Social Commentary, Gender and Racial Representation in The Powerpuff Girls

Like most well-received animated TV shows, Craig McCracken’s nostalgic revving, half episodic half serial, The Powerpuff Girls was made for kids to enjoy as well as adults. Three little girls fighting crime is enough to get many kids interested, but when tongue and cheek innuendo is added to the mix, it’s not that difficult to also get the parents' and/or babysitters’ attention. With this comes many opportunities for the show creators to make commentary on American society and lightly criticize it. Like many other popular cartoons of the 1990s, The Powerpuff Girls often pushed the limits of representation through satire. The show’s social commentary, though subtle and easy to miss, is ultimately strong enough to be reflected when watching through a critical lens. Though The Powerpuff Girls does a good job at acknowledging the problems reflected in American society, it does almost too good of a job to the point where the viewer has to incessantly question if the show is indeed challenging these norms or celebrating and reinforcing them as normal.

The ubiquitous episodic formula in the show is as follows: The city of Townsville is usually under attack, and the Powerpuff Girls find a way to save the day, even though Townsville doesn’t always deserve to be saved. Townsville as a collective is helpless, single-minded, and spoiled. They expect to be saved in most episodes but have also turned their backs on their saviors when the moment strikes. For instance, in season one finale titled, “Uh Oh, Dynamo”, The girls defeat a giant sea monster using Dynamo, a battle robot created by Professor Utonium. But, they don’t get thanks. Instead, they get yelled at by the Mayor for destroying Townsville. Like, yes, the city is disheveled, but one should be at least thanked when they’re saving someone’s life, no matter the architectural damage. In the episode, “Down N Dirty”, Townsville completely disown Buttercup because she smells so bad and refuses to take a shower. Like, Yes, the smell is important, but it’s not worth chasing a young child out of town with the implication of “burning them”. In the episode “Speed Demon”, the girls accidentally travel decades into the future to find that Him, a supernatural villain, has conjured the feelings of neglect Townsville felt for the girls not saving them into hate; they blame the girls for leaving and though, under Him’s hypnosis, try to hurt the girls, even when the girls apologize. In reflection of American society, Townsville folk are shown to be easily swayed in what to think, This is a social commentary on how the masses cannot truly think for themselves and often result in groupthink when individual thought would be preferred. This bit of social commentary cues in on how easy it is for the masses to be swayed to think something negative and band together for the wrong reasons. The show was on Cartoon Network in the mid-’90s, around the time when American politics started to get very divided. McCracken could be using the people of Townsville to lightly depict the negative effects of groupthink and how it is more ideal to think individually. As stated earlier, the people of Townsville always expect to be saved. Shown in the episode, “Major Competition” where a new, strangely patriotic superhero, Major Man deceives Townsville into thinking he can save them, Townsville is very quick to forget who the Powerpuff Girls even are, which also gives light to the notion that the people of Townsville don’t care to know who is saving them or who to give proper thanks to; as long as they are being saved, that’s what really matters. These depictions make a huge statement about the attitude of American society. It shows McCracken’s cynical view of how clueless the masses are until something tragic goes down, and how ungrateful the masses are as soon as things go back to normal. Very deep ideologies to put in a kid’s cartoon.

The Powerpuff Girls also has an interesting view of gender representation. Though the show has feminist implications, the show simultaneously has anti-feminist implications. This makes sense when you look at the anti-feminist agenda of the 1990s. “While women in business management received the most pressure to abandon their careers— the corporate boardroom being the most closely guarded male preserve— the media flashed its return-to-the-nest sign at all working woman (Faludi 102)”, says Susan Faludi in her text covering the topic of anti-feminist backlash in the 1990s. Looking at its feminist positives, Townsville would be gone if it wasn’t for Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. They are six-year-olds in Kindergarten, but also badass enough to protect an entire city. Raised by a single Father, Professor Utonium is deeply aware of the girls’ physical strength and strong mental capacity, giving them an ample amount of respect and praise. The Mayor is seen as incompetent and feeble-minded like most of Townsville, leaving all of the brains and intellect up to Ms. Bellum, the Mayor’s right-hand woman (her name is literally a play on words, referring to the cerebellum, a part of the brain) showing that behind every powerful man is an intellectual woman. Lastly, the girls’ Kindergarten teacher, Ms. Keane, is also very smart and well educated above her means to teach Kindergarten. If that’s not feminism, what is?

Simultaneously, the show’s social commentary takes a heavy jab at this ideology. The Powerpuff Girls are strong, smart, and powerful, but are also hero slaves to the hotline and take orders from the Mayor to save Townsville. Evident enough, as empowered as they are, they don’t really have the choice to say no because Townsville is completely desolate without them. Looking at Ms. Bellum’s character, the show completely undermines her smartness by overtly playing up her sex appeal, going as far as to only focus on her body and only showing her face one time over a decade of 6 seasons. McCracken makes an interesting political statement through this, showing that feminism is only okay when under the means of some sort of Patriarchy. This subject is heavily themed in the episode “Equal Fights” when the girls take a villainess’s advice and start to feel undermined by their male elders.

Things get even more tricky when thinking about the shows subjectivity of white feminism; the “label given to feminist efforts and actions that uplift white women but that exclude or otherwise fail to address issues faced by minority groups, especially women of color and LGBTQ women”. Given that The Powerpuff Girls was a product of the 1990s this isn’t surprising. Intersectionality was not in popular mainstream media at the time, and the show widely leaves out women of color/LGBTQ women while praising the good coming from white women. Listening to the narrator’s introduction of the opening theme song, he says, “sugar, spice, and everything nice. These are the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little girl”, keyword being “perfect”. Thus, The Powerpuff Girls implicitly conveys the notion that the perfect little girl is indeed white. Not only that, but the girls are also put in generic categories. Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup are kept in these boxes of gender representation, giving the notion that there are limited views on what a girl can be; smart, cute, and tough. There is no real way to know if Craig McCracken did this on purpose. Rightfully stated in the text Television in American Culture, “If television producers want their program to find a place on the television schedule, they must create a show that meets the approval of a network or cable channel, which in turn must be able to sell advertising during the program”. McCracken could be writing about white characters because writers go off of experience and what they know, but it is also interesting to note that Cartoon Network probably didn't want to take any risks with non-white main characters during such a successful time. Would merchandise across sell nationwide if Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup were non-white? Cartoon Network was not inclined to find out.

Paying further attention to the racial representation of the show, there is hardly any. Townsville is seen as predominately white, aside from the black extras thrown in the background from time to time. Throughout the series, characters of color sporadically show up but are forgotten as quickly as they were shown on screen. For instance, In the episode “Ice Sore”, Bubbles and Buttercup take out their frustration and jealousy from Blossom on to a Hispanic character named Pablo. He is pretty much never to be seen again in the series. In the episode, “Uh Oh, Dynamo”, the girls are to be seen in the Chinatown part of Townsville where there are Asian looking characters, but none of them speak throughout the entire episode. Blatant neglect. Black representation gets a little trickier. The show goes ‘so far’ to depict a black family in the episode “Beat Your Greens” for a whopping 13 seconds. The next time an African American character is on the show, they are 1 out of 3 criminals disguised as the Powerpuff Girls. The episode “Boogie Frights” can be seen as slightly offensive. In this episode, the girls save Townsville from disco dancing monsters who put a disco ball in the sky to block the sun so that they can party and scare the living daylights out of Townsville youth forever. Though these characters aren’t black, (they’re monsters) they are heavily urbanized to the point where they depict black culture in a way that one can expect the monster race to be of African American origin. Truly, that episode would be considered super racist if it were to be a new episode in today’s society, along with the brief representations of other cultures seen in the episode “Dream Scheme”. In this episode, the girls put the Sandman in his place when he attempts to make the entire world sleep forever so that he can get sleep. At the part where he is waking everyone up from slumber, The Italian people wake up at the dinner table and immediately start fighting, following the sleeping African people who wake up literally dancing around the fire, singing unintelligible words. Undeniably, political correctness was in a much cooler climate in the 1990s which is why these representations were widely accepted and unquestioned. Were McCracken and his team trying to be racist, most-likely not? But, they weren’t not trying to be racist either, which is indeed a problem.

Similar things can be said about the show's depiction of overweight people. Mostly villains are overweight, and these characters are considered grotesque, dumb, and looked down upon. For instance, Fuzzy Lumpkins’s character is seen as a lazy, overweight hillbilly, which can easily be offensive to people living in those parts of the US. In the episode “Twisted Sister” The Powerpuff attempt to create a 4th sister, Bunny, who is seen to be mentally slow, and larger than the 3 girls. At the end of the episode, she basically dies from an explosion seen as self-sacrifice but is never to be mourned more than once, or mentioned again. Tragic, but not to them. LGBTQ representation is ultimately left as a question mark. It doesn’t help that the only flamboyant character is literally the devil. The infamous villain, Him, is unconventionally masculine and feminine for the climate of that time. Though the character has been proven by McCracken to be based on Chef Blue Meanie from the 1968 Beatle’s film “Yellow Submarine”, it is also good to acknowledge that this did nothing to help alleviate the fear and misunderstanding of LGBTQ people. Why make the only queer character a villain? That’s never a good idea. But, it’s also good to mention, many shows depicted these groups of people worse at the time. On the topic of representation and ideology, The Powerpuff Girls is a godsend, compared to a show like South Park, or even Friends. You get what you get, essentially. Because, ultimately, it is up to the Network and how they choose to treat these subjects.

As stated previously, the popular Cartoon Network show The Powerpuff Girls pushed the limits of representation through satire and also does a good job at acknowledging the problems reflected in American society. But, this show keeps a level of transparency where it is ultimately difficult to know it’s the true stance on these issues. One could best sum it up by saying, it’s a reflection of the society it was made in, subtly making comments on what’s right and wrong in such a passive way in which a viewer can’t help but question what side the show is truly on. By that acknowledgment, it is a great show of its time because it does what any good should do; Make the viewer think critically about what’s going on around them.

Works Cited

Faludi, Susan. Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006.

Lacrimis, Mortem. "@CrackMcCraigen Hello! I Always Wanted to Know... Why Was HIM Wearing a Dress and Awesome Tigh Boots?" Twitter. June 11, 2015. Accessed June 06,2019. https://twitter.com/momus_querela/status/609020338278518784.

Lemoine, Alexa, and Dictionary.com. "What Does White Feminism Mean?" Dictionary.com. April 12, 2019. Accessed June 06, 2019. https://www.dictionary.com/e/gender-sexuality/white-feminism/.

"The Powerpuff Girls." IMDb. June 22, 1994. Accessed June 06, 2019. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0175058/.

The Powerpuff Girls, season 1, episode 5, “Boogie Frights”. December 16, 1998, Hulu

The Powerpuff Girls, season 1, episode 7, “Major Competition”. January 6, 1999, Hulu

The Powerpuff Girls, season 1, episode 8, “Ice Sore”. January 13, 1999, Hulu

The Powerpuff Girls, season 1, episode 13, “Uh Oh, Dynamo”. May 27, 1999, Hulu

The Powerpuff Girls, season 2, episode 4, “Beat your Greens”. September 10, 1999, Hulu

The Powerpuff Girls, season 2, episode 4, “Down N Dirty”. September 10, 1999, Hulu

The Powerpuff Girls, season 2, episode 5, “Dream Scheme”. September 24, 1999, Hulu

The Powerpuff Girls, season 2, episode 11, “Twisted Sister”. May 26, 2000, Hulu

The Powerpuff Girls, season 2, episode 12, “Speed Demon”. June 2, 2000, Hulu

The Powerpuff Girls, season 3, episode 10, “Equal Fights”. January 5, 2001, Hulu