Cross stitch pattern of Him from The Powerpuff Girls. Download the PDF here: Him Pattern

Grid Size: 72W x 97H
Design Area: 5.00″ x 6.79″ (70 x 95 stitches)
Colors: 8

My Patron, xSaffirex, has just been accepted into a planetary defense militia so of course they expected to be hazed a little, but it turns out that all those small gopher tasks that have had xSaffirex running around the station all week were really just to help them learn where everything is. Well, okay, maybe it was a little bit of teasing… maybe a lot of teasing, but xSaffirex is in it for the long haul!

I avoided watching the new Powerpuff Girls 2016 reboot because everyone said it was trash, so I decided to watch a random episode. I watched episode 31 Secret Swapper of Doom. In short: it’s fine. IMDB gave it a middling score, so I’m assuming that if you skip those episodes with a score of 3 or lower, a whopping 21 episodes, then the show might be worth watching.

I’ve got to say, the intro is nice. The song is dull and forgettable, but the animation style they use for it is really cute. I wish they had kept more elements from it for the actual show. The animation in general is pretty clean and smooth, not as stylized as the original. Nothing to complain about, but not a high point.

The episode starts out with the Professor going through some of his old stuff and it’s a really strong start. It’s sweet how he interacts with the girls and we get a narrative set up about him not wanting Bubbles to read his diary. It’s a cute moment. Some of the bits like Buttercup’s not brushing her teeth and getting pranked are set ups for things that happen later in the episode, but when you first see them, they seem so random. It’s like the writers knew they would be important later on but they couldn’t find a way to incorporate them organically into the story.

Actually, there seems to be a lot of random references and lines that go nowhere. I assume they’re supposed to be jokes and I just don’t know enough about the show to get them. Or maybe they’re just throwing out a bunch of small jokes hoping something lands. Bubbles being way too trusting is pretty funny but Buttercup getting covered with confetti isn’t.

Anyway, the titular secret swapper turns out to be one of those foldy fortune teller paper things. Blossom asks it about her crush, and that’s new to me! I don’t know, it just seems kind of off to give her a love interest, but they aged up the girls to elementary school, so I guess it makes sense. According to the internet, there’s some controversy over this guy being a self insert character by one of the show writers, and that’s a yikes if its true. The guy doesn’t really do anything in this episode though, so I’ll give it a pass.

There’s a short song over a montage, and I think they were going for a sort of Parry Gripp type song where there’s a combination of simple, wholesome, and whimsical, but what we got was just a song that blandly sings what the girls are doing. It’s just as forgettable as the intro.

There is a good scene though where Bubbles and the girls are tempted to read the Professor’s diary so that they can feed the secret swapper and get some earrings they saw on TV. I feel like they could have emphasized the moral of not falling into mindless consumerism, but at least they made it obvious that the girls are in the wrong for invading Professor Utonium’s privacy.

Turns out the fortune teller was an origami dinosaur the whole time. Yeah, that sounds about right. There was weirder stuff in the original. Oh, and Buttercup’s teeth come back for a joke that actually got a chuckle out of me, so that’s fair. The hook at the beginning is pretty effective and works into the scene where the Professor gets hurt by how much the girls broke his trust. And it all ties together when the girls apologize after defeating the monster by sharing in the Professor’s embarrassment.

Honestly, it’s a pretty structurally sound narrative, despite the Professor’s uncomfortable rapping. Sure, it’s not the best, and it certainly has weaker humor and music than the original, but the show doesn’t really deserve all the hate it gets. Maybe I just struck on a good one and all the others are bad, but if every episode was like Secret Swapper, I wouldn’t really mind it so much.

And it was all orchestrated by Him in the end? Okay, sure, I guess this is kind of his thing.