I like that when you GIS his name, this character is higher in the results than most of the photos of him are.


Also, this brings to light one of the underexplored problems of the whole reboot thing - if you reboot something that was made 20-25 years earlier (which is the usual gap) it's a statistical inevitability that a significant percentage of the people working on the reboot were in the middle of puberty when the original was new, and stuff like this (or worse) is the inevitable result, especially with cartoons.

"...there have been some other problematic issues with the show, including an episode where two of the girls twerked (which Mancini and Goldman created the story for, as they typically do, but didn’t write)."

Ha

I think the reason the original was popular is that it was written to be at least watchable by parents as well as kids, after a couple decades of kids' cartoons being half hour commercials that no sane and sober adult was likely to get much pleasure out of (not that sane and sober adults are good arbiters of taste at the best of times).

Cartoon Network made its initial name by, among other things, taking the piss out of and not being pre-CN Hanna-Barbera. "Not being in the old HB mold" WAS the HB mold aside from things like Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021 and Harvey Birdman. In those cases it was EXACTLY the HB mold, with CN throwing the puppets an animator and/or a writer's way and saying "do whatever with these things, maybe give Brak some hilarious brain damage or something".

There's no similar disconnect with stuff like PPG 2016. The new stuff has that mixture of "now's my chance to shove in some fanfiction" and standard outdated cultural references. In any case, CN just wants to extend a property's shelf life, so it's not likely worried until one of its show creatives commits sexual assault and/or self-immolation or something.

It's not just the obvious Deviantart fanfiction style antics like this and the fourth PPG that are the problems with these sort of reboots, it's that they often mostly feel like the scripts are based on bland fanfiction where the fan authors are such big fans that they want to make their "own" stories that are just like the original - they try to capture the spirit and style of the originals and it's always sort of a bit off and tone deaf and tin eared and very plain. Like the worst sort of pastiche, just lifeless and "there".

If they had actually lifted the 4th Powerpuff girl from a piece of fanfiction, it would have been less embarrassing than what they came up with.