THE POWERPUFF GIRLS
Sugar! Spice! And everything nice! These were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little girls!
A lot of kids get into superheroes at some point in their youth. Some--like me!--never outgrow an interest in such daring figures and their larger-than-life adventures. My first superheroes were Superman and Flash Gordon, and Popeye the Sailor Man, all of whom I experienced first on TV. But really, it was another TV superhero, Batman, who sparked my fascination with mighty crusaders, and with the BIFF and the POW and the ZAP. For my daughter Meghan, it was The Powerpuff Girls.
But Professor Utonium accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction: Chemical X! Thus THE POWERPUFF GIRLS were born!
The Powerpuff Girls was a bond that Meghan and I shared, as her young eyes widened with the possibilities of the impossible, and my older soul delighted in the energy and wit of The Powerpuff Girls' cartoon exploits. We watched the TV show and DVDs together, listened to CDs of Powerpuff Girls-related pop music, read the subsequent comic books, and went to see The Powerpuff Girls Movie when it was released in theaters. I will always associate The Powerpuff Girls with a cherished memory of watching my daughter grow up.
I discovered The Powerpuff Girls before Meghan did. I may have seen a commercial or print ad for the series around its debut on Cartoon Network in late 1998. My first conscious memory of the show was when someone in a power pop chat group mentioned he'd heard a boppin' song that sounded like it was about The Power Pop Girls. That turned out to be "The Powerpuff Girls (End Theme)" by Bis:
Blossom
Commander and the leader
Bubbles
She is the joy and the laughter
Buttercup
She is the toughest fighter
Powerpuff saves the day!
And they'll be fighting crime
Trying to save the world
Here they come just in time
THE POWERPUFF GIRLS!
My first direct Powerpuff Girls experience wasn't until 2001. I may have read about the episode in TV Guide, or online, or who knows where. But I knew that The Powerpuff Girls was airing an episode inspired by The Beatles. Well. This power pop/superhero geek hadda see that!
Like many of the Saturday morning cartoon shows of my childhood, each episode of The Powerpuff Girls contained more than one individual cartoon. (For example, in '66 each weekly shot of Space Ghost served up two Space Ghost cartoons, bookending another cartoon starring Dino Boy.) So the 2/9/01 Powerpuff Girls began with a PPG cartoon called "Moral Decay" before getting to the main event: "Meet The Beat Alls."
"Meet The Beat Alls" was a hoot, dizzying in its rapid-fire barrage of Beatles references and comic pizzazz. I can't say its splendid-time-guaranteed-for-all made me a Powerpuff Girls fan immediately, but it was a fab way to start.
Meghan was five years old by then. Her TV was limited; she loved books, music, and imaginative play, and those filled her time more fully and freely than television could. My wife Brenda and I weren't snobs about TV--we both love TV, fercryinoutloud--but as first-time parents we were concerned with making sure Meghan had opportunities beyond what our 27" Hitachi could offer. Television is seductive and addictive, so Meghan did become hooked on PBS' children's programming (Sesame Street, Barney, and later Arthur), and eventually on some of Nickelodeon's kids shows, too.
It took a while to get to The Powerpuff Girls. Brenda didn't have the background in superheroes that I did, and she was (and remains) openly distrustful of violent programming, even good-versus-evil cartoon violence. She had a valid point. We took Meghan away from a babysitter who had Batman Forever flickering on the TV for the kids in her charge. Listen: I'm a Batman fan, and I still agree that movie's not appropriate for young children. (The fact that Batman Forever sucks is merely incidental.)
I don't remember how Meghan finally got to superheroes and/or action programming, though I'm pretty sure I'm to blame. I do recall that an urgent need for Meghan to get new winter boots led us to Hill's Department Store one day. It was late in the shopping season for snow apparel, so the pickings were slimmer'n slim. There was but one pair of boots left in Meghan's size, a nondescript silvery gray pair. Brenda looked at them, and started to tell Meghan that she wouldn't want them. I answered, Are you kidding? These are superhero boots! It's like what an astronaut would wear! It's what Flash Gordon wears! Meghan said with great determination, I want these!
(Years later, when I retold that story yet again, Meghan remarked about me trying to manipulate her young mind. I reminded her that she was pretty happy with the situation at the time, and she agreed that was true. I think.)
And we somehow wound up watching The Powerpuff Girls. Both Meghan and I enjoyed these shows, though Brenda remained skeptical. Brenda would join us sometimes, and excuse herself others. Inevitably, this newfound interest in cartoon action affected Meghan's imaginative play, but not in the sense of hitting or punching or any overt violence on Meghan's part; she began to devise more fantastic scenarios, incorporating her own superheroes, and even writing and drawing new comic book stories starring her creations Super Meghan and friends. She was already creative before she ever watched The Powerpuff Girls; superhero fantasy merely served to further enhance and feed that creativity.
As Meghan grew older, she developed a greater appreciation of the inventive, manic humor of The Powerpuff Girls. It's not like she ever thought it was Proust to begin with--PPG always made her laugh--but she simply got more of the jokes as she matured. That's the ongoing reward of juvenile fiction and entertainment that doesn't talk down to kids; kids will respond in the moment to what seems real and valid to them, and their enjoyment can mature as they mature. Meghan tells me that another show she used to watch, Totally Spies, is nowhere near as great as she used to think it was; she retains her affection for The Powerpuff Girls. (This affection does not extend to any more recent incarnation of the girls; Meghan disdains latter-day PPG almost as much as she loathes Riverdale, The CW's current edgy TV distortion of her beloved Archie characters.)
Meghan began collecting comics: The Powerpuff Girls, of course, and her favorites, the various Archie titles. She continued to read real books, and she tried her hand at writing more stories of her own, comics and prose alike. She continued to draw, an interest I wish she still pursued. She danced. She swam. She studied. Math was her Kryptonite, but she gutted it out, and maintained stellar grades. She rarely, rarely missed a day of school, and only then when it absolutely couldn't be helped. Honor Roll. High Honor Roll. Honor Society. Teachers along the way who looked forward to reading the books that Meghan would write someday.
She graduated from high school in 2013. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor delivered the commencement address, and Meghan told Sotomayor she was thrilled just to be in the same room as her. Meghan had already fallen in love with Ithaca College on her first visit there. A private school education was dauntingly expensive for us workin' class folks, but a combination of scholarship and grant incentives brought the prize within reach. Go Bombers! Meghan became a writing major (with a history minor) at IC in the fall of 2013. She graduated summa cum laude in May of 2017.
Her comics collection is long gone. As she prepared to matriculate her way outta Syracuse in 2013, she decided she'd no longer have time or space to devote to four-color fancies, so her stash of assorted tattered and well-loved issues of The Powerpuff Girls, Archie, Betty, Veronica, et al. were shipped to the thrift store. She kept her Powerpuff Girls DVDs, and watched them with friends at college. Brenda and I surprised her with a gift of the complete series boxed set, giving Meghan a chance to re-watch all the shows she'd loved, and catch up with ones she'd missed. The boxed set included "See Me, Feel Me, Gnomey," the notoriously weird rock opera episode that was too freakin' strange for Cartoon Network, which refused to air it in the U.S. Freedom beef!
In 2016, Meghan got to meet Tom Kenny, the talented expatriate Syracusan who provided the voices of the narrator and the Mayor on The Powerpuff Girls. Tom is most famous for his work as SpongeBob Squarepants, and he was delighted to chat with someone like Meghan, who was much more interested in the events of Bubbles, Blossom, and Buttercup in Townsville than in the goings-on of SpongeBob and his pals. Tom was back in the 'Cuse to participate in a live celebration of our local late '70s/early '80s new wave scene, and you can see those details in Tom Kenny, My Daughter And Me and BRIGHT LIGHTS! The Complete Five-Part Trilogy. For now, suffice it to say that I consider Tom Kenny a superhero in his own right
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| Tom Kenny with Meghan and Meghan's friend Nicole |
Today is Meghan's 23rd birthday. No, I can't explain how all of that time went by so fast, though I betcha the evil Mojo Jojo had something to do with it. Man, ya just can't trust a criminal monkey mastermind. In college, Meghan decided she was more interested in publishing than in writing as a career path, and internships at Cornell University Press and London's Gibson Square Press led to her current employment at Syracuse University Press. She's back home, contemplating her next move. Brenda and I are so, so proud, and so happy to have her in Syracuse for as long as her fate allows her to be here.
You can compare being a parent to being a superhero. It might be a leap over tall buildings, but we'll allow it. As parents, you'll fail more often than Captain Marvel ever seemed to, but the stakes are still high, and you battle on to the best of your ability. You don't really deserve the lion's share of the credit for your child's success; all you can do is point in a presumably correct direction, and hope for the best. The rest is all up to him or her.
Nonetheless, we are all shaped by our experiences, good and bad. If we're smart, and if we survive, we'll learn from the bad experiences and cling tightly and lovingly to the good. Family. Friends. Love. Fun. Music. Knowledge. Adventure.
I write a blog so I can express my passions: my music, my heroes, my dreams. Nothing in life has ever matched the fulfillment of being Meghan's Dad. The Powerpuff Girls was a part of that. I remember summer afternoons with Meghan, in the swimming pool at Kennedy Park, following the directions for her imagined superhero play, with me bantering about adding The Justice League and The Challengers Of The Unknown and The Seven Soldiers Of Victory to her assembled coterie of Blossom, Buttercup, Bubbles, and Super Meghan. I remember sitting in a theater at the climax of The Powerpuff Girls Movie, watching and feeling the cathartic release as The Powerpuff Girls transcended the pettiness and troubles that had dogged them, and finally defeated Mojo Jojo. I remember quoting lines from the TV series, back and forth, father and daughter, more times than full memory can hold. I remember. The joy and the laughter. Powerpuff saves the day. Happy Birthday, Super Meghan.
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| And I STILL wish someone had the sense to release The Powerpuff Girls' great bubblegum song "Love Makes The World Go Round," from the TV episode "Mime For A Change." Ya wanna talk power POP girls? There ya go! |
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