Oh, the camp masterpiece we almost had; sugar, spice, and everything tragic, more like. This morning, a social media account called “Lost Media Busters” claimed to have gotten its hands on the trailer for The CW’s “gritty” Powerpuff Girls reboot, starring Chloe Bennet, Dove Cameron, Yana Perrault, and Donald Faison. The A.V. Club can confirm that the footage is actually from the pilot, but the trailer isn’t real. Still, this thing is kookier than we ever could have dreamed. That’s not clickbait; Buttercup utters the phrase “angry kinky hate boner” about Mojo Jojo’s (human) son in it, so you can make that call on your own. It would be a disservice to your shock receptors to spoil anything further, so just go ahead and watch it for yourself.
In a trailer chock-full of visionary choices—a protest sign recasting the girls’ P.P.G. acronym as “Privileged Problematic Girls” is a standout—perhaps the most bonkers single frame (at least out of context) is one that reads “From Oscar Winner Diablo Cody.” Cody wrote the screenplays for Juno, Lisa Frankenstein, and Jennifer’s Body, so anyone familiar with her work may be able to see the vision here. She also worked on a scrapped early version of Barbie, so this wouldn’t have been her first foray into reheated IP.
Unfortunately, the show’s original pilot—which this seems to be the trailer for—was “too campy” and “just a miss” in the eyes of The CW’s then-CEO Mark Pedowitz. The network attempted to retool it into something even edgier, but by then people had already seen (and despised) the costumes, and the writing was very much on the wall. This was also around the time the network was attempting to transition from the home of heart-eating dogs to professional golf for their presumed 58-year-old demographic, so the girls would have stood out too much anyway. At least this trailer is a better surprise than anything Professor Utonium could have cooked up in his lab.
