ABSTRACT
Gidget is a transmedia franchise consisting of five original novels and two novelizations, three feature films, two different television series, and three made-for-TV movies, as well as comics, board games, popular music, parodies and more, extending from the late 1950s well into the 1980s and beyond. Gidget is one of the earliest teen girl franchises and one of the longest lasting. Gidget is an early instance of what Henry Jenkins describes as transmedia storytelling and Amanda Klein and R. Barton Palmer call a multiplicity, insofar as Gidget appears in multiple texts across various media, but each text is a coherent whole, and readers or spectators can enter the Gidget narrative at different points; but Gidget offers up enough variations in enough different media that almost no fan will know the whole; and there is room for fan participation and free-play. Gidget needs to be understood intertextually, not only by examining each Gidget text in relation to the others but also by reading Gidget in socio-historical context and in dialogue with other contemporary novels, films, TV shows, and other discourse.
