The Powerpuff Girls is an American animated superhero television series created by Craig McCracken for Cartoon Network. The show centers on Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup, three kindergarten-aged girls with superpowers. They live in the fictional city of Townsville with their father and creator, a scientist named Professor Utonium, and are frequently called upon by the city's mayor to help fight nearby criminals and other enemies using their powers.
McCracken created a short film, Whoopass Stew!, about a trio of child superheroes known as the Whoopass Girls, which was only shown at festivals. Following his hiring by Hanna-Barbera, McCracken changed its name to The Powerpuff Girls and produced the series' pilot for their What a Cartoon! series, which premiered during the Space Ghost Coast to Coast episode "1st Annual World Premiere Toon-In" on February 20, 1995.
The Powerpuff Girls premiered on November 18, 1998, on Cartoon Network. It aired for six seasons, with the final episode airing on March 25, 2005. Along with two pilots, a feature-length film, and three specials, a total of 78 episodes were produced. It was nominated for six Emmy Awards, nine Annie Awards, and a Kids' Choice Award during its run.
Various spin-off media include an anime series, three soundtracks, various video games, a 2016 reboot series, and an upcoming reboot series, as well as various licensed merchandise. A planned live-action television series was cancelled.
Premise
Characters The show revolves around the adventures of three kindergarten-aged girls with an array of various superpowers: Blossom (pink), Bubbles (blue), and Buttercup (green). 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. However, he accidentally spilled a mysterious substance called Chemical X into the mixture, creating three girls and granting them superpowers.
The Powerpuff Girls individually represent body, mind and spirit and adopt the characteristics of the oldest, middle and youngest child. Blossom is the red-haired "commander and leader" of the trio, who is known for her intelligence and for assuming responsibility of their public persona. Bubbles is an innocent blonde girl who is the most sensitive and emotional of the trio. She produces a high-pitched voice and tends to cry a lot. Buttercup is a black-haired tough tomboy who is known for her fighting abilities. The Powerpuff Girls attend Pokey Oaks Kindergarten, where they interact with other children and learn from their teacher Ms. Keane. As heroines they are crucial for the survival of Townsville and are cherished by most citizens. The Mayor of Townsville regularly calls them on the "Powerpuff" hotline for emergencies. Sara Bellum is the Mayor's dependable secretary whose face isn't shown on screen.
The Powerpuff Girls battle a variety of villains that make up their rogues gallery. These include their nemesis Mojo Jojo, an evil chimpanzee with a large mutated brain and high intelligence, who was Professor Utonium's assistant before he was accidentally spilled with Chemical X—the same accident that created the Powerpuff Girls; Fuzzy Lumpkins, a pink, furry hillbilly monster; the Amoeba Boys, three dimwitted, single-celled gangsters; "Him", a sinister demon who often plays mind games on the girls with his powers; Princess Morbucks, the spoiled daughter of Townsville's richest man who hates and envies the girls; and the Rowdyruff Boys, the Powerpuff Girls' evil counterparts created by Mojo using a mixture of "snips, snails, a puppy dog tail," and radioactive toilet water.
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."
Episodes
Production
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 the California Institute of the Arts. 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. McCracken missed classes and assignments while working on four separate short films of his Whoopass Stew! series, starring the three characters as the "Whoopass Girls". The concept was a superhero parody inspired by the television series Batman (1966). However, only one short film, "A Sticky Situation", was completed. 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. One of his animation instructors, Becky Bristow, was impressed and convinced McCracken to pitch the idea to her friend Linda Simensky, who was serving as the director of development for Nickelodeon at the time. Simensky liked the idea; however, she thought that superhero and action cartoons were not what Nickelodeon executives were looking for.
As McCracken began his third year at CalArts, his friend Paul Rudish hired him to become the art director for 2 Stupid Dogs at Hanna-Barbera, which became McCracken's first job in the animation industry. While working on 2 Stupid Dogs in 1993, he was notified that former Hanna-Barbera president Fred Seibert was looking for shows and pitched Whoopass Stew! as a production board for Hanna-Barbera. As Cartoon Network executives did not allow McCracken to market the series with the word "ass", two of his friends came up separately with the name "Powerpuff", thus the title was changed from The Whoopass Girls to The Powerpuff Girls. In addition, the "can of Whoopass", which originally gave the girls their superpowers, was replaced with Chemical X. Seibert was impressed and began negotiations for a series pickup. Contract negotiations stopped when the series was required to be part of the World Premiere Toons shorts program before turning into a regular animated series. The storyboards, models, backgrounds, layouts, timing, and sheets for the shorts were mostly finished in Hanna-Barbera, and the animation was provided from overseas.
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. The second and final Powerpuff Girls short "Crime 101" aired on World Premiere Toons in January 1996. Cartoon Network tested the shorts in various locations, receiving mixed responses from children. 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." Trying to understand their dislike of the short, McCracken attempted to redesign the Powerpuff Girls to appear more realistic. However, Cartoon Network executive Mike Lazzo convinced him to stay true to his original vision.
McCracken was recruited by his former CalArts classmate and roommate Genndy Tartakovsky to serve as an art director, chief character designer, and storyboard artist on Dexter's Laboratory. While working on that show, McCracken attempted to pitch The Powerpuff Girls to other entities, but they showed no interest. 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 let McCracken pitch The Powerpuff Girls again. This time, McCracken turned the Powerpuff Girls into well-defined characters by developing their personalities and expanding the series' concept. On December 1, 1997, Cartoon Network announced that they had greenlit The Powerpuff Girls for an animated series. As post-production of the second season of Dexter's Laboratory was concluding, many of its crew members joined to work on The Powerpuff Girls. McCracken looked over every aspect of the production, consisting of 35 crew members and costing $500,000 per each 30-minute episode.
The Powerpuff Girls debuted on November 18, 1998, and concluded on March 25, 2005, with a total of six seasons. 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. Unlike the original series, the special was animated with Adobe Flash. McCracken and his crew preserved the traditional animation style by studying the first season and testing with the software. 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.
Character conception When McCracken was rehired to work on the concept of The Powerpuff Girls, he realized that he was focusing on concepts more than on characters in the World Premiere Toons shorts. To fix that mistake, he came up with distinctive personalities and a backstory for the main characters, which is presented in the main title sequence for each episode.
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. With Simensky's encouragement, he assembled a bible for the series by writing twenty questions and answering them from the characters' perspective, denoting their individual personalities. 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.
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." He gave the character a redundant way of speaking, which was inspired by reading DC Comics' The Superdictionary as a child. Mojo Jojo's rhythms of dialogue were also inspired by the English-language adaptation of Speed Racer. McCracken conceptualized Sara Bellum as "the typical hot assistant, though her best feature [is] her brain." "Him" was designed as "a total homage" to the Blue Meanie from Yellow Submarine (1968). According to McCracken, the production staff developed Him "as scary as possible."
Writing and storyboarding During story sessions, the crew played with many ideas and motivated episodes based on typical childhood experiences, without doing any deep research on such topic. On top of that, they added the idea of how the Powerpuff Girls would face any childhood dilemma through a superhero's perspective. A three-to-four-page outline was written based on the story sessions. After they were finished, McCracken wrote detailed notes for storyboard artists, consisting of how he wanted the sequences to be storyboarded.
For six weeks, storyboard artists drew and pitched storyboards to the crew before being revised with redrawn sequences. Once they were sent to McCracken, he monitored every sequence and redrew them if the storyboard artists misinterpreted the notes he gave them.
Designs and animation