Tomb

Hey, remember The Powerpuff Girls?

If you're a fan of clever, offbeat animation, you probably do. The show ran from 1998 to 2004 and featured the day-saving antics of three of the most adorable crimefighters ever. Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup were created in a lab from a mixture of sugar, spice, everything nice and an accidental dose of “Chemical X,” and now use their incredible abilities of flight, speed, invulnerability, eye-lasers and super-strength to combat evil.

This flippant origin sequence mirrors the show itself, which is also a mixture of contrasting ingredients that work bizarrely well together. The girls are violent yet cute; ruthless yet innocent. It is a show that delights children, yet is filled with jokes that only adults will get. Some episodes throw out lightning-fast references to The Big Lebowski (1998), This is Spinal Tap (1984) and A Hard Day's Night (1964).

On a basic level, it's just flat-out entertaining to see a trio of giggling, squeaky-voiced kindergarten-age girls defeat monsters and giant robots and such, but there is usually a lot more going on under the surface. The show holds a funhouse mirror to the various tropes of the superhero genre, calling attention to its quirks and inconsistencies, such as the concept of black-and-white, right-or-wrong, justice-at-any-cost. In one episode, Blossom succumbs to temptation and steals an unattended set of valuable golf clubs from a crime scene as a Father's Day present for Professor Utonium. In the end, she of course learns the error of her ways and apologizes tearfully. In any other show, she'd be forgiven and the status quo would return to normal, but here, she ends the cartoon in a prison uniform, sentenced to 200 hours of community service.

Violence is often portrayed in a critical light, even when it's being doled out by the heroes. It's not unusual for viewers to go from cheering the girls on to wincing with sympathetic pain at the beatdowns administered to the series' many villains. This is particularly true of the episode “Beat Your Greens,” in which Earth is invaded by vegetable-shaped aliens from the “Broccoloid Empire.” The children of Townsville, led by the Powerpuff Girls, eat the invaders alive, while the monsters scream, run and beg for their lives. And who could forget the sight of sweet little Bubbles going all Dark Knight on Townsville's criminal element, beating down jaywalkers while shrieking “Mercy is for the weak!” in “Bubblevicious”?

Japanese animation is an obvious influence on The Powerpuff Girls, so I suppose it's nicely symmetrical that Japan eventually made its own remake of the show in 2006. Unfortunately, the Japanese series Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z seems to miss the point of the satire and foolishly makes the girls 13-year-olds rather than kindergartners, jettisoning the entire “grown-in-a-lab” origin story in the process. I guess North America isn't alone in its ability to mishandle a remake of a beloved foreign work.

After years of irregular DVD releases of random episodes of the show, Cartoon Network has finally quit messing around and put out a DVD box set of the entire series. All six seasons are included in The Powerpuff Girls 10th Anniversary Collection, including various extra features, like “Whoopass Stew!,” the short film that introduced the characters. (They were originally called “The Whoopass Girls,” and their genesis came from “a can of Whoopass” rather than Chemical X.) Some episodes include optional audio commentary from characters from the show, and it's amusing to hear a cartoon villain exclaim “That's not what happened! This has been edited!” while watching his defeat onscreen.

If you're a Powerpuff fan, this box set is a smart buy. If you're new to the series, track down a rental disc and prepare to become a convert. Just don't start with the 2002 Powerpuff Girls Movie, which feels like a regular episode slowed down to 80 minutes.