Today I will be talking about the most spastic thing I've ever seen.
That's right.

It's...



Now I'm actually old enough to remember the first time any Powerpuff Girls cartoon ever aired. Their first appearance on Cartoon Network was the short Meat Fuzzy Lumpkins as part of World Premiere Toons. I remember that! I remember watching it with my friend, and he was like "the only good part of this cartoon is at the end when fuzzy goes nuts with the pickle gun." It was a pickle gun, right? No! That's not it...It was bacon! His gun shot bacon...Wait no! He shot Bubble's hair with it and it turned into a chicken leg...WTF was up with that?



I forget exactly what his gun did. I just remember the cartoon didn't pick up until the battle, or at least that's what my friend thought. I actually liked most of the show. I liked the characters, I liked the action and animation. I liked it so much that the next time I went to Paramount's Great America, I played a game and won a giant Buttercup. (I would have picked Blossom or Bubbles, but dad was with me and he pretty much picked it. "The green one is the least gay one, let's go with that one.")

It's sitting on top of my dad's record collection. Other things up there: Various Star Wars toys, a piece of coaxial cable, my graduation cap, an old warped giants cap and I think I see an arm from an Incredible Crash Dummy. Oh and of course there is cobwebs. Also up there but not pictured: A giant chunk of unprocessed candle wax that glows in the dark, South Park wind up toys, a couple Magic Eye books, and a couple pieces of art I made in the 4th grade.

But yeah, I liked the show. We even named one of the servers at TechFutures after Bubbles. It was cute.
I kind of gave up on it once it turned into a series though, I think I was just outgrowing it or something.

One of the interesting things about the show is, it's like a show made for adults disguised as a show for kids. There are moments of awesome action in there, homages to all sorts of Japanese anime and action movies worldwide. Yet they're little girls. Who go to kindergarten. What does that mean? Who is the target audience for the original short cartoon? Fans of the original stuff this show was copying (in other words, adults)? Or little kids? Or perhaps it's more like a way of showing the new generation something they'd never watch on their own, similar to the way Kill Bill stole from old Chinese, Japanese, Italian and American exploitation movies to make his own Uber-exploitation movie. Or similar to how George Lucas and Steven Spielberg took the best of the old movie serials they grew up with and turned them into one of the highest grossing movies of all time. I think that's what they did.

The original Powerpuff Girls is a show for children though, can we agree on this? It may have cool elements, but at the end of the day it's made for the Cartoon Network demographic as of 1996, which wasn't the same as it is today. Cartoon Network's demographic was children under 14, I'd say.

Now we get to this new iteration of the PPG, Demashitaa! Powerpuff Girls Z. I believe that the makers of this show had the same demographic in mind, including the adult portion of it. You have to remember though, Japanese people...Well...I dunno how to put this...They like the cute.



They like their cute so much, the original Powerpuff Girls weren't cute enough.



So instead of that simplified bubbly animation, we get a show with a very different style...Too much style. Since we're all used to the original version, seeing all the characters this way makes it difficult to actually judge the show for it's own merits.



There's another difference. If I'm not mistaken, in the original cartoon, the girls were bastard chemical byproducts of a failed chemistry experiment. In other words, they were never, ever normal girls. If you don't remember, in the original show the girls were made of sugar, spice and everything nice and the extra accidental ingredient, Chemical X. In this show, the professor gets a new chemical by accidentally dropping a 'Big Luck Bun' into the Chemical X. This creates a new chemical, which he calls Chemical Z. How original. Oh just in case you couldn't tell, the rest of this post is going to be quite SPOILERIFIC. If you care.



Oh and the professor has a "son." But there's no mother. Hmm...What could that mean...

I don't want to go there.



As you can see, there's also a 'digital dog,' which I'll get to in a second.

Right after they discover this new chemical, all of a sudden the weather across the world goes backwards. The desert has hail and the arctic has heat. And OMG THERE'S AN ICEBERG HEADED FOR TOKYO! They can't call superman to throw it into space, so instead, at the protest of the professor, the kid decides to shoot the iceberg with Chemical Z, because you know, that's the only thing to do, right?

This stops the bizarre and totally random weather, but also shoots out beams of light and dark energy. This is when we meet our main characters.

Blossom!


Blossom has a crush on every boy. Ain't that sad? All she can do is oogle the jocks. The real Blossom never oogled the jocks. The real Blossom knows that boys have cooties. Anyway, most of the episode is focused on her, but we also get our intros to 3 other characters.

Buttercup!


Buttercup is this skater-chick tomboy thing when the light energy finds her, which would explain the last picture there.

Bubbles!


All the boys like Bubbles. Uh. Okay I can accept that, I guess. How many blond-haired blue-eyed girls are there in Japan, anyway?
But it doesn't stop here, we're also introduced to...

MOJO JOJO!


Mojo Jojo has got to be one of the more interesting cartoon characters to come out of Hanna-Barbara corporate machine of the late 90s. Anyone who knows me knows I hate most Hanna-Barbara cartoons on principle. In the 60s, 90% of their cartoons are crap (but a the other 10% are excellent). They could never hold a candle to Warner Brothers cartoons or even Disney cartoons. They had good character design but terrible animation and story writing. Horrible jokes with canned laughter. However, they gave us Yogi Bear, so I'm torn. They are also pretty much responsible for all the content on Cartoon Network when it was getting started. The what a cartoon show? All Hanna-Barbara. Now the modern cartoons that got their start on Cartoon Network aren't all bad, sure some of 'em are, but they are at least original, creator-driven cartoons. After Hanna died, Cartoon Network pretty much took over and it's now called Cartoon Network Studios and it shows up in the credits of this Japanese adaptation:



Anyway, lost my train of thought. Mojo Jojo. He's just a normal monkey in the Tokyo Zoo when he gets hit with the chemical z dark energy, and then he's suddenly an evil monster! Who can talk! Wow that chemical z dude!

His evil plot is to kidnap all the little children in Tokyo, steal their candy, eat it so he becomes a giant King Kong type monkey and for some reason can destroy the city and take over the world



...or something. Does it really matter? His plan involves stealing candy from children. He's evil. So of course the PPG-Z show up!



So they fight. Kind of a big elaborate fight. Worth downloading it to see it, just so you can have your mouth hang open.



The Professor says some shit about stamina and what happens next? You guessed it. Ice Cream! What you didn't guess it?



I hope there's some kind of corporate sponsor responsible for all that ice cream, 'cause...otherwise...damn. How common are heart attacks in Japan?



Oh shit! The kindergarten teacher! Wasn't she like moderately hot in the original PPG cartoon? What the fuck is up with this old fat woman? That's not cool...

But still, in the end, the day is saved, thanks to...The Powerpuff GirlZ.