It's official: Buttercup, Blossom, and Bubbles are back. The CW announced on Tuesday, Feb. 9, that it ordered a live-action Powerpuff Girls series to pilot, and, while I, a millennial who grew up watching The Powerpuff Girls cartoon, am skeptical of the entire idea, I am willing to give it a chance. I just have one request: please, for the love of sugar, spice, and everything nice, don't give the Powerpuff Girls reboot the Riverdale treatment.
The Powerpuff Girls live-action series will reportedly follow the three crime-fighters as "disillusioned twentysomethings who resent having lost their childhood to crime fighting." As you can imagine, should the show be picked up to series, it'll be about getting them to reunite to defeat a great evil.
The show is being developed by Diablo Cody of Juno fame and Veronica Mars executive producer Heather Regnier, which gives me some hope that it will keep at least some of the Powerpuff Girls' original humor. But, this is The CW. The network's biggest hit in recent years, Riverdale, was seemingly born out of the question: how can we adapt a children's cartoon but make it dark and edgy? (See also: Nancy Drew). And while I tune in weekly to see what nefarious doings the Riverdale gang is up to, I'm not sure the same vibe should apply to my sweet ass-kicking angels Bubbles, Blossom, and Buttercup.
Now, I'm not against seeing the Powerpuff Girls mature, even though it completely changes their dynamics and their personalities. Seeing them as adults may be strange, but not necessarily bad. Making them dark, however, is a different story.
Giving Archie Andrews a serial killer makeover is one thing — he lives for a hero complex. But mess with the innate happiness and joyful energy of the Powerpuff Girls, and it will be considered an act of war on millennial nostalgia. I don't want to see one serial killer picking off the girls' high school friends, or the death of Professor Utonium bringing them together as adults. And I really, really don't want to see a dark color pallet.
Make the Powerpuff girls twenty-something, make them hate each other, make them totally exhausted of fighting crime. But if you replace their signature pink, blue, and green powers with sepia tone, you will live to regret it, CW.
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Image: The Powerpuff Girls/YouTube