1/31/2024 0 Comments Rebeca sugar tara strong together![]() Unfinished (and rather threadbare) Whoopass Stew story outlines intended to accompany A Sticky Situation exist in animatic form, though it wasn’t until McCracken’s involvement with the sometimes-inspired Cartoon Network What A Cartoon! showcase that the trio made it onto television, rechristened The Powerpuff Girls. The results are Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup, three adorable freaks of nature with giant exophthalmia eyes and fingerless stumps for arms who go by the collective term ‘The Whoopass Girls’ and do battle with appropriately ludicrous villains ‘The Amoeba Boys’. ![]() The story is of a lone professor who, for reasons that aren’t addressed but one assumes are innocent enough, attempts to create the perfect girls in his laboratory, absent-mindedly chucking in a ‘can of Whoopass’ (later changed to the more generic ‘Chemical X’) for good measure. The show is essentially a retooled television offshoot of McCracken’s student short A Sticky Situation, which in itself goes some way to explaining the equivocal vibe of the show it’d eventually become. Little tells such as the passive-aggressive asides the show’s narrator (Tom Kenny) would make, or the blink-and-miss-them double entendres and obscene sleight-of-hand sight gags all cultivated a general sense that the folks behind what you were watching were up to something not nearly as innocent as the squeaky voices and bright colours would have you initially believe. After a few minutes you either got it or you didn’t – that alternately beneath or above the surface of innocuous kids’ fare there was something a lot more clever, sharp and self-aware going on. I suppose we were the Bronies of our generation. And yes, I’m well aware of how creepy that looks written down. I really feel I should settle down with a nice girl like Bubbles, but I always wind up with the Buttercups. Against this backdrop, what possible appeal would a seemingly kitsch, Anime-informed show for – and about – infants have for such a classy – nay, damned classy – fellow as I? Even the cartoons I’d moved onto were unambiguous in their intended adult audience A promising new talent named Seth MacFarlane was charming the land with his fresh brand of edgy comedy that would doubtless prove inimitable and timeless (sorry, cheap shot). The type of TV my brain was tuned into back then mainly centered around Martin Sheen’s idyllic presidential rule of The West Wing and James Gandolfini delivering hard-hitting sociopolitical statements via his fists in The Sopranos. Nothing about Powerpuff Girls was, at first glance, something I should’ve been a fan of. One show, the brainchild of CalArts graduate Craig McCracken, both freaked me out and grabbed my attention with its abrasive cuteness, something of an odd combination at the time. ![]() See, when all my friends in secondary school were studying to become future world leaders, I was carving out more of a Worthless Piece of Human Garbage niche for myself by going out most nights to cackhandedly hit on townies, get hammered and come home to late-night animation (when they’d be repeated with that woman doing sign language in the corner of the screen – it always struck me as insult to injury that the poor deaf kids had to stay up til 2am just to watch cartoons) until I passed out. The world just didn’t understand, nor could they without giving it the hours of semi-drunken attention I’d had by that point. Such was the lament of all Powerpuff Girls fans who didn’t happen to be preadolescent and female. ![]() “Please refrain from speaking to me in future.”īuttercup. “I’m finding this conversation very unsettling.” And I think they’re meant to be about five years old.” They all kinda look like Frank Sidebottom. There’s, like, the sensible redhead one and the sort of feisty tomboy one and the ditzy blonde one…” And they fight monsters with their superpowers. “It’s like…well, it’s for kids, but it’s not.” You’re trying to explain to your peers the appeal of a certain Cartoon Network show: You’re reaching the end of your teens and vaguely resemble a giant potato with stubble. You’re now a stocky man in his late-twenties, eminently strokable in the beardy regions, able to subsist on a diet of powdered soup, chicken skin and Aberlour for days on end. I want to invite all you sexy, intelligent and cultured Skwigly readers to put yourselves in my shoes.
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