Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story

In the third and final episode the narrator and investigative reporter, Ms Scaachi Koul reveals that when she told people she had interviewed Joseph Francis on the subject of his once mighty Girls Gone Wild empire, she says the reaction was generally, oh yeah I have a vague recollection of all that. That is exactly what I thought when "Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story" was released on Peacock!

Interesting story of how high school AV club nobody Francis rises to softcore(mostly) porn video tape impresario and multimillionaire. But this is just the peamble.

"Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story" is a well done mix of: The producers boiling down nine hours worth of Koul-Francis one-on-one conversations; interviews with several girls coerced into flashing their boobs while inebrieated on spring break for peanuts (a GGW T-shirt and/or a couple hundred dollars) and the negative impact it has has on their lives; and discussions with former GGW camera men(yes, surprise, all behind the cameras are men) and other GGW employees. This paints a vivid (and I must say entertaining) picture of Joseph Francis as one hell of a misogynistic sleaze bag.

Also, included is some opining of GGW's impact on overall society in general. To this reviewer, this is not definitive, but should be left to the audience, to mull over and agree or disagree.

Finally, to my surprise, no mention is made of Snoop Dogg, and his involvement both as pitchman on GGW infomercials, and host on at least one of the tapes.

It seems as if this documentary mini series should have been made years ago. From this point in time, it does not seem to be much of an audience for those who genuinely care about this story. We remember there was a brief mini series episode in 2022 of the Rich & Shameless which briefly covered this.

Some of the newer revelations is that there were underaged girls on camera during the beginning stages of the franchise. It was clear the cameramen and overall team of the crew weren't experienced or else these problems wouldn't have happened. The girls themselves should have known better as well. This mini series is rather quite bias towards the women "victims" documenting some of these women roughly twenty or so years later.

This mini series also reminds us how big the franchise was during its peak days, with many celebrities supporting them with merchandise and with Joe Francis himself being close with a few of them. The main reason as to why this entire franchise ultimately failed was because of the rise of social media, easier access to free adult sites and also them using real girls as opposed to adult star actresses (however that is of course what made their foundation stand out and feel authentic).

In the end, it may be eye opening to those completely unfamiliar with the situation but for a majority of people, it doesn't cover too much new ground. It is a memory lane/ nostalgia type series.

Still trying to find the part where I'm supposed to feel bad about women making adult decisions and exposing themselves. At no part did I see a camera man hold up a gun to their heads and force them to show their breasts. Per usual it's naive women who want to have a good time and only regret their decision because of embarrassment and or how they will be viewed by friends and loved ones. This is a tired old story everyone knows how it ends man bad women good. Eerie music and dark lighting makes it more sinister than actually is. Zero accountability or personal responsibility was very taken for the so called victims.

I'm literally asking because I couldn't hear a large portion of it. The sound engineer and QC needs to be fired. Often times the music is so loud that you can't hear the person being interviewed. Thus creating a huge problem of trying to follow what should be the simplest of stories.

Unfortunately, I'm in no position to commend on the meat of the documentary as I couldn't hear a lot of it and I did not finish it due to this. It's very annoying.

I cannot recommend watching this title unless yo my want to turn on the subtitles and read it (which is not what I had in my for today).

It bums me out cause I was one of those kids that saw these late night infomercials and it was a huge filters phenomenon at the time but I guess I'll never know what happened 🤷‍♂️

Synopsis - Women are baring their breasts for the camera. Joe sees an opportunity to profit from this and subsequently makes a lot of money. I'm not going to defend any of the criminal acts that may have been committed, but it seems the majority of the women have a moment of clarity after the fact.

This could have easily been a 30 minute episode on Dateline or something similar. Why this material was expounded to 3 hour docuseries is quite perplexing. Who approved the audio mix for the final edit? To say it is subpar doesn't really do it justice. The background audio should never overpower the dialogue from your subject!!!

I gave up after the first episode and hope you will do the same. Read the Wikipedia article with a fireplace stream in the background. You'll save time and have a much more pleasant experience.

Do better next time Peacock.