In 1997, the Spice Girls were cresting the Girl Power wave. I, an eight-year-old weirdo in platform trainers with an imaginary boyfriend, revered the five-piece with a doglike devotion (except Geri—more on that later). The Spice Girls were my childhood soundtrack and the object of all my worldly ambitions. To quote Mel C's well-received 1999 solo offering , they were my northern star.

Properly construed, Spice World is one of the greatest films ever made, narrowly beaten only by Die Hard and Home Alone. There is much that is wonderful about the 1997 classic, and much that is merely good, but all of it is worth noting as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the film.

Weeks later, on May 31, 1998, the traitorous Geri confirmed all my childlike suspicions and quit the band. It was an act that bookended my childhood, slicing it into two halves as neatly as Richard E. Grant’s perfectly-defined sideburns in Spice World. The Spice Girl's split defined those early years: there was the time before Geri left—when all was well—and then there was the post-split heartbreak.

Tensions were fraught. I already hated my sisters on account of the fact they each had two eyebrows while I, a sluglike monobrow (to my eight-year-old self, this seemed a very bad and unfair deal). It was unfathomable to me that my dumb sisters would even countenance the idea of choosing the Geri commemorative tin—she couldn't even sing! I howled like a calving animal in the VHS aisle, until, eventually, my mom gave in. The entire car ride home, I gripped the Mel C tin wetly and smiled wolfishly out of the window, so my sisters wouldn't see me.

Of course, I watched Spice World in the cinema (many times), but my overriding memory of the film coincides with its 1998 VHS release. Now-defunct British retailer Woolworths was running a promotion: buy the VHS and get a free commemorative tin featuring the Spice Girl of your choice. My mom took my sisters and I shopping and we proceeded to fight all the way to the store. We were at a standstill: I demanded the Mel C tin, but my sisters wanted Geri.

A cultural moment was over. To quote another Mel C banger , things would never be the same again.

The period during which Spice World was produced—from pre-production in January 1997 through its cinematic release in December that year and then its VHS release in May 1998—perfectly mirrors the apex of the band’s success. It’s a euphoric moment in British cultural history: Tony Blair had just been elected; the economy was booming; British artists dominated the world charts, as "Cool Britannia" ruled. Things felt simple and even hopeful, in this pre-social media, pre-Iraq-war age—and the blithe, good-natured optimism of Spice World reflects this time.

Buoyed by the band's meteoric success, record executives had been toying with the idea of making a Spice Girls film for some time. "Wannabe" had been released in the UK in July 1996, but it wasn’t until the single was re-released in the States in January 1997—becoming one of the best-selling songs of all time by a female group—that the group’s manager, impresario Simon Fuller, began to take the idea seriously.

"The girls were being courted in Hollywood at the time, and they were offered a deal by Disney to do a film," remembers Kim Fuller, Simon's brother, who wrote the Spice World screenplay. (Everyone I interviewed for this feature refers to the group using the collective "girls.") But the group didn’t like the script Disney produced. "It was a bit Disney-fied, " Kim remembers. "I think it was about a young single mother of one of the girls, fighting hardship to form the band."