The Powerpuff Girls/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement: Several episodes were directly or indirectly distilled from PPG print material:
    • "Stray Bullet", from comic book story "Squirrely Burly" (issue #1).
    • "All Chalked Up", from the Scholastic Book of thesame title.
    • "PowerProf.", from the Scholastic Book "Powerpuff Professor."
    • "Substitute Creature", from the Little Golden Book of the same title.
    • "Neighbor Hood", from the comic book story "Remote Controlled" (issue #7). The episode was originally penned for season 1, but fearing a lawsuit from the producers of Mister Rogers, the outline was given to DC Comics for the comic story.
    • "Lying Around The House", indirectly from the comic book story "Big Fish Story" (issue #21).
    • "Simian Says", indirectly from the comic book story "See You Later, Narrator" (issue #46).
    • "Deja View" (comic issue #50) was intended as a season 5 episode, but was shelved due to being overbudget (half of the ep was to be in CGI) and having a tight deadline. Like "Neighbor Hood"/"Remote Controlled," the story outline was given to DC and made into a comic.
  • Animation Age Ghetto: Toyed with. The cartoon was originally conceived as "The Whoopass Girls", and the fact that it wasn't exactly originally conceived as a children's show eventually showed... big time. All while not actually making it inappropriate for kids.
  • Anvilicious: The Aesops of every episode that has one are very obvious and heavy handed. It got worse as the show went on
  • Ass Pull:
    • In "Insect Inside", Blossom produces a giant jar to contain a mass of cockroaches. Lampshaded in a later episode where she pulls out a giant match, which she claims to have gotten from the same place.
    • During "HIM Diddle Riddle", the girls are tasked with taking down a giant monster without using their powers. Buttercup runs off and comes back in a helicopter with a gatling gun. Where did that come from, how did she get it, and how does she know how to pilot it?
  • Awesome Music:
  • Badass Decay: The first episode Him was introduced, he was presented as a hellish almighty powerful being so fearsome we can't even say his name, and was pretty solid Nightmare Fuel. By the last time we see him in the show, he's turned into just as much of a feeble joke as any other villain.
    • Though somewhat justified as Him draws power from evil: the more good around him the weaker he is. And we've seen what would happen if he won as well, and it's not pretty. He may not be as deadly when last seen, but he's no doubt still too dangerous to be taken lightly.
  • Complete Monster: Him parodies this trope, but Dick Hardly in "Knock It Off" plays it completely straight. While inspecting the production of the Powerpuff Girls Xtreme Kool Letterz, Dick Hardly finds a perfectly accurate Buttercup among them. Dick's reaction? He reprimands one of his Mooks for not cutting back on the sugar and tells him to melt that particular Buttercup copy down for its Chemical X. Dick Hardly was so evil that the writers saw it fit for him to be the only human in the entire show to actually die! And other than the Gnome from "See Me, Feel Me, Gnomey", he was the only villain to be Killed Off for Real, period.
  • Crack Pairing: Each girl has her own popular, cracky pairing in the fandom: Bubbles x Him, Blossom x Mojo, and Buttercup x Ace - though the last one was actually canon for one episode.
  • Crazy Awesome:
    • Mojo Jojo at the end of "Forced Kin".
    • HIM in "Him Diddle Riddle".
    • The Mayor in "Impeach Fuzz".
    • Harold and Marianne Smith.
  • Creepy Awesome: HIM, all the time.
  • Ear Worm:
    • The ending theme.
    • The children's song about Ms. Keane from "Substitute Creature".
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: The Rowdyruff Boys were intended to be one shot villains, but they garnered such huge fan support with tons of fan art to even a website built around them (archived link here) that the writers eventually caved and brought them back, redesigned and having more depth then just being evil counterparts to the girls.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Sedusa, Femme Fatale, and Ace of the Gangreen Gang for some female fans.
  • Freud Was Right: Entire episodes like "Members Only" and "The Boys Are Back In Town" are beyond disturbing.
  • Girl Show Ghetto: Averted - it was one of the most revered cartoons during its era by both sexes. And despite the ass-kicking, the girls were pretty girly.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Japan absolutely cherished the PPG. So much so that they made their own version of the series.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ho Yay: In the episode called "The City of Clipsville," Professor Utonium is about to marry Ms. Bellum. But then when he takes off her veil to see her face, it turns out to be Mojo Jojo who reveals that he has always loved the professor. This is also a serious example of Getting Crap Past the Radar.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Him, mainly in his earlier appearances. Sometimes Mojo Jojo, particularly in the movie. Also the Gnome in "See Me, Feel Me, Gnomey."
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • From "Cover Up," a floored Buttercup's pathetic "Nooo" when a rather diminutive monster marches toward her. She just let herself get beaten up because she hadn't rubbed her good-luck blanket, but when taken out of context, this clip has some rather Unfortunate Implications. Needless to say, without context, Poopers had a field day remixing this clip.
    • "Eat your pea, Professor!"
      • "SWALLOW IT!"
  • Misaimed Fandom: In the Clip Show spoofing episode, one of the "flashbacks" was of the Powerpuff Girls being bimboish teenagers who have given up crime fighting to hang out at the mall and flirt with the also teenaged Rowdyruff Boys. The whole sequence is rumored to have been a parody of extremely bad PPG fanfiction. A great deal of fans completely missed the point however, and the sequence ironically ended up inspiring even more fanfiction with similar plots.
  • Moe: Bubbles especially. The other girls have their moments, too.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Dick Hardly doesn't just cross it with murdering a perfect Buttercup clone, he crosses it by absorbing the Chemical X in the bodies of the girls, as their father is watching them slowly die.
    • Also, once the Rowdyruff Boys started throwing vehicles full of innocent civilians at the powerpuff girls, that's when the girls decided it was time to stop trying to fight fair against them. (For contrast, the tactic the girls used in response was to look pretty and kiss said boys to overwhelm them!)
    • Mojo crossed it in the movie by enslaving Townsville with super monkeys, destroying half the town and betraying the Powerpuffs' trust in the process. Since it was chronologically his first evil world domination plan, he apparently couldn't cross the line any further in the TV series. See Villain Decay.
    • Mitch crosses this in "Getting Twiggy With It" when he flushes the titular hamster down the toilet. It's made abundantly clear that he won't repent for what he's doing to the poor hamster.
    • From the episode "Cop Out", there's Mike Brikowski. At first, he's just a Jerkass cop who is too lazy to do his job at worst, but he crosses a line when he jumps to attempted murder. As the Powerpuff Girls themselves note, he went from bad to worse. And it's implied that the reason he was fired (leaving his fellow police officer to face bank robbers by himself, which could potentially get him killed) wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back.
    • Him crossed it and then some in "Speed Demon", where he took over Townsville and turned it into an apocalyptic wasteland, driving the citizens into a depressed insanity... and he's implied to havemurdered the Mayor. And this was the result of the girls disappearing for 50 years with no one to stop Him.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: At the start of the episode "Catastrophe", the girls are shown at a ceremony where they are rewarded with a bronze statue and "Powerpuff Day". The ceremony is soon interrupted by a monster searching for his cat, who the girls leave to deal with. The ceremony is never mentioned again throughout the episode.
  • Paranoia Fuel: The episode "Supper Villain" hammers in that your average, everyday neighbor with an average, everyday family could actually be a sociopathic supervillian wannabe without anyone knowing it.
  • Periphery Demographic: At the peak of popularity, most of the show's fans were boys... not that every guy would admit to watching it in public. Nowadays it seems fine to admit you watched it, though, and it was intended for all children anyway.
  • Seasonal Rot: The two seasons made without Craig McCracken after the show was Uncancelled, due to boring plots, ungodly amounts of Flanderization, and a really unfitting art style.
  • Tastes Like Diabetes: "Love Makes the World Go 'Round" is a generally fine song, though the part sung by Blossom at the end is truly a triumphant example of saccharine lyrics.

Blossom: Puppy dogs, kitty cats, swimming through love.

  • Toy Ship: Practically every romance fanfic writer seems to have forgotten that the Rowdyruff Boys are the Girls' Evil Twins. This bit from "The Boys are Back in Town" does not help a bit:

Blossom: All right, girls. I think we know what we have to do. Let's give 'em some sugar!
Bubbles: Ooh, ooh! I want the blond! I think he's cute!
Buttercup: Man, you're weird.

  • Ugly Cute / Grotesque Gallery: The Powerpuff Girls Xtreme.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Er...looking back on the show, it's more than a little squicky that a middle-aged, unmarried man took the time to create three "perfect little girls"
  • Villain Decay: If we look at things chronologically from the movie to the TV show, this happened to Mojo Jojo. He actually suceeded in taking over and destroying much of Townsville in the movie, but in the show he eventually begins downscaling his villainy and fails in more and more humiliating fashions.
  • Villain Sue: The Alien Force from "Forced Kin"... until the end.
  • The Woobie: More often than not, it's Bubbles.
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