The Powerpuff Girls

Characters

The show revolves around the adventures of three five-year-old girls with an array of various superpowers: Blossom (pink), Bubbles (blue), and Buttercup (green).^[2][3] As depicted in the opening sequence of each episode, the Powerpuff Girls were created by Professor Utonium in an attempt to create the "perfect little girl" using a mixture of sugar, spice, and everything nice.^[4] However, he accidentally spilled a mysterious substance called Chemical X into the mixture, creating three girls and granting them superpowers.^[4]

The Powerpuff Girls individually represent body, mind and spirit and adopt the characteristics of the oldest, middle and youngest child.^[5][6] Blossom is the red-haired "commander and leader" of the trio, who is known for her intelligence, assuming responsibility of their public persona.^[7] Bubbles is an innocent blonde girl who is the most sensitive and emotional of the trio.^[8][9] She produces a high-pitched voice and tends to cry a lot.^[9] Buttercup is a black-haired tough tomboy who is known for her fighting abilities.^[8][10] The Powerpuff Girls attend Pokey Oaks kindergarten, where they interact with other children, along with their teacher Ms. Keane.^[11] The Mayor of Townsville regularly calls them on the "Powerpuff" hotline for emergencies.^[12] Sara Bellum is the Mayor's dependable secretary whose face is obscured.^[11][12]

The Powerpuff Girls battle a variety of villains using their superpowers to fight crime in the city of Townsville.^[2][13] Mojo Jojo is an evil chimpanzee with a powerful, large brain and high intelligence.^[4] Jojo was Professor Utonium's assistant before he was accidentally spilled from Chemical X—the same accident that created the Powerpuff Girls.^[4][8] Fuzzy Lumpkins is a pink, furry hillbilly monster who possesses a banjo named Jo.^[11] The Amoeba Boys are three single-celled gangsters with simplistic minds.^[13] "Him" is a demon who possesses various supernatural and denomic abilities, such as manipulating with time and space.^[13] Princess Morbucks is the daughter of Townsville's richest man who badly wants to be a Powerpuff Girl.^[11] The Rowdyruff Boys are the Powerpuff Girls' evil counterparts created by Jojo using a mixture of "snips, snails, a puppy dog tail" and radioactive toilet water.^[11]

Setting

The show is set mainly in the city of Townsville, USA. Townsville is depicted as a major American city, with a cityscape consisting of several major skyscrapers. In his review of The Powerpuff Girls Movie, film critic Bob Longino of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reviewed the series as "one of the few American creations that is both gleeful pop culture and exquisite high art", analyzing that the drawings "emanate 1950s futuristic pizzazz like a David Hockney scenescape."^[14]

Development

In 1991, Craig McCracken made a small drawing of three young girls—a blonde, a redhead, and a brunette—while attending the character animation program in California Institute of the Arts.^[4][13][15] Wanting to create a superhero short film for his sophomore year, he incorporated superpowers into the girls and used them instead of a Mexican wrestler character he had previously created, named El Fuego.^[4][16][17] Titled Whoopass Stew!, McCracken worked on four separate short films of the series, missing classes and assignments; only one short film "A Sticky Situation" was completed.^[18] The concept was a superhero parody inspired by the television series Batman (1966).^[5] Along with McCracken's other short films, "A Sticky Situation" was shown at Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation in 1994.^[19] One of his animation instructors Becky Bristow was impressed, convincing McCracken to pitch the idea to her friend Linda Simensky for Nickelodeon.^[20] Simensky, who was serving as the director of development for Nickelodeon at the time, liked the idea.^[20] However, she thought that superhero and action cartoons were not what Nickelodeon executives were looking for.^[20]

When he began his first semester of his junior year at CalArts, his friend Paul Rudish hired McCracken to become the art director of 2 Stupid Dogs from Hanna-Barbera, becoming McCracken's first job in the animation industry.^[21] While working on 2 Stupid Dogs in 1993, McCracken was notified that former Hanna-Barbera president Fred Seibert was looking for shows and pitched Whoopass Stew! as a production board for Hanna-Barbera.^[16][22] As Cartoon Network executives does not allow McCracken to market the series with the word "ass",^[16][23] two of his friends who were separated with each other created the name "Powerpuff",^[24] thus the title was changed from The Whoopass Girls to The Powerpuff Girls.^[16] In addition, the Whoopass can was replaced by Chemical X.^[23] Seibert was impressed, negotiating The Powerpuff Girls for a series pickup.^[22] Contract negotiations stopped when the series was required to be part of the World Premiere Toons shorts program to become an animated series.^[22] The storyboards, models, backgrounds, layouts, timing, and sheets for the shorts were mostly finished in Hanna-Barbera, and the animation was provided from overseas.^[16]

The Powerpuff Girls' debut short "Meat Fuzzy Lumpkins" premiered during the Space Ghost Coast to Coast episode "1st World Premiere Toon-In" on February 20, 1995, as part of the World Premiere Toons program on Cartoon Network.^[25] The second and final Powerpuff Girls short "Crime 101" aired on World Premiere Toons in January 1996.^[26][27] Cartoon Network tested the shorts in various locations, receiving mixed responses from children.^[28] During a focus testing in Los Angeles with the producers and Seibert, a group of 11-year-old boys reacted that young girls should not be superheroes and that the creator "should be fired."^[4][29][28] Trying to understand their dislike of the short, McCracken attempted to redesign the Powerpuff Girls to appear more realistic.^[29][30] However, Cartoon Network executive Mike Lazzo convinced McCracken to stay true to his original vision.^[30]

McCracken was recruited by his former CalArts classmate Genndy Tartakovsky to serve as an art director, chief character designer, and storyboard artist on Dexter's Laboratory.^[31][32] While working on Dexter's Laboratory, McCracken attempted to pitch The Powerpuff Girls with other entities but they were uninterested.^[28] Simensky, who joined to serve as senior vice president of Cartoon Network Studios, enjoyed McCracken's work as a storyboard artist on Dexter's Laboratory, persuading Lazzo to rehire McCracken to pitch The Powerpuff Girls again.^[28][5] Once McCracken was rehired, he fixed mistakes he made in the shorts by incorporating personalities of the Powerpuff Girls and expanding its concept.^[33] On December 1, 1997, Cartoon Network announced that the network greenlit The Powerpuff Girls for an animated series.^[3] As post-production of the second season of Dexter's Laboratory was concluding, many of the crew who worked on Dexter's Laboratory joined to work on the series.^[34] McCracken controlled every aspect of its production,^[35] consisting of 35 crew members and costing $500,000 to produce a 30-minute episode.^[36]

The Powerpuff Girls debuted on November 18, 1998, and concluded on March 25, 2005, with a total of six seasons.^[37][38] Cartoon Network aired a half-hour special titled "The Powerpuff Girls Rule!!!" in the United States on January 19, 2009, as part of the series' tenth anniversary marathon.^[39] Unlike the original series, the special was animated with Adobe Animate.^[39] McCracken and his crew preserved the traditional animation style by studying the first season and testing with the software.^[39] On January 28, 2013, a CGI special titled Powerpuff Girls: Dance Pantsed was announced to premiere that year, though it was later delayed to January 20, 2014.^[40][41]

Character conception

When McCracken was rehired to work on the concept of The Powerpuff Girls, McCracken realized that one of his biggest mistakes was that he was focusing on concepts more than the characters in the World Premiere Toons shorts.^[33] To fix the mistake, McCracken provided a detailed background and backstory by introducing the characters and its concept in the main title sequence and supplemented the Powerpuff Girls by incorporating their status as superheroes and developing their private life.^[30][42]

Cartoon Network executives also advised McCracken to change the names of the Powerpuff Girls to Pink, Blue, and Green since they found it hard to differentiate them by Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup.^[43] With Simensky's encouragement, McCracken assembled a bible for the series by writing twenty questions and answers to explain the girls' individual personalities.^[4][5] McCracken balanced each of the girls' "cuteness and toughness", with Blossom placed "in the middle", Bubbles placed in the "cuteness" side, and Buttercup placed in the "toughness" side.^[44]

McCracken conceived Mojo Jojo as a "a green-faced evil monkey being beaten up by three little kindergarten-age girls", an image that he found interesting, later developing him as a "generic science fictiony, evil mastermind."^[45] He gave the character a redundant way of speaking, which was inspired by reading DC Comics' The Superdictionary as a child.^[4] Jojo's rhythms of dialogue were also inspired by the English-language adaptation of Speed Racer.^[4] McCracken conceptualized Sara Bellum as "the typical hot assistant, though her best feature [is] her brain."^[4] "Him" was designed as "a total homage" to the Blue Meanie from Yellow Submarine (1968).^[45] According to McCracken, the production staff developed him "as scary as possible."^[44]

Writing and storyboarding

In story sessions, the crew create many ideas and motivate stories based on experiences of young children.^[35] Although they did not research childhood fears to write the episodes, several episodes were based on their childhood experiences.^[15] For each episode, a three-to-four-page outline is written based on story sessions.^[35] After they were finished, McCracken wrote detailed notes for storyboard artists, consisting of what he wanted the sequences to be storyboarded.^[35]

For six weeks, storyboard artists drew and pitched storyboards to the crew before being revised with redrawn sequences.^[35] Once they were sent to McCracken, he monitored every sequence and redrew them if the storyboard artists misinterpreted the notes he gave them.^[35]

Voice actors

For Blossom, McCracken wanted "a kind of sincerity and strength and cuteness, and a real uniqueness to her voice."^[4] McCracken chose Cathy Cavadini as he considered her "perfect" for the character.^[4] Bubbles was the hardest character for McCracken to cast, citing that several voice actors do "cute-girl voices" but can become "really saccharine" and aggravating for viewers.^[4] After Tara Strong was cast, she developed Bubbles' angry reactions and screams while retaining the "cuteness" of her voice.^[4] McCracken cast E. G. Daily as Buttercup, stating that her voice "has that gruffness, but there’s still a cuteness to it."^[4] The Mayor of Townsville and the Narrator were voiced by Tom Kenny.^[4]

Designs and animation

The Powerpuff Girls incorporates a flat, simplistic design reminiscent of the UPA shorts and early Hanna-Barbera cartoons.^[4] McCracken designed the characters as unrealistic, "iconic" images.^[4] The Powerpuff Girls were drawn with big eyes, horizontally shaped oval heads, finger-less hands, and feet that resembles "socks filled with wet sand".^[4] Additionally, noses and fingers were not drawn to retain its symbolism of children.^[4] McCracken humorously based their character designs on Margaret Keane's paintings of children depicted with "big, sad eyes" from the 1960s.^[16]

As his first drawing of the Powerpuff Girls was small, McCracken did not draw certain body parts of the girls.^[20] McCracken later tried to draw their fingers, but felt that they never looked right.^[20] As McCracken drew more small drawings of them, he increased the sizes of their heads, eyes, bodies, and hands.^[16] McCracken preferred the Powerpuff Girls to appear more symbolic of children rather than going for a "realistic" look, meaning fewer body parts were needed.^[4] Partially inspired by the Church of the SubGenius figurehead J.R. "Bob" Dobbs whose spray painted images McCracken used to view were stenciled around his town, Professor Utonium was designed with straight lines and black-and-white colors.^[4] The Mayor of Townsville was designed with a top hat floating a few inches above his head to represent an image of a mayor.^[4]

All of the episodes were hand-drawn and produced at Rough Draft Studios' subdivision Rough Draft Korea.^[46] The timing was influenced by Tex Avery and Bob Clampett's shorts; its action sequences were inspired by anime.^[4] During production of the fourth season and The Powerpuff Girls Movie, the animation was switched from its traditional cel method to the digital ink and paint technique.^[47] Initially, McCracken wanted to continue the traditional cel method, feeling that computer animation still lacked the "visceral feeling" of traditional cel animation.^[48]

Music

McCracken wanted the music score to combine the orchestra with electronica and techno music to define its characters, energy, and speed.^[49] According to one of the series' composers James L. Venable, the electronica themes were incorporated into the action scenes while the orchestra varied its size in dramatic scenes.^[49] Mark Mothersbaugh auditioned to become the composer of the series by composing a demo and sending it to McCracken.^[50] McCracken rejected Mothersbaugh as he feared that Mothersbaugh could quit to score for feature-length films and cause production delays.^[50]

The opening theme used a sped-up drum break sample of "Funky Drummer" performed by Clyde Stubblefield.^[51] The ending theme song was composed by Venable, Thomas Chase, and Steve Rucker and performed by Scottish band Bis.^[52]

Critical reception

In a 2000 Entertainment Weekly review, Marc Bernardin complimented the show on its "spot-on pop-culture acumen" and "unparalleled sense of fun", giving it a warm welcome from earlier "lame" superhero cartoons that he grew up with.^[57] Peter Marks of The New York Times noted the show's use of adult humor and pop culture references, declaring it "the sort of playful satire that can appeal as much to a viewer of 37 as 7."^[58] Joly Herman of Common Sense Media described the show as a "cute, highly stylized series [that] thrills the senses with its strange characters, funny situations, and lots of lowbrow humor". She went on to say, however, that the show does go from innocent to violent in no time and that there is not much protecting young viewers against the violent undertones.^[59] Robert Lloyd of the LA Times praised the series, calling it "perfectly drawn, perfectly written and perfectly voiced."^[2]

The show began airing at the height of the "Girl power" trend in entertainment media.^[60][61] The Powerpuff Girls were often compared to the likes of Sailor Moon, Lara Croft, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who are also strong and heroic female leads.^[60][61] Terrence Briggs of Animation World Network noted that "The Powerpuff Girls works as an interesting comic deviation from the more sexual presences" of other fictional heroines.^[60] McCracken argued that he did not create the show to fill a gap in the market encompassed by the "Girl Power" slogan, but that its true vehicle was "good, strong characters" that made for good storytelling.^[62] However, he did believe that it gained momentum from being considered a "girl power" cartoon, and that it became successful among boys and girls for the inclusion of action scenes.^[63]

In an issue of the online newsletter The Big Blue Dot Trend Update published in 1999, The Powerpuff Girls was voted as the best animated series on television by teenagers, surpassing The Simpsons and Pokémon.^[53] In 2002, TV Guide ranked the Powerpuff Girls at number thirteen in the "50 Greatest Cartoon Characters of All Time" list.^[64] IGN ranked the series 18th in its "Top 25 Primetime Animated Series of All Time" list in 2006.^[65] The Powerpuff Girls peaked at the top spot in Entertainment Weekly's list of "10 Best Cartoon Network Shows" in 2012.^[66]

Awards and nominations

Film

Due to its popularity, Cartoon Network prompted a film based on the series, which was completed for less than two years.^[5] Titled The Powerpuff Girls Movie, it was released in the United States on July 3, 2002, by Warner Bros. Pictures.^[82] A prequel to the series, the film follows the story of how the Powerpuff Girls were created, and how Mojo Jojo became a supervillain.^[83] The film received a rating of 63% at review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, as well as some criticism for its violence.^[84][85] The movie grossed $16 million worldwide with an $11 million budget.^[86]

Anime adaptation

A Japanese anime series based on the series Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z premiered in Japan in 2006 and aired with 52 half-hour episodes.^[87] It was locally created to broadcast on TV Tokyo, exploiting the popularity of the original animated series on Japanese satellite television.^[87] Powerpuff Girls Z deviates from the original series in terms of genre and animation style.^[88]

Cancelled live-action adaptation

On August 24, 2020, a live-action television series based on the original animated series was announced to be in development at The CW.^[89] According to Variety, it would depict Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup as "disillusioned twentysomethings" resentful at losing their childhood to fighting crime and faced with the choice of reuniting "when the world needs them more than ever."^[89] The project, produced by Warner Bros. Television Studios, was written by Heather Regnier and Diablo Cody, who were serving as executive producers with Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter, and David Madden.^[89]

A pilot was ordered on February 9, 2021, and Maggie Kiley was hired as the director.^[90] On March 9, Variety reported that Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron and Yana Perrault were cast as Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup.^[91] On March 30, following the title change to Powerpuff, Donald Faison was cast as Professor "Drake" Utonium.^[92] On April 1, Nicholas Podany was cast as Joseph "Jojo" Mondel Jr., the son of Mojo Jojo.^[93] On April 7, the series began production.^[94] Two days later, it was reported that Robyn Lively was cast as Sara Bellum.^[95] Tom Kenny was also confirmed to be reprising his role as the Narrator from the original series.^[95] On May 24, The CW announced that the pilot would be reworked off-cycle, with the cast and crew remaining on board.^[96] A day later, Mark Pedowitz, president of The CW, stated that the script would be largely rewritten due to negative reviews.^[97] On August 11, Bennet dropped out of the project due to scheduling conflicts.^[98]

In May 2022, it was said to be in "some stage" of redevelopment.^[99] However, on May 18, 2023, The CW announced that the series had been cancelled by Nexstar Media Group.^[100] On July 5, it was reported that the series was no longer in development at Warner Bros. Television.^[101] On March 6, 2025, a full-length trailer of the series' pilot was leaked by Lost Media Busters on YouTube.^[102] It was later removed by Warner Bros. Entertainment that same day.^[103]

Music

The first album Heroes & Villains was conceived by McCracken, choosing bands who influence him and the series.^[37] Released in July 2000, it features original songs about the Powerpuff Girls characters by various artists, including the new wave group Devo, Bis, The Apples in Stereo and Frank Black.^[4] The album topped the Billboard's Kid Albums chart for six weeks.^[50][104] Additionally, it peaked at number 181 on the week of August 12, 2000, and charted for two weeks on Billboard 200.^[50][105] The music video for the Apples in Stereo song "Signal in the Sky (Let's Go)" premiered in November 2000 during the six-hour "Powerpuff Girls Music Marathon" on Cartoon Network.^[50]

The second album The City of Soundsville features electronica-style character themes.^[106][107] The third and final album Power Pop was considered a "big disappointment" and was not received as well as the previous albums.^[108] The British girl group Sugababes also released "Angels with Dirty Faces" to promote The Powerpuff Girls Movie.^[109] The song peaked at number seven on the UK Singles Chart.^[110]

Video games

Several video games were created to promote the series. The Powerpuff Girls: Bad Mojo Jojo, released on November 14, 2000, follows Blossom as she tries to beat Mojo Jojo.^[111] The Powerpuff Girls: Paint the Townsville Green, released in December 2000, follows Buttercup as she fights crime.^[4][112] The Powerpuff Girls: Battle HIM follows Bubbles in her fight against HIM and was released in January 2001.^[4][113] The Powerpuff Girls: Chemical X-traction, released in October 2001, follows the girls battling enemies in a variety of settings in order to reclaim Chemical X and track down Mojo Jojo, who fed the material to all the villains in Townsville.^[114][115]

The Powerpuff Girls: Mojo Jojo A-Go-Go centers around the name of the Powerpuff Girls' mission to stop Mojo Jojo and his minions.^[116][117] Released in 2002, The Powerpuff Girls: HIM and Seek follows the girls battling their variety of enemies through Townsville while on a scavenger hunt.^[118] PC games were also created for the series, including The Powerpuff Girls: Princess Snorebucks and The Powerpuff Girls: Gamesville.^[119][120]