video adven­tures inspired wan­der­lust, romance and career aspirations.