Before we get into our next short subject, some news regarding plans for a live-action Powerpuff Girls.
The pending CW series has cast its three leads, and two of them are not strangers to the superhero genre.
Dove Cameron (Bubbles) voiced Spider-Gwen in the Marvel Rising miniseries of shorts and movies, and her resume also includes Liv & Maddie and Descendants. Speaking of Marvel, Chloe Bennett, who will play redheaded Blossom, is fresh from Marvel's Agents of SHIELD after 7 seasons on the now-defunct ABC series.
I still have doubts regarding Diablo Cody's take on things, recasting the girls as a trio of disillusioned 20-somethings who lost a large chunk of their childhood due to their crime-fighting careers. Cody is hoping this will have the same kind of success as another CW reimagining of a saccharine comics series, that being, of course, Riverdale. TV executives believe sweet & innocent doesn't cut it in primetime anymore. Simple as that. We'll see come the fall, if it's ready by then.
Now, let's move the clock back to 1998, and "Powerpuff Bluff". A trio of adult thieves, repeatedly thwarted by the girls, decide to impersonate them---badly, of course---to discredit them.
Edit, 12/26/21: The video was deleted by Dailymotion. In its place is a title card:
I recall Jimmy Kimmel doing a skit on Fox NFL Sunday a year or so later with three guys wearing Halloween masks of the girls. Whether or not Kimmel had seen "Powerpuff Bluff" is unknown at this point.
Rating: B.
17 comments:
Seeing the girls being sent to prison was kind of dark.
And not a good idea.
Ms. Cody and the CW don't seem to realize that much of the appeal of PPG was that they were big-eyed little girls beating the snot out of the baddies. Making them angsty young adults completely robs them of their novelty and ruins their appeal.
What they're looking at doing is taking another saccharine cartoon, in this case the Powerpuffs, and darken them, just as CW and Greg Berlanti & Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa did with Riverdale. They think the kids that watched the original PPG in 1998 will tune in 23 years later.
Somehow, I doubt it.
What is up with companies and TV networks making teen and adult adaptations of kids franchises?
I think that some writers/directors get some kind of sadistic pleasure in seeing the cartoon characters from their youth become disillusioned and bitter because they themselves have become disillusioned and bitter in their adult years. In other words, they want these cartoons to "grow up" like they did.
Also, because Riverdale was a success for the CW, we now have to have a slew of other shows just like it, hoping to repeat the success of Riverdale. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
That would explain why Disney makes a lot of live action remakes of some of their old animated films. That would explain why Michael Bay made a PG-13 Transformers movie franchise. That would explain why Lionsgate made a PG-13 Power Rangers movie.
You’d have to be numbskull to believe that if a film or TV show is edgy, not at all family-friendly, and and based on an existing beloved franchise, it’s a hit.
@Steven: Lionsgate wasn't the first to do a Power Rangers movie. Fox made two of those in the mid-to-late 90's, during the franchise's peak period, and were along the same lines as the TV series of the time.
As Goldstar & I have pointed out, the only reason this is happening is because of Riverdale, and, to a lesser extent, Nancy Drew. Gone are the days where the family would sit back for some old school Disney.
I shudder to think of what they'd do to another CN property, like, for example, Ed, Edd, & Eddy or Johnny Bravo.
The first two Power Rangers movies were PG, not PG-13. The only other CN shows I can picture becoming adult shows are Courage the Cowardly Dog and The Grim Advenutres of Billy and Mandy since those shows relied on dark comedy. Making teen and adult adaptations of kids franchises has been done before. Back in 2000, American Mcgee adapted the popular children's book Alice in Wonderland and turned it into a psychological horror game called American McGee's Alice. The game got a sequel in 2011 called Alice: Madness Returns. Both games are rated M for Mature. Last year in 2020, Disney released a live action remake of their 1998 animated feature Mulan. The original film was rated G, but the remake is rated PG-13.
Honestly, Johnny Bravo wouldn't be very hard to turn into an adult adaptation. When you strip the show down to it's bare essence, Johnny Bravo was just a show about a guy trying to get lucky.
Just because a kid's cartoon wouldn't work as a dark adult adaptation that doesn't some Hollywood executives wouldn't be stupid enough to try it anyway. Case in point.
Whoops! I forgot to mention that there were plans for a live action comedy film about Johnny Bravo with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in the title role, but nothing came of it. The movie's plot, as I recall, would have had Johnny scouring the country in search of his absent father.
@Steven Dolce: The CW wouldn't be interested in Courage the Cowardly Dog because there aren't any young people on that show for the network to exploit, unless they turned Eustace and Muriel into disillusioned twenty-somethings.
@Goldstar I bet the JB movie got canceled. Also, I did not say I wanted a CW adaptation of Courage.
Also, I kind of find it weird to have Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson to play the title character becasue he's black and JB is white.
Technically, Dwayne Johnson is half black, half Samoan. And it's a moot point now, but his race really wouldn't matter since Dwayne Johnson is a very marketable personality, everyone knows who Dwayne Johnson is and his presence would bring people into the theatre. Nowhere in JB's bio does it specify that he can must be played by a Caucasian actor. If the movie hadn't been canceled, I honestly don't think that anyone would care that JB wasn't white if Dwayne Johnson was playing him.
But the question becomes one of, well, can The Rock do Elvis? Jeff Bennett's characterization of Johnny was a blond Elvis impersonator, after all.
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