Earlier this year, The CW scrapped its planned live-action Powerpuff Girls series and then, a few months later, Warner Bros. TV officially halted development on the project marking the end of the line for the series which would have seen the beloved characters all grown up as disillusioned twentysomethings resentful of having lost their childhoods to crime-fighting. And, as it turns out it’s that premise that might have been the problem from the very start. Powerpuff Girls creator Craig McCracken told The Los Angeles Times that in his one meeting with creators of the live-action series that turning the characters into adults turned them into something other than the Powerpuff Girls. It made them generic.
“I had one meeting with them and I told them, ‘When you turn them into adults, they’re no longer the Powerpuff Girls because if they’re adults, that’s just three super girls who didn’t have to deal with being kids,’ McCracken said. “That’s a completely different show.”
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What Was Powerpuff Going to Be About?
Powerpuff would have caught up with Blossom (Agents of SHIELD‘s Chloe Bennet, who later departed the show), Bubbles (Descendants‘ Dove Cameron), and Buttercup (Broadway actress Yana Perrault), who used to be America’s pint-sized superheroes but now are disillusioned twentysomethings who resent having lost their childhood to crime-fighting. Will they agree to reunite now that the world needs them more than ever? A pilot was filmed before being retooled off-cycle.
“The reason you do pilots is because, sometimes things miss, and this was just a miss,” former The CW president Mark Pedowitz previously explained in 2021. “We believe in the cast completely. We believe in Diablo [Cody] and Heather [Regnier], the writers. We believe in the auspices of Greg Berlanti and Warner [Bros. TV] studios.”
“In this case, the pilot didn’t work,” Pedowitz continued. “But because we see there’s enough elements in there, we wanted to give it another shot. So that’s why we didn’t want to go forward with what we had. Tonally, it might’ve felt a little too campy. It didn’t feel as rooted in reality as it might’ve felt. But again, you learn things when you test things out. And so, in this case, we felt, let’s take a step back and go back to the drawing board.”
The Powerpuff Girls Celebrate Their 25th Anniversary
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the beloved Powerpuff Girls cartoon. The series first premiered on Cartoon Network on November 18, 1998, and the original incarnation of the series ran for six seasons, three special episodes, The Powerpuff Girls Movie, a special episode for the 10th Anniversary bringing back the original cast, and more. The Powerpuff Girls even came back with a reboot series in 2016 that ran for three seasons of its own and is even coming back another new reboot from McCracken returning to work on the project.
What do you think about McCracken’s comments? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section.
