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Leaked footage of the live-action Powerpuff Girls series that was canceled by network The CW following a pilot has revealed that the characters would have been grown-up, drunk and disillusioned.
The series, which was ordered in 2021, was planned to star Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron, Yana Perrault as Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup respectively.
Donald Faison, best known for his work on Scrubs, would have played Professor Drake Utonium, who created the unlikely heroes in his laboratory.
Variety reports that the leaked footage, which has now been taken down from YouTube, may have been a rejected trailer.
The clip showed the younger versions of the Powerpuff Girls and their rise to fame as captured in the popular Cartoon Network animated series.
It also presented the trio’s lives as young adults, with Blossom stressed and burnt out, Bubbles turning to alcohol and throwing up in a trash can and a rebellious Buttercup pushing back against gender expectations.
Powerpuff Girls: Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron and Yana Perrault (Getty)
“I’m not wearing that dress anymore, it’s gender normative and ass ugly,” the character says in one clip.
An early logline stated that the series, which was overseen by Juno director and screenwriter Diablo Cody, would have followed the titular superheroes as they became “disillusioned twentysomethings who resent having lost their childhood to crime fighting”.
When the series was canceled in 2021, CW chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz said: “The reason you do pilots is because sometimes things miss, and this was just a miss. We believe in the cast completely. We believe in Diablo [Cody] and Heather [Regnier], the writers. We believe in the auspices of Greg Berlanti and Warner [Bros. TV] studios.
“In this case the pilot didn’t work. But because we see there’s enough elements in there, we wanted to give it another shot. So that’s why we didn’t want to go forward with what we had. Tonally, it might’ve felt a little too campy. It didn’t feel as rooted in reality as it might’ve felt. But again, you learn things when you test things out. And so in this case, we felt, let’s take a step back and go back to the drawing board.”
When photos from the set first leaked at the time, the online reaction was not kind.
In a post that received nearly 256,000 likes, Twitter user Deann Wiley wrote: “This is why y’all need to leave cartoon as cartoon cause this looks absolutely ridiculous. 3 grown ass women flying around in slip dresses & penny loafers.”
Someone else added: “Is there a way to cancel this before the pilot episode,” while another user commented: “Scrap the whole thing.”
