The Powerpuff Girls are getting The Umbrella Academy treatment. Variety reports that a live-action series featuring the titular trio as “disillusioned twentysomethings who resent having lost their childhood to crime fighting” is in the works—at The CW, naturally, and featuring none other than Diablo Cody as one of the writers and executive producers.
The only plot detail revealed is that the PPG has been disbanded and will have to “reunite now that that the world needs them more than ever,” so Tordotcom HQ has been abuzz with speculation about the possibilities. Will Bubbles develop a complex from having to be the nice one for so long? Will Professor Utonium get his comeuppance for what’s objectively a really screwed up premise to create the “perfect little girl”? Can the Powerpuff Girls retroactively sue him for violating child labor laws, and would they even qualify as artifically created human beings? Will Mojo Jojo get the Draco in Leather Pants treatment? And most importantly, will The CW embrace HIM’s status as a genderqueer icon, and could he please be played by Harry Styles and/or a drag queen, specifically Shangela?
According to Variety, Heather Regnier will co-write and co-executive produce as part of her overall deal with producer Warner Bros. Television, with Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter, and David Madden on EP duty as well. There’s no word yet on casting details or a production timeline.
Oh, FFS. No.
I admit, it does sound like a parody of a CW show. But Riverdale‘s first season was pretty awesome, in part because it was aware of how bizarre and kitschy it was and didn’t take itself too seriously (though I can’t say the same of later seasons). Berlanti has made kind of a career of making things work that we never in a million years imagined could work, like Crisis on Infinite Earths. So I’m keeping an open mind.
But is it still in the City of Townsville?
This is the most 2020 thing ever.
Leave the PPG alone… but I would like to see Shangela as HIM.
This is awful! Live action and “disillusioned twentysomethings who resent having lost their childhood to crime fighting”, exactly the kind of content I don’t want to see in this context and I hope this “edgy dark” trend doesn’t survive the pandemic.
There’s no childhood memory, big media isn’t happy to trash.
The Umbrella Academy and The Boys exist, so this is a concept that can & does work, but why use the PPG???
@6/palindrome310: I think people today forget that The Powerpuff Girls was always edgy. It was originally a cartoon short called Whoopass Stew! made as a college project, and I always saw it as a satire of anime like Sailor Moon, in that it featured color-coded superpowered girls who were at once cute and ultraviolent. A large part of the joke was how absurdly violent and brutal the fight scenes were in contrast to the girls’ childish, adorable appearance. There was also plenty of satire and deconstructive humor in it, like the one where they built a giant Sentai-style robot to battle a giant monster and ended up destroying the whole city and earning the public’s outrage.
In short, PPG was never really a kids’ show; it was a satire of kids’ shows aimed at adults. Although it seemed that later incarnations lost track of that and turned it into the very thing it was spoofing to begin with. If anything, this “sequel” sounds as if it might be returning to something more like the original spirit of the thing.
I think the Professor created the robot, didn’t he? There was an episode where for some reason he got all crazy worried about the girls getting hurt in their battles. I’m pretty sure the robot was his doing and the girls reluctantly used it to mollify him.
I have absolutely no idea who thought taking a giant, steaming, dysentery-ridden dump over people’s favourite characters, groups and concepts was a good idea to begin with, but I’m utterly sick of it at this point. Whether it happens to Luke Skywalker or the Grey Wardens or Atticus Finch or Jean-Luc Picard or Cortana or anyone else, it always winds up both turning out terribly and a major slap to the face of what made these franchises so successful in the first place.
@10/Lisa Conner: Yes, I think so, but that doesn’t alter the satirical intent I was talking about. It was a deconstruction of giant-robot shows in that it portrayed the heroes’ robot doing as much damage as the monster.
@11/Devin Smith: As I said, PPG was originally a biting satire of pre-existing concepts that many people liked, so your objection is misplaced. As someone who was there when it first aired and understood what a sharp-edged deconstruction it was from the start, I find it really, really bizarre to see people talking about it today as if it were the very kind of pure, innocent kids’ cartoon that it was making fun of. It’s like mistaking The Simpsons for Make Room for Daddy. But then, it’s always been an uphill battle to get people to understand satire.
@12: Your condescension is, as ever, appreciated.
Moreover, while Powerpuff Girls did deconstruct a lot of classic superhero tropes, as with Dexter’s Lab, it was always done in a generally good-natured manner; it was Genndy Tartakovsky poking fun at the old stories and concepts he loves. For example, one of his “Dial M For Monkey!” shorts was a pastiche of the Thing’s fight with the Champion of the Universe, featuring Macho Man Randy Savage as the villain. This, however, just seems really mean-spirited and cynical and self-indulgently nihilistic. In short, it’s a 2020 deconstruction, all right.
Besides, how in the hell are they going to effectively translate the very stylized designs from the cartoon into live-action? Him in particular is one they may have problems with, assuming of course that character’s even on the table.
@13/Devin Smith: I am constantly amazed at people who assume they can judge everything about what a show will be like from just one or two sentences. That has never worked before and it never will. That’s such a tiny amount of information that it could go any any number of directions. Assuming the worst is just projecting your own fear and doubt onto the unknown, which is a common human impulse but must not be mistaken for objective truth.
It’s also unwise to assume that the way characters begin a story is the way they’re meant to be throughout the entire thing. Countless stories are about characters starting in a bad place and rebuilding, growing, improving, etc. What’s being described here sounds to me like it’s just a description of the way the characters are at the start of the pilot. Presumably the show will be about them rediscovering their bond and finding new value in their heroism. It’s not an uncommon pattern in Berlanti superhero shows. Arrow, the one that started it all, was about a hardened vigilante killer being reformed into a heroic symbol of hope through the guidance of the friends and partners he gained. Legends of Tomorrow is about a bunch of C-list heroes, losers, and villains being redeemed by their found family and screwing things up for the better. Batwoman is bringing in a new hero who sounds like she starts out very screwed up and will be redeemed by her adoption of a heroic role. Just because a story starts out somewhere dark doesn’t mean it has to stay there.
People often tend to assume that sequels that put characters through hardship are coming from a place of hate or contempt for the characters. As a writer myself, I find that utterly bewildering. We don’t torture characters because we hate them; we torture them because we love them, because it’s in dealing with hardship and solving problems that they reveal the things we love about them. A story about people having peaceful, fulfilled lives is boring, no matter how fond we are of the people in it. It’s through crisis and struggle that they prove themselves worthy of our love. So if we bring them back after “happily ever after,” then of course we’re going to put them through hell again. Of course we’re going to start them out in a bad, unhappy place, pile on new problems, so that they can solve them. It’s not hate or contempt, it’s just how stories work.
“Besides, how in the hell are they going to effectively translate the very stylized designs from the cartoon into live-action?”
Why would they? Riverdale doesn’t look like Dan DeCarlo drew it. The goal is not to duplicate or remake the show, the goal is to use the characters and concepts of the show as a launching point for building something different.
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@12/CLB:
Key questions to explain the divergence in reaction among commenters: What age were you? Were you aware of the tropes PPG satirized?
If you’re a kid when you first encounter something, it’s all pure and innocent, because you’re not yet media-savvy; you don’t know about “subtext”, and that it’s used by adult creators to appeal to different audiences in different ways. At most, you get a vague sense that you’re missing something. (The same happens if you’re an adult and consume a story made for a different culture.)
Especially if the people (audience) are children upon first exposure, or haven’t thought about the property since they were children. The now-common internet-outrage re: “property X is being revisited” or worse “the premise of X is being deconstructed” seems to be largely driven by nostalgia. Most people don’t think about their favorite and formative stories as existing within a broader cultural conversation (most people aren’t analytic, full-stop); rather, they have an unexamined sense of ownership: “this is my toy from my attic, and how dare you repaint it?” (See also: “who moved my cheese?”)
@16/philip_thorne: Yes, I was an adult and able to see that PPG was made for adults. But I don’t buy the excuse that being children at the time means it’s okay to continue misunderstanding it as adults. When I was a kid, I took Batman ’66 in earnest, but looking back at it now, I understand that it was a sitcom and a satire and I’m able to appreciate it on that level. The point of growing up is supposed to be to learn things you didn’t know as a child.
And I don’t need the nostalgic sense of ownership explained to me. I know perfectly well why some people react that way. But that doesn’t require me to agree with it or forbid me from offering a counterargument. Just because a person has a certain perspective doesn’t mean we’re not allowed to offer them alternative perspectives. Conversation is supposed to be about people offering different perspectives on an issue so it can be considered from every side.
I don’t like the premise because it directly contradicts the show. The girls know that getting to fight them is on every monster’s bucket list, even if the monsters get the snot kicked out of them. They know that they live in a specially enchanted town, and that just down the road is the bleak squalor of gritty realism, which they tried once and turned away from. They know that they are different, and they’re OK with it. They aren’t under any illusions about their lives, is what I’m saying.
I mean, what’s the shocking revelation that tips them into disillusionment? That they look different? That they were synthesized not born? That their dad is occasionally reality challenged? Like I said, they know this stuff already.
@18: Yeah, the Venn diagram between “deconstructing the source material” and “not understanding the source material and what actually happened in it” is basically just two perfectly overlapping circles at this point.
@18/Jenny Islander: “I don’t like the premise because it directly contradicts the show.”
Why does that matter? Of course it’s not meant to be an in-continuity sequel, it’s a reimagining inspired by the original idea, no different in principle from Smallville or Riverdale. Like any such reinvention, it’ll use those elements that work for its purposes and change other elements.
Sounds awful. I am SO tired of disillusioned twenty something’s! Probably because I am fifty something and youthful angst just doesn’t appeal any more. But don’t get upset. Just don’t watch it. That’s what I did with the sequel Trilogy. As far as I am concerned Rey and co. Don’t exist. Luke, Leia and Han succeed and live happily ever after. More or less.
@12: Actually, it might make it even better since “daddy” made them use the robot, which caused devastation, and when the townspeople are angry the girls declare “he made us do it!”
While I appreciate the giant robot thing, it still seems weird for the Professor to suddenly decide to be obsessively overprotective of the girls when they’ve already faced so many dangers. That would’ve made a better very early story.
I can already a few episodes where the girls were visibly fustrated with their superhero responsibilities. The one where people were asking for help with every tiny little thing. The one where they absolutely exhausted with all the crime fighting they had to do. The one where they travelled to the future and have see the apocalypse that would come about if they ever stopped or left.I can already easily see why as twentyyearolds they come to resent their childhood. There are a few episodes where the girls were visibly fustrated with their superhero responsibilities. The one where people were being asked for help with every tiny little thing. The one where they absolutely exhausted with all the crime fighting they had to do. The one where they could not spend enough play time with their best friend Robin. The one where they travelled to the future and have seen the apocalypse that would come about if they ever stopped or left. How idiotic the mayor is. Although not shown, there were some experiences that would leave even Batman traumatised: the one where Dick kidnaps them, lethally sucking the chemical X out of them, producing thousands of disfigured PPG ‘sisters’ to be exploited for money, all of them ending up comiting murder and dieing in a factory explosion. In a more realistic show, with enemies like HIM, which they never captured or fully defeated, for safety reasons Utonium would have to go into hiding, the PPG could never get too close to anyone or start a family because Him could kill them with a snap of a claw. The only reason Him would always loose in the classic show is because he wanted to win only using the PPG’s emotional weaknesses, but PPG always came up on top. HIM might not be so ambitious in reality. Even with HIM imprisoned, it’s possible that the girls might genetically be unable to have kids. It is in their twenties that they start really wishing they could have a normal life and a family of their own, and they can’t. Also missing out on kindergarten education is one thing, but not with school and college education. It’s even possible that they don’t actually age or grow up physically, or even worse, mentally. Except for Blossom, she got born with the mind of an adult already
. Would you not despise your childhood if you were in their shoes for 20 years? I am excited about the upcoming show but really hope they will still have and really show their superpowers.
I don’t why my previous comment had words and letters randomly removed. Here it is again below:
I can already easily see why as twentyyearolds they come to resent their childhood. There are a few episodes where the girls were visibly fustrated with their superhero responsibilities. The one where people were being asked for help with every tiny little thing. The one where they absolutely exhausted with all the crime fighting they had to do. The one where they could not spend enough play time with their best friend Robin. The one where they travelled to the future and have seen the apocalypse that would come about if they ever stopped or left. How idiotic the mayor is. Although not shown, there were some experiences that would leave even Batman traumatised: the one where Dick kidnaps them, lethally sucking the chemical X out of them, producing thousands of disfigured PPG ‘sisters’ to be exploited for money, all of them ending up comiting murder and dieing in a factory explosion. In a more realistic show, with enemies like HIM, which they never captured or fully defeated, for safety reasons Utonium would have to go into hiding, the PPG could never get too close to anyone or start a family because Him could kill them with a snap of a claw. The only reason Him would always loose in the classic show is because he wanted to win only using the PPG’s emotional weaknesses, but PPG always came up on top. HIM might not be so ambitious in reality. Even with HIM imprisoned, it’s possible that the girls might genetically be unable to have kids. It is in their twenties that they start really wishing they could have a normal life and a family of their own, and they can’t. Also missing out on kindergarten education is one thing, but not with school and college education. It’s even possible that they don’t actually age or grow up physically, or even worse, mentally. Except for Blossom, she got born with the mind of an adult already
. Would you not despise your childhood if you were in their shoes for 20 years? I am excited about the upcoming show but really hope they will still have and really show their superpowers.