Was The Powerpuff Girls EVER that great?

Cafe Society
1

So I caught a bunch of stuff on the recently-axed live action Powerpuff Girls, and the news that Craig McCracken reacquired the rights and is planning some kind of revival. There’s been a predictable amount of hand-wringing over this, and of course more than a little residual bile thrown at the 2016 reboot. The overwhelming consensus seems to be that nothing could match the original cartoon series and the fans want more of that.

And I have to ask…what is it about the original series that made it so beloved? It played out like a deconstruction, if not a right wing propaganda piece about how females are inferior and shouldn’t be allowed to control anything. Heck, I was a pretty big fan (I certainly liked it a lot more than Johnny Bravo or Courage The Cowardly Dog) and when it was over I soon realize how terribly it had aged.

Here. These were the basic Powerpuff Girls stories:

  • The girls get into a big dustup with the bad guy(s), get absolutely creamed, and later prevail using some ridiculous out-of-nowhere tactic which uses none of their powers or fighting abilities, which was invariably “what they should have done all along”. :roll_eyes:

  • The girls get into a big dustup with the bad guy(s), get absolutely creamed, and have to beg the help from a third party, often another bad guy.

  • The girls fall into the bad guy’s trap and are utterly helpless until either an unlikely savior with a tiny fraction of their powers or some ridiculous twist saves them.

  • One or more of the girls gains a new power/skill/tool and royally screws it up again and again and again until barely managing to get a handle on it at the 11th hour.

  • The girls get horribly mistreated and can do nothing about it. The tormentors completely get away with it and learn nothing. (Goddam… :rage:)

  • An enemy of the girls gains enhanced powers, which they can’t deal with at all, and only some random lucky fluke allows them to prevail.

  • One or more of the girls completely screws up and causes irreparable damage.

  • One of the girls makes a bad decision, let’s her heart take over her head, or falls into a pattern of destructive behavior, putting the others in danger, and they struggle mightily to snap her out of it.

  • Someone the girls care about is in danger, and it should be an easily fixable problem, but it takes such an embarrassingly long time for them to get their crap together that they avoid utter disaster by seconds.

  • The girls get thrown headfirst into a living nightmare, the lesson of which generally is either they can’t ever have any fun or they shouldn’t ever have any fun.

  • The girls try to get friendly with either another person or a pet and it blows up in their faces in the worst possible way.

  • Something that would definitely qualify as child abuse or a gross miscarriage of justice happens, but because there’s a lesson that needs to be taught it gets a free pass. :rage:

There is no superhero fantasy here. There is no “girl power.” (They did an episode mocking the idea, for crying out loud.) Seriously, exactly how many episodes were there where they took the initiative and resolved the crisis, unassisted, with their superpowers, without massively screwing up, and weren’t crapped on afterward? There’s Boogie Frights, there’s Monkey See Doggy Two, and beyond that I’m drawing a blank. The girls seemingly exist to sell merchandise and be punching bags.

Which is why I could never understand the huge beef over the 2016 series. Other two seconds of butt wiggling in one episode which apparently blew everyone’s minds, what was so awful about it that wasn’t equally awful about the original series? From beginning to end I was like, yep, she going to screw the pooch, yep, she’s going to get beaten up, yep, she let her emotions take control and she’s about to get burned, again. Honestly, it could’ve been a college animation project by someone who admired Craig McCracken’s work, it was that on point. (Powerpuff Girls Z was a “what if” adaptation within the framework of a magical girl anime and never pretended to be anything else, so I have no input on that one.)

I fully understand that I’m risking the same dumbfounded looks I got from my Calvin and Hobbes OP. Look, it’s very simple: I’ve suffered so much pain, abuse, and injustice in my life that I can’t overlook it. If it’s a cartoon animal tormenting the crap out of another cartoon animal, yes, that can be funny, I don’t have a problem with that. But when you have three small, powerless, human (okay, human-like) girls, then give them awe-inspiring abilities, and make them EVEN MORE POWERLESS as a result, well, problem. I could watch a revival of Dexter’s Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, I.M. Weasel, or Hi Hi Puffy Amiyumi. I dread what a new Powerpuff Girls would be like.

2

I was in my late 30s and a big fan. It’s really the only contemporary children’s show I ever liked as an adult. I thought the Beat-Alls was the funniest thing I’d ever seen. But the novelty wore off by the time the theatrical film came out. I have no desire to revisit the old show or any reboots.

3

My girls were terrified of Mojo Jojo.

So we never watched.
I feel we didn’t miss much.

4

My kids loved it. I didn’t watch it much.

A funny story though: i have a grandaughter via my stepdaughter so this grandaughter
is only a year (maybe less) younger than my daughter. They are still very close, and during the power puff years watched the show together.

I don’t recall all the specifics, but one episode featured a pile of mashed potatos that a fly landed on? My grandaughter apparently had a very weak stomach and threw up big time from just watching an animated fly land on animated potatos.

My daughter quit watching it when my g-daughter was around. Because just the thought of the show made g-daughter queasy let alone watch the show or hear the theme music. That was true for a lonnng time. She hasn’t lived that down to this day. :joy:

5

I tried watching and couldn’t. I’m not exactly sure what but there’s something unsettling about the way they blink.

6

I never watched an ep. but am now hopelessly confused because I thought the entire point was them being proactive and independent.

7

One great cross over with DC :slight_smile:

8

Likewise. They were way after my cartoon-watching days, but I admit I was surprised by the OP and am following the thread looking for either corroboration or debunking.

On a sorta-related note …

AIUI the Power Rangers were a similar idea and more or less contemporary to Powerpuff. Four youthful folks with various super powers doing good. Started as comics/anime, then continued as either live human or animated cartoon, then later as the other format. IIRC at least some of the Rangers were female.

How did the characterization of them go. Was the group effective or ineffective. Were the women just there to be victims needing rescue, or were they fully capable members of the team, sometimes in fact the savior of the episode?

Not looking to hijack, but rather to compare / contrast and see if there’s anything one series can tell us about the other.

9

Ok, olde farte here (37 when it debuted), and a male to boot, but I loved PPG. I thought it was cleverly written. I didn’t watch it for “empowerment”, though I do enjoy watching women heroes (Black Widow, the modern Wonder Woman, Brittany Force ( :slight_smile: ) as long as they don’t oversex them). I just thought it was fun.

I don’t remember it being anything like in the OP. I haven’t watched it in 25 years, though.

I liked it better than Johnny Bravo, who seemed really one-dimensional, and it got annoying how everyone shit on him every episode. He’s not THAT bad a person!

And I like saying “Mo-o-o-o Jo JOJO!”

:slight_smile:

10

Another non-watcher but I thought a central idea was that they were literally children so I guess it makes sense that they would get captured or need help on a regular basis.

But I do empathize with the OP. I’ve seen people get Big Mad over revivals to shows like He-Man, She-Ra and the Thundercats and can only think “You know those cartoons sucked when they were new, right? You only watched them because you were nine and that’s what was on after school. You can’t ‘ruin’ a cartoon that was just a 20 minute toy commercial.”

While PPG was after the big “Cartoons as toy commercials” boom of the 80s and I understand there’s some decently regarded 90s animation, I’m still going to guess that it doesn’t hold up well to adult viewing today and strife over reboots is largely driven by nostalgia and weird culture war nonsense.

Though I did see the “live action” trailer and that did look like hot garbage. I don’t care about PPG but I was still mad that mankind wasted energy on that.

11

I remember this one!

12

Not quite

13

As I understand it, the Power Rangers started off as a Japanese live-action show. It was converted into an American live-action show by keeping all of the costumed action scenes (since the costumes include full face masks so you can’t see the actors anyway), but recasting the uncostumed teenagers as Americans and re-shooting those scenes in English (maybe also changing the stories, but the non-powered parts were pretty bland high-school drama, so “stories” might be a stretch).

Though it was probably inspired by Voltron, an earlier animated show that also had a bunch of animal giant robots that combined into a humanoid giant robot. And which got an animated reboot when my generation (who grew up on the original) had kids.

14

All the info is in the Wikipedia article I linked. (The Super Sentai franchise started in 1975, the source animation for The lion version of Voltron was from 1981.)

15

For me, it was all the aesthetic and humorous absurdity. It never struck me that the show was trying to do anything but make me laugh. The “girls” were amusing because they were freaks of Science in the bodies of exaggeratedly cute children with the same daily petty concerns of all children.

16

Mojo Jojo is my spirit guide.

17

Wait, really? So the influence was in the other direction?

Well, Voltron was still way cooler than Power Rangers, anyway.

18

I’m learning more about this stuff all the time.

Assuming you’ve pegged it here, the OP’s idea that the kids get in over their heads and need outside rescue regularly will certainly resonate with an audience of ages, say, 4 to 9 who pretty well expect every exciting IRL adventure of their own ends with adults as deus ex machina to save the day. After they’ve been as heroic as they can be, which isn’t much by adult standards.

19

I watched the Power Puff Girls in my twenties and loved it, because it was a COMEDY through and through. It just happened to star three cute little girls with super powers.

20

Back when this story came out a few weeks ago TPTB had already scrubbed copies of the trailer from sites and all I could find was long “reaction videos” commenting about it (and “reaction videos” are amongst the most awful crimes of the modern age) but a look again today found it: