The movie “Legally Blonde” (2001) is one of the most popular and iconic movies of all time. Frequently on cable TV, during the entire 25 years since it was released. The original movie starred Reece Witherspoon as Elle Woods, a young woman who was rejected by her cruel and stupid boyfriend and tries to get into Harvard Law School to win him back.

One of the best parts of this very good movie is Elle’s resilience, which at first enabled her to start out badly at Harvard and then fight back to become a top student. Elle was so different than all the other Law students at Harvard, which caused a great deal of resentment from several egomaniac law students, angry that someone like this got into their school. This was yet another challenging problem that Elle had to overcome. Despite all the problems, Elle keeps her extremely positive personality and continues to wear pink, traveling almost everywhere with her tiny Chihuahua, Bruiser, and refusing to try to be like everybody else – just to fit in.

The most surprising thing about the new Amazon Prime Series “Elle” is that it took 25 years to come up with a great idea like this – following Elle’s life in the mid-1990’s while she was still in high school. The first task the producers of this eight-episode series did was casting Lexi Minetree as Elle Woods, as she is outstanding in this role, with her look, personality, and voice matching Reece Witherspoon’s perfectly.

The story has some similarities to the movie, where Elle’s father is forced to move from Los Angeles to Seattle due to a botched nose job within his plastic surgery business, forcing Elle to adapt to a Seattle High School where she is very different from every other student. Like the original movie, Elle has to overcome the hostility of many of the students, especially Kimberly (Chandler Kinney), who is nasty and cruel to Elle at every opportunity. Too much of this nastiness is overkill, especially towards someone as cute as Elle. Once arriving at this Seattle school, several different sub-stories allow Elle to eventually gain several friends, while never losing her own identity – including wearing pink outfits while everybody else wears dark, depressing grunge clothing. Over time, Elle forms new friendships with Liz (Gabrielle Policano), a gay young woman, along with Shannon (Danielle Chand), Miles (Jacob Moskovitz), and Dustin (Zac Looker). These friendships grow stronger as the series progresses, but not without many disagreements and conflicts along the way.

The main sub-story in this series involves the High School Principal(Matt Oberg) and the Dean of the school (James Van Der Beek) stealing money from the high school. Van Der Beek was in his final role during the latter stages of dying from colon cancer, and within the four episodes Van Der Beek appeared, it was difficult to see his extreme weight loss, while admiring his courage to continue working when he had such a short time to live.

The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this solid series is way too low at 53%, while my rating is 80%, and I strongly recommend this series.