TIMBOXRELOADED TUMBLR POST # 2,492
Between 1998 and 2005, Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup–the tiniest, cutest superheroes in the universe–burst onto the scene as stars of their own cartoon show in November 1998, when The Powerpuff Girls premiered on Cartoon Network television. Their actual and original creator, Craig McCracken, had waited six years from their inception at CalArts to finally get his animated series on the air.
With all the recent fuss being made on the internet over the news of Cartoon Network rebooting The Powerpuff Girls themselves this year and without the involvement of the original cast and crew–Craig McCracken and The Powerpuff Girls’ three respective original voice actresses, Cathy Cavadini, Tara Strong, and Elizabeth Daly, in particular–it is hard to believe that what would eventually become the Powerpuff Girls actually begins at CalArts and with one man who now works for the Walt Disney Corporation: the aforementioned Craig McCracken.
McCracken, a relentless drawer and doodler from the very moment he could pick up a crayon as a child, had visions of immortality dancing in his head from an early age, back when he first set out specifically to create something that would end up as his legacy.
He had always been an unusually ambitious kid. But for the longest time, his dream was to be a comic strip artist, not an animator–his dream was to do strips for the newspapers and to do comic books–and that’s what he craved. When he began develop his own comics such as Marty the Mouse or CrudPuppy (an angry, obnoxious dog), he discovered that he wasn’t into doing traditional four panel gags. His creations were becoming more and more elaborate pages that needed music, effects, and spoken dialogue…and that was when he realized he would better look into film-making.
By the age of twelve, McCracken once recalls, he had begun trying to create “that one character that would be my definitive character.” But of course, his young hands and mind were bound to frustrate him, and so he reluctantly ended up taking his parents’ advice: Just go to art school and just wait.
It was at CalArts, at age twenty, that he finally honed in on his characters. It was also in that school that he enrolled into with pals Paul Rudish and Genndy Tartakovsky, that his affinity for the classic UPA style began to click for him.
“I always knew there was this graphic style that I liked–I had seen it somewhere,” he notes. “But growing up in Southern California, you know, there was no access to UPA cartoons…you might have seen it somewhere, in some ether world, and your subconscious remembers seeing it, but it wasn’t till I got to CalArts that I really found it and realized that’s the stuff–that 50s graphic style that I knew I always liked; I just didn’t have any reference to it.”
Once McCracken completed his freshman project, “The No-Neck Joes”, he had to come up with another idea. Inspired by director Joe Horne’s weird little animated serial for MTV, The Adventures of Stevie and Zoya, he decided to try a superhero/good guy/bad guy narrative story–which is what led him to come up with what would eventually become Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup of Townsville–The Powerpuff Girls referred to in the eventual title.
“I was already in school, so I was making films,” McCracken recalls. “And I knew for my second-year student film I wanted to do a superhero type short…At the time, I was working on a Mexican wrestler character to be my hero. I wasn’t totally sure of it yet–and I just happened to draw these three little girls, and I went, ‘Wait a minute. They’re superheroes; it’s much cooler!’ It was more of a contrast, and they seemed tougher because they’re so cute.”
So McCracken made The Whoopass Girls, the animated short that you’re about to see, which is designed in a sharp-angled minimalist style which is not unlike the 1950s animated shorts of UPA (United Productions of America).
As soon as he began to create The Whoopass Girls short film that you’re about to see, “A Sticky Situation”, he believed that this was the original idea that couyld put him on the map. That year, he planned to make not one, not two, not three, but four different cartoons featuring his pint-sized heroines. “i wrote and storyboarded four of them, recorded all four of them, did the layouts for two, and only finished one. So I felt like I’d screwed up because I didn’t get all four films done that year,” he says.
To describe Craig McCracken as driven is probably an understatement. Whoopass Girls took up so much of his time, he admits that he pretty much stopped attending classes or doing his other assignments. “At the end of the year, y’know, all the teachers were like, ‘Who’s this guy?’” One of his animation instructors, Becky Bristow, was impressed. She was the first person to encourage McCracken, confirming his notion that Whoopass Girls had the potential to be a TV series. She also just happened to be friends with Linda Simensky, who was director of development for Nickelodeon at the time. Bristow convinced her to drop by and take a look, but although the exec liked what she saw, she couldn’t do anything with it back then.
“It really wasn’t right for Nick,” Simensky would say in 2003. ‘They definitely weren’t looking for superheroes or action…With Nickelodeon, it was a lot about characters sort of going through exploration, and finding themselves. The Powerpuff Girls were already there. They were just gonna go out on adventures.”
Now, The short went over pretty well in school. It went over just as well when he pitched it to Cartoon Network which ended up commissioning two animated shorts from McCracken for World Premiere Toons which both aired in 1995 and 1996–but not before the name became The Powerpuff Girls.
Anyway, The Powerpuff Girls themselves first sprang to life as a small thumbnail drawing–so small that McCracken couldn’t give them too many distinctly articulated features–and when he tried to enlarge the image to refine it, he realized that some things should not be tampered with. “That’s why they don’t have fingers or anything,” he explains. “Because I drew them so tiny…and when I tried to add fingers, I was like, okay, I’m not gonna screw with it. I stumbled accidentally onto something that works; I’m just gonna leave it.”
Once he had conceived The Powerpuff Girls, with their stylized design and great big peepers (which is a nod to 1960s artist Margaret Keane’s huge eyed paintings of huge-eyed children–Even the Powerpuff Girls’ teacher Ms. Keane is named after Margaret Keane), he basically hatched the whole, entire concept that we know today and ever since, including such wild supporting characters like simian archfiend Mojo Jojo, whose evil proclamations (provided in the TV series by Roger L. Jackson, previously known as the voice on the phone in the late Wes Craven’s SCREAM films during the 90s) are hilariously stilted.
However, for a variety of reasons–not the least of which was Craig McCracken’s full time work on Genndy Tartakovsky’s Dexter’s Laboratory–it would take over 6 years from 1992 to 1998, when the girls would eventually make it to the small TV screen as stars of their own series. And at one point, he was so convinced at the time that Powerpuff Girls would never get picked up by CN that he actually shopped it around Hollywood to other studios. So said McCracken: “I’m glad that it didn’t happen elsewhere, ‘cause it would’ve ended up on the shelf. And as Simensky puts it: “If Powerpuff had ended up at Nickelodeon, it wouldn’t have been Powerpuff…it would have been completely dissected into something just so different.”
And part of the problem was, Cartoon Network had taken the two original PPG shorts around to focus groups, where children would watch and offer their reactions to them–and the response from all those groups was mixed at best and negative at worst.
So recalls Craig: “i went to one in L.A., and this group of eleven year old boys basically said, ‘This is the worst show we’ve ever seen, this is a terrible cartoon!’”
Dexter’s Laboratory, however, usually tested extremely well, so Cartoon Network felt so much more confident to put Dexter’s Lab into production. And by 1995 or 1996, Linda Simensky had joined CN from Nick, and she always just assumed that Powerpuff Girls would eventually become a full series on TV, and so she became its staunchest advocate.
In 2003, she recalls that “The ting that no one was saying was, “well, this didn’t test well…so let’s fix it!’”
She wanted to keep the Dexter’s Lab crew together. “it was such a great team of guys. At that point, they were on their third season, and I said to Mike Lazzo, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to keep them all together, and not have them just leave after their fourth season? If we could get Powerpuff fixed, they could segue into another show.’” Luckily, Lazzo completely agreed with Simensky, so the two executives began pushing the idea at the network.
Craig McCracken went back to work on The Powerpuff Girls. He began by addressing an issue that had repeatedly come up: What was the difference between Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup? So the creator worked out a chart that truly explained everything. “When I did the first shorts, I was more focused on weird concepts than developing characters,” he observes. “That was my biggest mistake. I knew the characters so well because I’d been working on them for [six[ years, but I forgot that I wasn’t telling the virgin audience who they were.” So this time, McCracken made sure the the girls’ distinct personalities were all evident. He made the backstory, which is their creation by a lone scientist named Professor Utonium out of things representing suger [Bubbles], spice [Buttercup], and everything nice [Blossom], plus an accidental dose of the now-infamous Chemical X potion (in the Whoopass Girls student film that you’re about to see, it was initially ‘a can of Whoopass’)–play into the main stories ever more.
He also refined the world of the Powerpuff Girls themselves, as well as adding more and more wacky supporting characters. It became a solid concept..and Cartoon Network finally said ‘yes’ to Powerpuff Girls.
And so, as post production work on the fourth season of Dexter’s Lab (episodes 40-52) progressed, the rest of the crew just slid straight onto The Powerpuff Girls, albeit with a leadership change, Dexter’s Laboratory’s original creator (and future creator of Samurai Jack) Genndy Tartakovsky stayed on as supervising producer and co director–but although his attitude was Craig worked on his Dexter show and would now work on Craig’s show, this was still definitely Craig McCracken’s brainchild, and this time, he was ready.
So says Linda Simensky:
“Craig had learned so much from doing those Dexters (the old gold 1990s classic Genndy Tartakovsky-involved original 52-episode first run of Dexter’s Laboratory up until Last But Not Beast plus the Ego Trip TV special), that he was like a different person from the shorts (in 1992, 1995, and 1996) to his first series (from 1998 up until the movie in 2002). When he did the first board for the redeveloped show, it was brilliant.”
The original run of The Powerpuff Girls (up until the movie in 2002, anyway) is distinguished by clever writing suffused with tongue-in-cheek humor, strong design, and glorious use of color–and creators and designers all through the animation industry quickly took note!
For example, Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi gushes that “I look at Powerpuff Girls and I see perfect color combinations,” all the while expressing nothing but admiration for the series.
For another thing, Glen Hanson, designer of a short lived but strikingly imagined MTV show called Spy Groove in the year 2000, calls the art of Powerpuff “one of the most beautiful art directions ever for an animated show. The graphic nature…the bold lines around the characters–there’s such a wonderful and simple and strong sense of design there.”
McCracken’s creative hand is indeed evident in all aspects of the show during its original pre-Movie run. He presides over every story session, supervising all the storyboard artists, directors, and writers. “We’ll just throw ideas around until we come up with stories that feel good,” said McCracken, “ and then break it up into beats, structurally.”
For each and every original episode of the Powerpuff Girls up until the 2002 movie, a 3-to-4-page outline is written based on these story sessions. Once the outline is completed, he proofreads. “And then, what I’ll do is write really detailed notes…how I want the sequence to be [story]boarded, some inspirational stuff to look at, what the goal of the sequence is, from whose perspective it’s supposed to be drawn…I’ll put those notes on it.”
The storyboard artists take it from there, generally getting 6 weeks to board an 11-minute cartoon, and adding their own creative input along the way. “Everybody’s got a certain voice and a certain style,” McCracken observes, “and we try to give shows to people because we know, ‘You can do this one amazingly well, this is perfect for you.’ So they do their rough storyboard, and then they put it up on the wall and pitch it to the whole crew..and we cut stuff and reboard things.” The artists then clean up the revised storyboard. Once McCracken gets it back, he will “go through it, and maybe redraw stuff, or if they misinterpreted a note I had –I’ll reboard a sequence…just redo it. It’s just the nature of the business, to get the shows right.”
The original pre-Movie run of The Powerpuff Girls has already produced many standout cartoons, including Bubblevicious (the one where Bubbles became a ‘I’m hardcore now!’ sort of girl after dialing the danger-fighting levels up to eleven), Bare Facts (where Mojo Jojo kidnaps the Mayor, stripped the Mayor of his clothes and title, blindfolded the naked Mayor and tied him up in his volcanic lair before Mojo got pummeled by the girls)–both of which are nominated for an 1999 Emmy award–and last but not least: Meet the Beat-alls, which is a witty pun filled cartoon episode jammed with clever Beatles references in both dialogue and visuals. The plot concerns Four of the Girls’ most vanquished and frustrated enemies–Mojo Jojo, Fuzzy Lumpkins, Princess Morebucks (the youngest prisoner of Townsville Jail) and Him, respectively–all of whom band together to form an unbeatable crime team, so they dubbed themselves “The Beat-Alls” and unleashed an 8-days-a-week wave of evil, violent carnage on Townsville’s residents. But of course, only our tiny superheroines can halt this sort of “brutish invasion.” Slyly pinpointing the Bad Four’s one weakness, the girls enlist the aid of some “performance criminaL” in the form of a seductive Asiatic monkey called Moko Jono to seduce Mojo Jojo and break up the Beat-Alls once and for all. Practically each and every line of dialogue in the episode is taken from Beatles’ song lyrics and album titles–and it all works!
Before the original show ended in 2005, The Powerpuff Girls quickly became a huge hit for Cartoon Network–and 12 years before Adventure Time With Finn and Jake came along, The Powerpuff Girls was once CN’s first monster marketing success. And before long, there were once Powerpuff Girls toys, storybooks, activity books, stickers, tattoos, glitter pens, puzzles, CDs, audio and videocassettes (or VHS tapes), DVDs (the most complete of which was the 10th Anniversary Collection DVD box set from 2009 that houses all 78 episodes minus the movie and specials), posters in stores all over the planet, and most infamously, The Powerpuff Girls Movie, which is a 2002 feature film spin-off notorious in many, many circles for the fact that, as a big screen critical and box office failure, it barred Cartoon Network from making or financing more theatrically released big screen feature films forever.
Linda Simensky felt vindicated for her unwavering belief in the series:
“it needed time get out there and kind of percolate. It worked out so perfectly for the show. Even think about all that licensing that was done; Cartoon Network was not ready two years earlier to handle all that. So I think Craig was incredibly lucky. Ultimately, it’s the best possible thing that could have happened to the show.”
Yes, It took a long time or six years for all that to happen to the Powerpuff Girls between 1992 and 1998 or beyond, but Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup finally made it to the screen as stars of their own TV series. Once the fourth season of Dexter’s Laboratory wrapped with Last But Not Beast in 1998 and Ego Trip in the following year, Craig McCracken finally got ‘cracking’ with his original creation. With Genndy Tartakovsky (creator of Dexter’s Lab and Samurai Jack and future director of the first two Hotel Transylvania movies for Sony) tagging along to help produce and co-direct, the Powerpuff Girls series was put into production and began to run in 1998 before the original run ended in 2005.
And now, and yes, sure, I apologized for writing such a TL;DR-worthy kind of description, but before you start further complaining about CN’s recent 2016 Powerpuff Girls Reboot from this springtime onward, just sit back and relax and enjoy The Powerpuff Girls’ 1992 point of origin:
WHOOPASS STEW!
(aka A Sticky Situation)
Go Girls! Go!
