The Powerpuff Crusaders and the Love Day Episode · 9:07pm June 19th
It's not exactly a mind-blowing statement to claim that Friendship is Magic shares some Powerpuff Girls DNA (e.g. Blossom and Twilight are both powerful, socially responsible bookworm-type leaders). But "Hearts and Hooves Day" and "Keen on Keane" are, like, eerie déjà vu levels of similar.
Blog Number 262: "The City of Ponyville!" Edition
Let me pile up the evidence:
Three girls - the Powerpuff Girls in the one, the Cutie Mark Crusaders in the other - craft (a) Valentines-themed card(s) for their popular and friendly teacher - Miss Keane and Cheerilee respectively - to show their appreciation, only to discover to their shock that their teacher doesn't have a romantic partner.
Thinking this is a major oversight, they take matters into their own... appendages. Thus, they end up selecting a good-natured relative who's just dealing with food at the time of the girls' eureka moment, and who's generally a bit on the reclusive side. He (Big Macintosh, Professor Utonium) becomes their idea of a perfect match.
The girls send separate invitations to lure both "lovers" to their idea of a romantic location for a date, which ends up being politely super-awkward for said "lovers". The girls spy on them nearby, but not only are they easily spotted, their childish ruse is just as easily deciphered by the grown-ups.*
* Minor digressive detail, but I really like how the Powerpuff Girls' idea of a romantic dinner spot is the sort of restaurant a tiny little kid would want to visit, i.e. a Chuck E. Cheese knockoff. Similar to how the ponies get charming reminders of their pony-ness, so the girls get charming reminders of their tiny childishness.
After laughing off the girls' plan, the "lovers" then actually fall for each other, which involves prolonged eye contact.
- The plan backfires because the "lovers" become sickeningly over-saccharine sweethearts with pet names, behaviour which is so obsessive the girls fear it will interfere with the running of their respective lives and affect those around them.
- The "lovers" break up by the end of the episode.
The main difference is that the Cutie Mark Crusaders take active steps to force the romance magically, which leads to them having to counter their own mistake and learning not to interfere with people's relationships, whereas the Powerpuff Girls (belonging to a less aesop-oriented show) neither exacerbate nor solve their own problem. In the latter case, it solves itself once Professor Utonium finds out Miss Keane has a cat, sparking a comedic argument (and an appropriate callback to a prior episode*) which pulls the rug out from under the whole story.
* It involved a villainous cat. Not Opal.
There are minor variations too. For the CMCs, the dire consequences of Cheerilee and Big Mac getting obsessive are merely speculative. For the PPGs, the dire consequences actually happen.
Still, that is a lot of overlap that I find hard to dismiss as just coincidence.
Also, did you know the English dub for the anime version (Powerpuff Girls Z) included MLP voice actors?
For one thing, this reference...
Worth noting I'm not the first to point this out. There's more that can be said about the Powerpuff-MLP comparisons, but for now this particular pair of eps struck me as an especially clear example of conceptual inheritance (Lauren Faust co-directed "Keen on Keane" and must at least have still been on the advisory role come "Hearts and Hooves Day").
Nothing that deep or profound, I'm afraid. Just something that struck me as too good to ignore. Call it a case of me... horsing around!
So once again, that's all! For now! Thanks to... Impossible Numbers! 
Ooh, got to this one already, eh? [Well, unless you're skipping a lot of watching them out of order more than I'd have guessed] Nice!
Oh geez, following that link made me cringe at how slapdash my writing was then. Those first rewatches of Seasons One-Three are… painful, and I would not advise anyone to take them as reflective of what I think today. And even just the pointing of the similarity to this episode was a muddle of a paragraph in its prose construction. Yikes.
I know, right? A lot of English dubs produced for South-East Asian TV (yes, it sounds weird I know, but it is a thing for shows where there's no real financial demand for it in America) are farmed back to Canada, as it's the cheapest place where you can still get that reliable quality of in-and-out of the booth lickety-split.
Having watched some dub clips of this show (when I first discovered Powerpuff Girls in the late 2000s, I was so hungry for more I watched the whole 52-episode run, even though it's a very flat magical girl anime; mostly in sub, as that was weirdly far more common YouTube, though it was of course better subbed then dubbed), the weirdest things to my FiM-ears now is hearing, in part or in full, Spitfire out of Buttercup's mouth and Spike out of Ken's. We also have Nicole Oliver as Ms. Bellum, Tabitha St. Germain as Ms. Keane (and Snake, who's female in the dub), Kelly Sheridan as Princess Morbucks, and many of the regular male FiM voice actors, though none of them sound like their FiM characters to nearly the same distracting level as the above two. Of course, this anime came first, so I can't blame it, especially as, never being broadcast in the Anglosphere, virtually none of FiM's audience have seen it.
Anyway, this was a great trip down memory lane! It has been noted by aficionados of both shows that one can detect somewhat more parallels to FiM in the PPG episodes Faust herself wrote or storyboarded on, this being a clear example. I won't lie, as much as I love FiM, PPG is for sure a better show, and there's a lot more wit and fun playing to an adult level in their episode (plus, its half the length).
It's also such an anomaly in the show's run: this episode and its accompanying 11-min partner ("Not So Awesome Blossom") plus one 22-min episode were the first two of Season Five, but they not only aired five months after the movie (meaning they were in production during the final crunch on the film), followed by a nine-month pause before CN started airing more of Season Five, but they're a complete anomaly. Craig and Lauren were still on these first two episodes, yet left thereafter to start on Foster's.
Thus, despite using the digital techniques and stylistic revisions pioneered by the movie, they still have the same visual language and tone and sensibilities as the early, classic seasons. Whereby the rest of Season Five, plus Six, headed by Chris Savino (yeah, I know – weirdly, his run reminds me of the Lady Writers on FiM, in that he was a very slipshod showrunner but the episode he personally wrote/storyboarded were largely great) are much visually slower (there are lots of "character turns slowly to camera" reaction shots) and pedestrian, doubly so for the scripts. Considering how attuned we are to the changes in FiM's season when the visual style and language of the show remains the same, just with more ambition and scope on a gradual level, the change between the two era of PPG is even more startling given it's on the visual as well as the script level.
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Yes, I've passed all four seasons and even found time to watch the PPG Movie on Saturday. General summary at present is: Good stuff! I think I'll come back later and go into more depth then (for instance, the Movie has a distinct "pilot" flavour I can't help comparing with Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends and MLP:FiM's premiere itself).
Credit where it's due, in this case, as I can't claim to have set a precedent. I even made a point of checking the episodes' respective TVTropes pages in case the plot parallels had been mentioned there in any capacity (they were on the MLP page as a whole plot reference).
One example on a related note: many of the cast members did the dub for Mobile Suit Gundam 00, and that was a major factor in my curiosity towards - and eventual viewing of - that anime.
You do see familiar names in the dubbing community, to be sure. I first encountered them when I watched the dub for the 90s Digimon Adventure and its followups, and you start picking up on the voices of notable names after a while (like Steve Blum, who's done a lot of voice work in general).
As far as I can tell, most people wouldn't recommend it anyway for quality issues. Then again, it's tough finding PPG media beyond the original show that's not contested at best.
Very surprised to find how close to the conclusion of the original series the anime adaptation was! (Ignoring the long-after-the-fact specials, that is). Must've really taken off in Japan to get adapted so quickly.
Something I will comment on here and now is how much the PPG show lives and breathes on disciplined pacing. Even as early as the fourth season, you can really tell when an episode is struggling to fit the time (off the top of my head, "Superfriends" suffers especially poorly for this because it doesn't have the most exciting story to begin with, so the sluggishness and stretching becomes obvious), and it's becoming easier to miss going into the fifth season (which is where I'm at now).
Do like how PPG has much of FiM's easy-going charm and character love in its lineup, as well as more regularly action-packed thrills and the sort of dedicated fight patterning and framing you'd later see at its peak in Tartakovsky's Samurai Jack and (to a much more gruesome extent) Primal. It's got a bit of everything for everyone, hasn't it?
It'd be worth tracking down which eps get whom on their credits list - I remember we talked about the overlap in writing staff from The Powerpuff Girls to MLP: Friendship is Magic (Amy Keating Rogers' rise, for example). Could spot more stylistic patterns that way.
Yes, keeping these episodes and seasons straight has sometimes been awkward. Even as far back as the first season, there was a weird two-month gap between "Just Another Manic Mojo / Mime for a Change" and "The Rowdyruff Boys", which is much bigger than the gap between seasons one and two. And let's not get into the weird time anomaly that is "Helter Shelter / Power Lunch".
A change in style which is very obvious on a revisit, I might add! Like, I'm surprised I never commented on it before now.
That would explain how thin some of the episodes have been feeling lately, even the ones I really liked. Some of them feel more like ten-minute setups with no genuine payoff, not fully fledged narratives in their own right. Or like amusing concepts stretched rather than developed (the "Mo' Linguish" and "Nuthin' Special" are a couple of examples I can recall). Too straightforward and repetitive, as well ("Octi-Gone" could've been a fun murder-mystery homage, but it comes across as a narrative checklist). There's enough of the original flavour carrying over for vague goodwill, but something structural didn't survive the transition. Not completely.
I've seen you mention the pacing of certain MLP Season Six and Seven episodes in a similar vein to how I described the slackening PPG equivalents above: the later stuff feels clumsier and the timing feels less disciplined. You think it's a parallel "running out of steam" phenomenon, perchance, or a consequence of handing the reins over to someone with a very different directorial aesthetic?
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For my money, a more apt comparison is that Season Five episode of Teen Titans that shows how they all got together in the first place. Arguably even better than the PPG movie, by showing the origin after we know the character and the world so well, it hits that sweet spot of deepening them and making it all feel more like a living myth, rather than just a superfluous prologue, as many origin stories are.
There was loose murmurings from Craig at the time that were a second PPG commissioned, Him would be the antagonist in it, but even after from its box office failure, given how the newer execs were unhappy he didn't give them a bright, colourful, poppy kids' movie, that would never have been greenlit (coincidentally, or perhaps not, Him only appears in three supports rolls during the Craig-less last two seasons (excepting "Power-Noia" as he did direct that).
Especially for LA-based anime dubs, since those people can still be cast and heard in all the regular big English-language cartoons made there (most Vancouver-recorded cartoons, until recently, had limited adult appeal, and very few American shows are recorded in New York to avail of the anime dubbing scene there).
Yes and no. PPG was successful on a cult level, and was "known" there, or as much as it could be for the reach Cartoon Network Japan as a cable channel had. But many at that network felt, given many of its ingredients common to successful Japanese shows, it could have been huge, but the visual and tonal style was too American for Japanese kids. Thus, they reached out to CN in America to acquire permission to make a Japanese version of the property.
Alas, despite the quick production speed of anime, by the time this was greenlit and development could begin, PPG has been crushed underfoot as the current "American cartoon of interest" in Japan by Lilo & Stitch, so it only lasted one year. Helped that the Disney's flick's spin-off American cartoon wasn't so overtly American as to not work for Japanese audiences, though they too made their own anime version in 2008, which unlike PPGZ, lasted several seasons. It is a very weird thing, not least for the designs of all the established aliens being thrown in with anime character and moving with the anime style of body language despite having American animation character designs.
And that's just you viewing it now in isolation: when it first aired, it was notorious for the PPG Heroes & Villains album song "Signal in the Sky" being played in full for a montage (nearly three-and-a-half minutes) and in the same Summer where the music video of same song played constantly during ad breaks on the network. That music video is so awesome I don't have the words for it, but even great stuff grates when it repeats. See also The Iron Giant being broadcast continuously in 24-hour marathons with ads for the PPG Movie that same summer.
And unlike most shows that try to do that and end up not really satisfying any group, it makes those elements work even when your favourite isn't onscreen.
I will confess I haven't broken it down as much as with FiM. Plus, as they didn't write scripts, but brainstormed episode ideas collectively, then a board artist boarded it from the collected outline, it's not a one-to-one comparison (Amy Keating Rogers was the only non-artist writer on staff, her first professional gig, and I recall her job was basically writing up the outlines from the brainstorming sessions, though she contributed plenty throughout that process herself, of course).
That said, I have pinpointed a decent few trends. Chris Savino episodes love puns ("Los Dos Mojos" and "I See a Funny Cartoon In Your Future" (a Jay Ward tribute, basically), for one. Lauren Faust, though she didn't write much, only being there for two seasons, was given to relationship episodes or moments where she could ("Powerprof.", "Stray Bullet", "Keen on Keane"), though she's most known there among fans for the controversial "Equal Frights". David Smith, who would would late do the 15th anniversary CG special "Just Pantsed", happens to have done every episode with a song (plus the rock opera "See Me, Feel Me, Gnomey"), and also a few with riddles or puzzles for the viewer to figure out. Don Shank, while mostly an Art Director, a decent few of his storyboarding credits are for very action-y episodes (which fits, being an art director), like "Uh Oh Dynamo" and "Criss Cross Crisis". And so on.
And very good examples. On another note, "Mo' Linguish" is one of those that sounds great, but is underdone by Mojo's way of speaking turning into a parody of itself, even as fun as the way in which adult community college students start speaking like him gets going.
Mixture of both, as lazy as it sounds. Of course, again, it's more obvious with PPG, as both the writers and art/animation directors changed, whereas the key leads up at DHX were people who had worked on FiM since the start or near-start (Jim Miller started as a board artists halfway through Season One). Then you also have the nature of the show switching to a fully digital flow (many have said it thus feels too clean for its UPA-origins, without the spit-and-shine polish the movie could also apply to turn that around into a positive), and that Savino was simultaneously being showrunner for the last two seasons of Dexter's Laboratory (which not only had a different crew to the original, but was brought back after basically a hiatus of four years since the original 52-episode run concluded). It's noted that Savino directed very few of the new episode (likely owning to being dual showrunner), most going to Randy Myers and/or John McIntyre. Who had co-directed with Craig quite a bit, but maybe they mostly brought things beyond the sense of timing or pacing.
On a side note, some of the design changes are just weird. You'll have noticed how Mojo is shorter and more angular, especially in the ears, but I'd say Big Billy looked even more squashed and stretched is the one I always notice most.
PPGZ is a blast from memory lane. Never knew there was a dub which is crazy, and the cast makes it even crazier~!
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Huh, how did you see the anime, then? I was under the impression it was hard to find outside of Japan (I'm assuming from your comment you saw it subbed).
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Yarr Harr Fiddle Dee Dee?