The origin of the Charlie's Angels pose

Cafe Society
1

I’m having a bit of a Berenstein Bears moment.

Everyone knows the famous Charlie’s Angels three-person pose. One in the middle, standing straight and facing forward, hands in an action pose (typically holding a gun, extended either straight out or up). The two flanking people face away from the center person, their action-pose hands reaching out to the sides.

It’s obligatory for the various remakes and reboots to pay homage:

And all you have to do is mention it, and pretty much anyone can re-create it on demand:

It’s even available as stock photography:

https://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-charlies-angels-image709077

But here’s the thing — as far as I’ve been able to determine, the original Angels never actually did this themselves.

Their most famous “posed trio” image has variations on the women holding their hands in prayer, as a reference to the “Angels” part of their name:

In fact, it appears that this goes back exclusively to the opening credits graphic:

And this pose was, itself, never actually done by any of the original Angels. Real people taking up these positions is exclusively the province of after-the-fact reference.

The reason this comes up: My kids were watching Phineas & Ferb. I was watching over their shoulders, because as this sort of animation goes, it’s reasonably clever and funny and entertaining. I mean, it’s no She-Ra, but it’s still pretty good.

Anyway, they were doing one of their song-and-action numbers, and in the middle of it, the characters did this:

I laughed out loud. My daughters asked why. I explained it was a reference to an old TV show, and they asked me for details. I grabbed my phone and did a quick image query.

The quick query turned into a couple of long minutes of increasingly perplexed variations on different search terms as I tried to find an example from the original show. Eventually I gave up and used some of the pictures from the remakes, above, and that seemed to satisfy the girls.

But it left me with the unsettling realization that, until that moment, I would have been certain I had a memory of the original Angels doing that pose, because it’s been so omnipresent ever since. Except, no, that memory is false, fabricated, extrapolated in my imagination.

Am I the only one who would have sworn this was a real thing before it became a reference?

2

I only remember it from the opening credits. I suppose I might have thought it was one of those cases where it goes from real people to a silhouette, but I’m not surprised that it was only a silhouette.

3

That silhouette almost looks like it was drawn before the show was cast. I too, have a false memory of the original Angels striking that pose.

4

a) I hazily associated it with the silhouette. But b) I don’t remember the middle silhouette doing that.

5

I don’t recall this ever being done by the characters in the original show, it was just the silhouette in the opening credits. Two of them have longer hair, and one shorter, so either the image was done after the original trio was cast or the producers knew what looks they wanted for the three characters.

And no one ever does the radio. In fact, in all your examples, all three women are making the same gesture, whereas in the original all three were different.

6

Yeah, that was another surprise when I started digging into this. “Gun! Karate! And… walkie talkie?”

7

I remember a lot of their poses, but not that one in the silhouette.

8

If you watch the original intro, they do tie each silhouette to a particular Angel, maybe that led you to remember them being in the pose?

Warning - video link may cause unexpected stirrings if you were an adolescent boy when the show was originally broadcast.

9

Aw geez. What a terrible way to hold a gun.

10

I had similar recollections to the OP’s; the three live women forming the pose at least somewhere in the title or credits. In addition to the iconic silhouette drawing with the red background.

Somehow I don’t think I’d ever noticed the middle woman was holding a walkie talkie; I believed it was a rifle of sorts. Pretty obvious now.

@muldoonthief - Yeah, thanks for the memories. The first run of the show coincided with my college & grad school years. So those were older women of the almost cougary age from my POV. Rowwrrr! :smiley_cat:

It’s interesting how darn good looking yet not over-over-over-the-top they looked. By modern amped-up silicone-upped made-up celebrity babes, they look downright ordinary. For particularly sleek & shiny values of ordinary.


The best parody / tribute to the pose I ever saw was a large billboard along the freeway near where I used to live.

It was for a hair salon. It was a photo of three good-looking 30-something women with fairly extravagant hair making the pose. One stylist had large but real scissors upraised and spread wide open. Another was weilding a gun-shaped blow dryer and the third had a large bulbous hairbrush held up like some kind of medieval knight’s mace. It really, really worked; you (I really) couldn’t drive by without paying it attention. Despite driving by it every day coming home from work, it never got old.

One time when I needed a haircut I skipped my usual painfully male barbershop and went to their salon. I was a bit surprised to see the 3 gals on the billboard actually worked there. They were ~10 years younger than me and real easy to look at. Madam blow-dryer / gun gives a nice haircut too. Shame about me having a wife.

I’m wracking my brain to try to recover the name of their salon but it’s not coming back. This would be 15-20 years ago now. But, like so many salons, the name was sort of punny. It also paid homage to the name “Charlies Angels”. Google’s no help now, so I bet they’re long gone. Shame.

11

I see a lot of images out there that appear to have been slightly altered to make it look like a rifle. The one below is one of the more obvious, but there are others with more subtle differences that could be a rifle or walkie-talkie depending on your mood.

12

I’m thinking it was altered to gun like in real world for the show. That’s the title card used in wiki and on posters available on line.

13

It’s not in the link to the original credits, above. It’s more obviously a rife in those credits. And there are many subtle differences between the title card image in the OP and the linked credits.

Interesting! Did Steven Spielberg work on the show? :slight_smile:

14

regarding picture before casting. My recollection is that it was developed as a vehicle for Kate Jackson. She played somebody’s wife on The Rookies and was popular.

15

Charlie’s Tangles?

16

Close but no mousse. I think. You’ve got the idea though.