thoughts before the tenth anniversary release of The Powerpuff Girls on DVD
I like cartoons. Did I mention somewhere that I like cartoons? If the comment on the masthead didn't indicate so then I indicate it now.
We are coming upon a not-very solemn occasion my friends on the internet. We are coming along to a decade with the Powerpuff Girls. When I was a kid I saw Hanna Barbara cartoons and most of them, after an initial age 5-7 fascination with Scooby Doo and The Flintstones wore off and I turned to Transformers, G. I. Joe, and Star Blazers, seemed to me cheap knock-off cartoons that lacked in characterization or plot. Yes, it sounds incredibly snobby but I was an incredibly snobby kid about cartoons, especially by the age of about 10-12. I found it ANNOYING that Optimus Prime won all the time and was so flawless he never made any real mistakes. By that time I had completely left Hanna Barbara cartoons behind, though there was a certain drive-by-the-car-wreck fascination I had with the excreble Space Ghost.
But in the 1990s Hanna Barbara capitalized on its trashy past and brought Space Ghost back in Cartoon Planet and the weird but often strangely satisfying Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. It was a sort of cartoon playing out of the equally cartoonish but puppet-based Mystery Science Theater 3000. I could get all meta and talk about how both MST3K and SG:C2C present worlds in which evil is reduced to the banal, the petty, the pathetic and use that as a cultural measure of a certain moral failure in society in the West to properly address or consider the actual magnitude of evil in our world. But that would be so obviously both petty and extravagantly silly that I leave jokes too dry but for the eggiest of eggheads with genre fascinations to pretend that I actually wrote that. Some essays are better left as ideas and not essayed. Here I am making dumb puns ... as though there were other kinds.
But by the time the Powerpuff Girls hit the TV I began to see that Hanna Barbara might do something I never thought possible, get behind an actually original idea (as opposed to a neutered or kiddified Looney Toons knock-off or a rip off of the Honeymooners in space or in the stone age) for the first time since ... say 1965 or so. The Powerpuff Girls were doubtless not the only original series concept HB got behind but it was the one that, when I saw it, I didn't regret seeing! Other shows that got launched like Sealab 2021 or Space Ghost's reboot were obviously indebted to earlier creations and that's not getting to the Brak show. Mind you I'm not saying ANYTHING bad about the Brak show! I'm not that inspired to say much about Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I enjoy it in small doses but the show that for me single-handedly rehabilitated Hanna Barbara's decades of suck was basically the show affectionately abbreviated to PPG.
Why? Simple, it was a funny show. It was a show that was geared not just toward kids but toward adults. There was nothing about Femme Fatale that kids would necessarily get in terms of jokes but the character herself was altogether a joke. The characters were all types but types of the sincerely played out kind. McCracken and Tartakovsky and company only winked through the camera lens a handful of times and played things relatively straight. By that I mean we got a HB cartoon that didn't have some canned laugh track as happened in earlier epochs. The show simply had to be funny in order to survive and was on late enough that it couldn't afford to pander either just to kids or adults. Saving the world before bedtime was an apt sales pitch.
I have read comments from any number of people with delusional nostalgia who miss the days of the 1980s Saturday morning cartoons as though those were the be all and end all of actually good cartoons. No, dude, seriously, they WEREN'T that good. I've got a passage from Ecclesiastes for you folks, don't ask yourself "where are the old days that were better than these?" because it is not from wisdom you ask that question. Do you really want Saturday morning cartoons where Optimus Prime and the Autobots cross the Atlantic ocean on water skis? Really? How were all these multi-ton vehicles supposed to FLOAT on water enough to mvoe forward? Russian accents in G. I. Joe anyone? Lion-O's sword? And at the risk of inviting some back-talk for using this colloquialism, even at the age of 11 we all knew that He-Man was totally gay.
And when guys in their thirties (and isn't it ALWAYS usually guys in their thirties) complain about how cartoons were all better in the 1980s I bet they aren't really talking about the Snorks, My Little Pony, Jem, Rubik the Amazing Cube, the Mr. T. Show, the Gary Coleman Show, Laverne & Shirley (the cartoon, not the live action series), the Private benjamin cartoon, Turbo Teen, or Pole Position! Naw, they're thinking of stuff like Thundercats, G. I. Joe, Transformers, MAYBE Silverhawks. Some more obscure folks might name drop Thundarr the Barbarian and more could point to some landmark imports like Star Blazers or maybe point to Robotech. Stuff like Tranzor Z or Speed Racer from earlier periods might come up, too.
All that is to say that if you really go back and WATCH most of these shows you'll see that the people who complain about how bad shows like Teen Titans or The Batman are don't know the suckitude of the cartoons they are actually defending by way of comparison. Transformers G1 wasn't THAT good. Beast Wars, after a weak season 11 first half, got pretty interesting. The Transformers movie that is often beloved by fans, crap. No, it is NOT better than the Michael Bay film. Michael Bay's film is at the same level and has a less obtrusive soundtrack. I don't care if you think Optimus Prime's death signalled the end of your childhood. The movie just wasn't too good. The kinds of continuity errors that fanboys forgive to consider TF a decent movie within the context of the show is, well, peculiar.
All that is to say that my fondness for PPG is not based on a childhood nostalgia. I was an adult and in the work force by the time the show came out. I wouldn't say the 1990s were a new golden age of cartoons by any means. I'd say it's more like a silver age. We didn't have Disney or Looney Toons or the Fleischers and the truth is no one is likely to "beat" those artistic achievements but we had Batman: the animated series, we had an influx of anime that people began to have more appreciation for, we had the DC animated universe as a whole, Miyazaki's work gained currency and Pixar enabled Disney to get behind the release and distribution of cartoons that didn't suck.
Perhaps the single biggest innovation was simply The Simpsons demonstrating that a prime time cartoon geared toward adults and not just children could work. Beavis and Butthead laid the groundwork for other shows like King of the Hill and to some degree South Parh. The 1990s didn't equal, in most respects, the level of artistic innovation of the golden age, but it consolidated the reality for cartoons that is true elsewhere but wasn't so true here, that cartoons could appeal to a wide audience but also diversity out to more adult stuff.
Where the Powerpuff Girls fit into that, for me, is that it was simply a fun show that works at multiple levels. Take anyone element of the show or the writing or the characters and you'll see that it doesn't "look" like a particularly special show. But the show was fortunately often quite a bit more than the sum of its, on the face of it, ordinary parts. The blonde, redhead, brunnete breakout of character designs bespoke covering all the bases of girlyness. The Professor served as not just a father figure but as someone the girls could rescue. McCracken once said, I think, that he wanted to create a show in which girl power and feminist ideas could be presented in a way that was fun and accessible for anyone.
As a cultural manifestation of would be feminist agitprop, if you want to put the worst possible spin on the motive (which I think would be extremely unfair but I say this to make a rhetorical point), I would say The Powerpuff Girls succeed by taking the high road of taking the low road. Aim to please, first of all.
C. S. Lewis famously opined that the best way to tell stories to children it to tell a fun, pleasing story and prefer that moral lessons are learned along the way. The WRONG way to approach things would be to begin with the moral lesson children ought to learn and then go about fashioning a story that gets the job done. The Powerpuff Girls, right up to the name (or down to the name) demonstrated that the committment to first make sure it's fun goes a long way. Even if McCracken conceived of the series as a way to promote a social view you won't see that played out in so blatantly a didactic fashion that you "have" to deal with the subtext/metatheme to even get drawn into the show.
I suppose if I were to arbitrarily select two cartoons that for me bookended the 1990s that had signal agendas they wanted to promote you could go one of two ways. At the start of the 1990s there would be Captain Planet and at the end of the 1990s there would be the Powerpuff Girls. Which of these cartoons even got to the point of having a tenth anniversary release of the entire run of the series?
Particularly in terms of how Christians with conservative theology and politics might see things, the social agenda PPG was designed to help promote is so sweet, charming, and in many respects benign where speechifying goes it would be easy to see virtues in the show. If Christians wanted to freak out into culture war mode they would have been better off freaking out about The Powerpuff Girls rather than Pokemon or Captain Planet. Captain Planet's didactism was so off-putting that that might be the single simplest reason there's not some tenth anniversary box set of the entire run of Captain Planet. I think those Christians would need to chill out but that's not really why I'm writing.
I'm writing to share some of my enthusiasm for a very cute show. Tara Strong and E. G. Daily do some of their most memorable work here and Cathy Cavadini is great as Blossom. I have a soft spot for Strong's voice-over work. I liked her as Batgirl, liked her as Bubbles a great deal, liked her work as Raven on Teen Titans. Even her tiny role in the dub of Spirited Away was fun for what a small part it was. And, yes, I even know that she did work under her maiden name as Tara Charendoff. Yes, I am that much of a cartoon nerd that I recognize voice actors. Roger Jackson gave us one of the landmark voices of the late 1990s with the wonderful voice of Mojo Jojo, easily one of the greatest ineffectual blowhard villains in cartoons in the last ten years. What's not to like about a genius level monkey who can't get his plans to work because he's a monkey and he's fighting three little toddlers with powers that get into pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman level? Answer? Nothing.
So my suggestion to 1980s cartoon nostalgists is to rethink your loyalties. There are very few cartoons from the 1980s I would want my now 7-year-old and 4-year old nieces to watch from that period. That cartoon with Bill Cosby as a bad guy and the hourglass full of thistles? You remember that one? The Care Bears movies 1 and 2? Trust me, that age of "good" cartoons you're remembering from the 1980s had a lot of crap. If you think Michael Bay was wrong to make a Transformers cartoon that desecrated your childhood, well, you didn't have to watch that thing, did you? And the truth is that the only thing I really remember for Transformers are a few voices--Chris Latta as Starscream, Frank Welker as Megatron, and Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, and Scatman Cruthers as Jazz, of course. But, really, I never thought of Jazz as Jazz, I always thought of him as Hong Kong Phooey (a show that was in some ways more fun as a concept than execution but another HB cartoon that I admit I remember fondly, seeing episodes on reruns in the mid 1980s that really came out in mid 1970s).
So, in short, forget the 1980s if you're a nostalgia type and if you were a fan of Powerpuff Girls you can be content knowing this series is finally getting what looks like a decent release package.
We are coming upon a not-very solemn occasion my friends on the internet. We are coming along to a decade with the Powerpuff Girls. When I was a kid I saw Hanna Barbara cartoons and most of them, after an initial age 5-7 fascination with Scooby Doo and The Flintstones wore off and I turned to Transformers, G. I. Joe, and Star Blazers, seemed to me cheap knock-off cartoons that lacked in characterization or plot. Yes, it sounds incredibly snobby but I was an incredibly snobby kid about cartoons, especially by the age of about 10-12. I found it ANNOYING that Optimus Prime won all the time and was so flawless he never made any real mistakes. By that time I had completely left Hanna Barbara cartoons behind, though there was a certain drive-by-the-car-wreck fascination I had with the excreble Space Ghost.
But in the 1990s Hanna Barbara capitalized on its trashy past and brought Space Ghost back in Cartoon Planet and the weird but often strangely satisfying Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. It was a sort of cartoon playing out of the equally cartoonish but puppet-based Mystery Science Theater 3000. I could get all meta and talk about how both MST3K and SG:C2C present worlds in which evil is reduced to the banal, the petty, the pathetic and use that as a cultural measure of a certain moral failure in society in the West to properly address or consider the actual magnitude of evil in our world. But that would be so obviously both petty and extravagantly silly that I leave jokes too dry but for the eggiest of eggheads with genre fascinations to pretend that I actually wrote that. Some essays are better left as ideas and not essayed. Here I am making dumb puns ... as though there were other kinds.
But by the time the Powerpuff Girls hit the TV I began to see that Hanna Barbara might do something I never thought possible, get behind an actually original idea (as opposed to a neutered or kiddified Looney Toons knock-off or a rip off of the Honeymooners in space or in the stone age) for the first time since ... say 1965 or so. The Powerpuff Girls were doubtless not the only original series concept HB got behind but it was the one that, when I saw it, I didn't regret seeing! Other shows that got launched like Sealab 2021 or Space Ghost's reboot were obviously indebted to earlier creations and that's not getting to the Brak show. Mind you I'm not saying ANYTHING bad about the Brak show! I'm not that inspired to say much about Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I enjoy it in small doses but the show that for me single-handedly rehabilitated Hanna Barbara's decades of suck was basically the show affectionately abbreviated to PPG.
Why? Simple, it was a funny show. It was a show that was geared not just toward kids but toward adults. There was nothing about Femme Fatale that kids would necessarily get in terms of jokes but the character herself was altogether a joke. The characters were all types but types of the sincerely played out kind. McCracken and Tartakovsky and company only winked through the camera lens a handful of times and played things relatively straight. By that I mean we got a HB cartoon that didn't have some canned laugh track as happened in earlier epochs. The show simply had to be funny in order to survive and was on late enough that it couldn't afford to pander either just to kids or adults. Saving the world before bedtime was an apt sales pitch.
I have read comments from any number of people with delusional nostalgia who miss the days of the 1980s Saturday morning cartoons as though those were the be all and end all of actually good cartoons. No, dude, seriously, they WEREN'T that good. I've got a passage from Ecclesiastes for you folks, don't ask yourself "where are the old days that were better than these?" because it is not from wisdom you ask that question. Do you really want Saturday morning cartoons where Optimus Prime and the Autobots cross the Atlantic ocean on water skis? Really? How were all these multi-ton vehicles supposed to FLOAT on water enough to mvoe forward? Russian accents in G. I. Joe anyone? Lion-O's sword? And at the risk of inviting some back-talk for using this colloquialism, even at the age of 11 we all knew that He-Man was totally gay.
And when guys in their thirties (and isn't it ALWAYS usually guys in their thirties) complain about how cartoons were all better in the 1980s I bet they aren't really talking about the Snorks, My Little Pony, Jem, Rubik the Amazing Cube, the Mr. T. Show, the Gary Coleman Show, Laverne & Shirley (the cartoon, not the live action series), the Private benjamin cartoon, Turbo Teen, or Pole Position! Naw, they're thinking of stuff like Thundercats, G. I. Joe, Transformers, MAYBE Silverhawks. Some more obscure folks might name drop Thundarr the Barbarian and more could point to some landmark imports like Star Blazers or maybe point to Robotech. Stuff like Tranzor Z or Speed Racer from earlier periods might come up, too.
All that is to say that if you really go back and WATCH most of these shows you'll see that the people who complain about how bad shows like Teen Titans or The Batman are don't know the suckitude of the cartoons they are actually defending by way of comparison. Transformers G1 wasn't THAT good. Beast Wars, after a weak season 11 first half, got pretty interesting. The Transformers movie that is often beloved by fans, crap. No, it is NOT better than the Michael Bay film. Michael Bay's film is at the same level and has a less obtrusive soundtrack. I don't care if you think Optimus Prime's death signalled the end of your childhood. The movie just wasn't too good. The kinds of continuity errors that fanboys forgive to consider TF a decent movie within the context of the show is, well, peculiar.
All that is to say that my fondness for PPG is not based on a childhood nostalgia. I was an adult and in the work force by the time the show came out. I wouldn't say the 1990s were a new golden age of cartoons by any means. I'd say it's more like a silver age. We didn't have Disney or Looney Toons or the Fleischers and the truth is no one is likely to "beat" those artistic achievements but we had Batman: the animated series, we had an influx of anime that people began to have more appreciation for, we had the DC animated universe as a whole, Miyazaki's work gained currency and Pixar enabled Disney to get behind the release and distribution of cartoons that didn't suck.
Perhaps the single biggest innovation was simply The Simpsons demonstrating that a prime time cartoon geared toward adults and not just children could work. Beavis and Butthead laid the groundwork for other shows like King of the Hill and to some degree South Parh. The 1990s didn't equal, in most respects, the level of artistic innovation of the golden age, but it consolidated the reality for cartoons that is true elsewhere but wasn't so true here, that cartoons could appeal to a wide audience but also diversity out to more adult stuff.
Where the Powerpuff Girls fit into that, for me, is that it was simply a fun show that works at multiple levels. Take anyone element of the show or the writing or the characters and you'll see that it doesn't "look" like a particularly special show. But the show was fortunately often quite a bit more than the sum of its, on the face of it, ordinary parts. The blonde, redhead, brunnete breakout of character designs bespoke covering all the bases of girlyness. The Professor served as not just a father figure but as someone the girls could rescue. McCracken once said, I think, that he wanted to create a show in which girl power and feminist ideas could be presented in a way that was fun and accessible for anyone.
As a cultural manifestation of would be feminist agitprop, if you want to put the worst possible spin on the motive (which I think would be extremely unfair but I say this to make a rhetorical point), I would say The Powerpuff Girls succeed by taking the high road of taking the low road. Aim to please, first of all.
C. S. Lewis famously opined that the best way to tell stories to children it to tell a fun, pleasing story and prefer that moral lessons are learned along the way. The WRONG way to approach things would be to begin with the moral lesson children ought to learn and then go about fashioning a story that gets the job done. The Powerpuff Girls, right up to the name (or down to the name) demonstrated that the committment to first make sure it's fun goes a long way. Even if McCracken conceived of the series as a way to promote a social view you won't see that played out in so blatantly a didactic fashion that you "have" to deal with the subtext/metatheme to even get drawn into the show.
I suppose if I were to arbitrarily select two cartoons that for me bookended the 1990s that had signal agendas they wanted to promote you could go one of two ways. At the start of the 1990s there would be Captain Planet and at the end of the 1990s there would be the Powerpuff Girls. Which of these cartoons even got to the point of having a tenth anniversary release of the entire run of the series?
Particularly in terms of how Christians with conservative theology and politics might see things, the social agenda PPG was designed to help promote is so sweet, charming, and in many respects benign where speechifying goes it would be easy to see virtues in the show. If Christians wanted to freak out into culture war mode they would have been better off freaking out about The Powerpuff Girls rather than Pokemon or Captain Planet. Captain Planet's didactism was so off-putting that that might be the single simplest reason there's not some tenth anniversary box set of the entire run of Captain Planet. I think those Christians would need to chill out but that's not really why I'm writing.
I'm writing to share some of my enthusiasm for a very cute show. Tara Strong and E. G. Daily do some of their most memorable work here and Cathy Cavadini is great as Blossom. I have a soft spot for Strong's voice-over work. I liked her as Batgirl, liked her as Bubbles a great deal, liked her work as Raven on Teen Titans. Even her tiny role in the dub of Spirited Away was fun for what a small part it was. And, yes, I even know that she did work under her maiden name as Tara Charendoff. Yes, I am that much of a cartoon nerd that I recognize voice actors. Roger Jackson gave us one of the landmark voices of the late 1990s with the wonderful voice of Mojo Jojo, easily one of the greatest ineffectual blowhard villains in cartoons in the last ten years. What's not to like about a genius level monkey who can't get his plans to work because he's a monkey and he's fighting three little toddlers with powers that get into pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Superman level? Answer? Nothing.
So my suggestion to 1980s cartoon nostalgists is to rethink your loyalties. There are very few cartoons from the 1980s I would want my now 7-year-old and 4-year old nieces to watch from that period. That cartoon with Bill Cosby as a bad guy and the hourglass full of thistles? You remember that one? The Care Bears movies 1 and 2? Trust me, that age of "good" cartoons you're remembering from the 1980s had a lot of crap. If you think Michael Bay was wrong to make a Transformers cartoon that desecrated your childhood, well, you didn't have to watch that thing, did you? And the truth is that the only thing I really remember for Transformers are a few voices--Chris Latta as Starscream, Frank Welker as Megatron, and Peter Cullen as Optimus Prime, and Scatman Cruthers as Jazz, of course. But, really, I never thought of Jazz as Jazz, I always thought of him as Hong Kong Phooey (a show that was in some ways more fun as a concept than execution but another HB cartoon that I admit I remember fondly, seeing episodes on reruns in the mid 1980s that really came out in mid 1970s).
So, in short, forget the 1980s if you're a nostalgia type and if you were a fan of Powerpuff Girls you can be content knowing this series is finally getting what looks like a decent release package.
posted by Wenatchee the Hatchet at 4:15 PM
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