Production
In 1991 Craig McCracken, then a student in the character animation program of CalArts, created "The Whoopass Girls" as a drawing of three girls on a small sheet of orange construction paper. The following year he included them as the main characters of his short film Whoopass Stew! The Whoopass Girls in: A Sticky Situation. This short, along with a few of McCracken's No Neck Joe shorts, was selected to be shown at Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation in 1994. While working on Dexter's Laboratory, McCracken submitted his work to Hanna-Barbera's innovative What a Cartoon! Show shorts program, which was eventually produced for Cartoon Network as "The Powerpuff Girls in: Meat Fuzzy Lumpkins" as part of World Premiere Toons. "Meat Fuzzy Lumpkins" first aired in 1995, and was followed by a second short, "Crime 101", a year later. Announcer Ernie Anderson, the narrator of the pilot episodes, died of cancer in 1997 before the show premiered, and he was replaced by Tom Kenny for the remainder of the series. The show's animation director was McCracken's former classmate Genndy Tartakovsky (Dexter's Laboratory, Samurai Jack), who also directed many episodes himself. All of the original episodes (except the WAC shorts with the first one being animated at Animal House in Japan and the Second being animated at Fil Cartoons in the Philippines) were hand-drawn and produced at Rough Draft Studios in South Korea.
The Powerpuff Girls series debut on November 18, 1998 was the highest rated premiere in Cartoon Network's history at the time. The series consistently scored the highest rating each week for the network across a wide range of demographics—from young children to adults. In October 2000, Cartoon Network credited The Powerpuff Girls for its Friday night prime time ratings win among cable networks. By the end of 2000, merchandising based on The Powerpuff Girls encompassed a whole variety of products, including T-shirts, toys, video games, lunchboxes, and dishware. Concerning The Powerpuff Girls success, Craig McCracken has stated, "I thought it would get on Cartoon Network and college kids would watch it and there would be a few random T-shirts out there in the rave scene or in record shops. But I had no idea that it would take off to this extent." The show's last original run episode was on March 25, 2005, in all six seasons were made.
In August 2008, McCracken revealed on his DeviantArt account, as had been announced in that year's Comic Con, that he was working with Cartoon Network on a new half-hour Powerpuff Girls special to celebrate the series' tenth anniversary. The special, titled "The Powerpuff Girls Rule!!!", aired on the Pan-Euro Cartoon Network on November 29, 2008, on the Powerpuff Girls Birthday Marathon, and in the United States on January 19, 2009, as part of its 10th anniversary marathon. Unlike previous episodes in the series, the anniversary special was animated using Adobe Flash at Cartoon Network Studios. As of March 30, 2012, this series has returned to Cartoon Network in re-runs on the revived block, Cartoon Planet.
Read more about this topic: The Powerpuff Girls
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“It is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)