It’s Been 5 Years And I Still Want to See That Insane Live-Action Powerpuff Girls Reboot The CW Made

We live in an era of entertainment where the reboot might not actually be king, but it’s still a pretty big deal. Just about everything, it seems, is getting the reboot treatment particularly on the small screen where new takes on classic or iconic series almost feel more common than new programming at times. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some reboots are genuinely good and entertaining. But then there are some that aren’t, and some that never quite make it off the ground. One of those reboots that never quite managed to see the light of day was The CW’s live action The Powerpuff Girls. Despite producing a pilot, the series ended up scrapped and with The CW being sold to Nexstar and the network’s programming shifted, that was the end for grown up Buttercup, Bubbles, and Blossom.

But last year, the trailer for the live-action series leaked online. We already knew that the live-action Powerpuff Girls series was going to be bonkers. Set photos and official looks from the pilot back in 2021 stirred controversy and everything we’d been told about the series — that it would follow the girls as “disillusioned twentysomethings who regret spending their youth fighting criminals. The question lingers of whether they can swallow their resentment long enough to come back together and save the world when it needs them most.” — didn’t exactly inspire confidence. The trailer? Yeah, it confirmed that the show as very, very weird. But now, a year after that trailer leak and five years after being promised this series I still want to see the pilot. The longer I sit with it all, not only do I think I see the vision for what they were going for but I think a wider audience will, too.

The Live-Action Powerpuff Girls Was Going For Satire And We Completely Missed the Point

The series was set to star Chloe Bennet as Blossom, Dove Cameron as Bubbles, and Yana Perrault as Buttercup along with Donald Faison as Professor Utonium. The now-adult Powerpuff girls were far from the bright and delightful trio of superheroes that we grew to love in the cartoon. Instead, they were burnt out, broken, and traumatized adults who had sacrificed their childhoods to take on very adult protective roles. How this impacted the girls as adults was on full display in that leaked footage. It revealed that the trio accidentally caused the death of Mojo, an incident that impacted them greatly and, years later, the girls were now estranged from one another and were trying to separate themselves from their crime-fighting with as much distance as possible. Buttercup became a firefighter. Bubbles went to Hollywood to find fame but descended into alcoholism, and Blossom was so broken by what happened to Mojo that she retreated from public life entirely.

The general story itself certainly sounds jarring, but it was the presentation of it that, at the time, seemed really weird. The footage was brightly colored like the cartoon, but the acting was stiff and stilted and cringe. It had everyone scratching their heads and declaring that the cancellation was for the best but if you really think about it, that trailer was exactly right. If you think about it, The Powerpuff Girls cartoon itself is ridiculous. While there is no real acting per se outside of voice acting, there is still a bit of cringe and a bit of stiltedness to how it’s presented. It’s meant to be weird and a little satirical and I think that is exactly what the live-action series was trying to capture but in a way that wasn’t simply for cute entertainment.

The live action series was using that cringe as satire. Think about it: for most adults, the cartoons and entertainment that we loved from our childhood holds a very special place in our hearts. We tend to look past some of the more questionable elements of those programs and not really think about what the actual impact would look like if extrapolated into adulthood. The live action Powerpuff Girls seemed poised to do exactly that: examine our childhood favorite with the rose-tinted glasses off childhood off. The “cheap” costumes and off kilter setting would have given us a sense of the familiar gone wrong while the disaster cases of the girls themselves would have, on some level, given us an honest look at what happens when you don’t let kids have their childhoods but also allowed grownups to see themselves in their favorite heroes. After all, aren’t we all a little burnt out, traumatized, and messy?

We’ll probably never get to see that pilot episode and that’s a shame. We’ll also probably never actually get an adult take on the Powerpuff Girls and they will eternally stay crime fighting kids. But I really wish they’d let us see it. Five years later, I think we’re all ready to see what they were trying to build and maybe, just maybe, actually appreciate it.