Hi all, I’ve come across a story or two this week about a proposed Powerpuff girls reboot, and (as with everything these days) it has set the internet squabbling over whether this will be a worthy follow-up to the original series. For those who may not know, The Powerpuff Girls was a late 90s/early 2000s cartoon show revolving around the adventuress of Blossom, Buttercup and Bubbles, three kindergarten-aged superheroes created in a lab by their father, Professor Utonium. The stories were fun, silly and very tongue-in-cheek, with the kindergarteners fighting villains such as Fuzzy Lumpkins, a hilbilly monster, Mojo Jojo, a superpowered monkey, and of course, “Him” (a flamboyant version of the Devil).
So, the latest reboot has had a script leak – I’m not going to add fuel to the fire by going through it, there’s more than enough rage on the internet already – but an observation I will make is that the fragment I’ve seen is a dark, gritty satire of the original. This got me thinking: what makes a good satire work? I looked through my library for inspiration and came up with one of the best satires I’ve seen, a hilarious, ridiculous reboot about a superhero who quits his role to become a lawyer. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law.
Harvey Birdman was a 2000s reboot of an old 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero serial about a solar-powered, bird-winged secret agent. In the reboot, Harvey has decided he’s had enough and joins the law firm Sebben and Sebben, working with his sidekick to tackle crime in a whole new way. This is a fantastic setup, as each episode allows for a new set of characters from the Hanna-Barbera universe to ask Birdman to take their case. Some of the best episodes include Fred Flintstone as a mob boss, the Jetsons suing their forbears over climate change, and Yogi Bear’s sidekick Boo-Boo revealed as a terrorist. My personal favorite characters are the recurring judge, Mentok the Mind-Taker (“ooo-EEE-oo!”), and Bridman’s psychotic boss Phil Ken Sebben, voiced by comedy legend Stephen Colbert.
The episodes certainly delve into some adult topics, looking at sex, drug abuse, racism and corporate greed. Poor Harvey has more than his fair share of misadventures, more often than not being the butt of each episode’s joke. So, if this is the case, why does the show stick in my memory, even twenty years after it first aired? Part of this was snappy, fast-paced jokes that sometimes bordered on the surreal, all delivered by some truly talented voice actors. Another reason is because the crazy Hanna-Barbera plaintiffs are all, in some way, true to their original characters, and you can tell that the jokes were written by genuine fans of the original cartoons.
Once again, we came to the crux of the matter. Harvey Birdman wildly succeeded as satire for two reasons. One is that each episode, no matter how serious or absurd, is a love letter to the madcap, crazy universe of Hanna-Barbera, not condemning the old guard for their silliness but celebrating that silliness to explore adult topics. The other reason builds on this – no matter how ridiculous Harvey is, no matter how much he is thrown in the mud, the show never condemns him as a genuinely bad person. Harvey is the everyman; sometimes greedy, desperate or vain, but with a good heart beneath all the pompousness, and a true desire to make the world a better place.
I don’t know where the Powerpuff girls reboot is going to go, but if they can take a few lessons from Harvey Birdman, I’m hoping they have every success!
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