Not too hard, is it? We almost live in that world already, which is what gives Josie and the Pussycats its appeal, its humour - and it’s edge. “The movie takes place six months from now, whenever now is,” says producer Marc Platt, “so it’s a reality-based world, but heightened and stylised. It takes us to a place we’ve never been, be it Riverdale or the big city the girls find themselves in.”

It’s all quite recognisable, though. “The music, the production design and the cinematography all reflect the MTV world,” says co-producer Tracey E Edmonds. Edmonds is also the wife of music-industry legend Kenneth ‘Babyface’ Edmonds, who is himself executive producer of the film, and must have recognised a few moments from his own music-producing career with such artists as Whitney Houston, Boyz II Men, Madonna, ‘N Sync and Britney Spears. More to the point, both Edmonds are big fans of the original comic strip-turned-TV series.

Because the real origin of Josie and the Pussycats, of course, is an Archie’s comic from the sixties and a Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon from a decade or so later: while Rachael Leigh Cook, Tara Reid and Rosario Dawson bring them to life in the film, Josie and her two teenage friends have existed for almost 40 years in the memories of those who read comics or watched Saturday morning television - which is to say, quite a few of us.

Wyatt Frame, played by Alan Cumming, with Mega Records’ boy band Du Jour (clockwise from left: Seth Green, Donald Faison, Alex Martin and Breckin Meyer)

“The original characters are wonderful – funny, charming and good role models,” sums up Deborah Kaplan, who co-wrote and co-directed the film. “And now … they rock!”

But Kaplan and her writing/directing partner, Harry Elfont, didn’t have the original idea for the movie: that came from Riverdale Productions, the company that makes all the TV cartoons based on the classic Archie’s comic series. With the market for comic-book adaptations currently dominated by ‘dark’, late-teen/early-adult material like X-Men and Blade, the folks at Riverdale obviously felt that the time had come for something brighter, lighter and sexier. The Pussycats, in other words.

As the project progressed through Universal Studios, it soon became clear that almost everyone who came into contact with it had a little corner of their memories dedicated to Josie, Melody, Val and their music. Kaplan and Elfont, who had met up at New York’s toney Tisch School of the Arts (and, in Elfont’s case, even studied film-making at Oxford University in England), may not have been the most obvious Josie and the Pussycats fans. But the pair understood just how the project could be simultaneously updated and brought to the big screen: by telling the story against the backdrop of a stylised version of the music business, in which product placement, corporate greed and megalomaniac moguls are the order of the day. That way, there would be the added element of three teenage heroines fighting back against a corrupt world.

In Kaplan and Elfont’s script, Josie and her life-long friends are a garage band in Riverdale who make their own kind of music, but have few fans and play gigs to near-empty venues. Not that they care: it’s their music and, if nobody likes it, well, that’s just too bad. Besides, the world outside, with its obsessive focus on labels, trends and this week’s clothes, is not really something they want to belong to.