New Cry for Powerpuff Girls: ‘Help!’

Timing is everything, particularly in animation. Even so, the stroke of timing that Cartoon Network’s Emmy-nominated series “The Powerpuff Girls” is currently capitalizing on is downright fortuitous.

Right as the Beatles are experiencing an unexpected resurgence of popularity and a return to the top of the charts comes an eleven-minute “Powerpuff Girls” cartoon titled “Meet the Beat Alls,” a Beatles parody that is packed with more in-jokes and references to the group than even Yoko Ono could catch.

Airing tonight (the 37th anniversary of the Beatles’ first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and D-day for the British invasion), “Meet the Beat Alls” was not inspired by the current Beatles renaissance, but rather anticipated it, because even TV animation takes far too long to produce for trend-jumping to be effective. But what is more remarkable than the timing is that an artist who hadn’t even been born at the time the Beatles broke up created this virtual Fab Four IQ test.

“I’ve listened to all the albums, I’ve seen all their films and watched every documentary,” says Craig McCracken, the 29-year-old creator of “The Powerpuff Girls” and the episode’s writer, who has been a Beatles fan from age 7. A self-described “obsessive” personality regarding pop culture, McCracken decided to put his appreciation for the Fab Four into an episode, creating a homage while taking a few satiric pokes.

Up to this point, Bubbles, Blossom and Buttercup, the kindergarten-age superheroines known as the Powerpuff Girls, have seemed invincible. In “Meet the Beat Alls,” however, they confront a team composed of four of their regular foes--a super-brained monkey called Mojo Jojo (who previously thought he was a loner); an oafish backwoodsman named Fuzzy Lumpkins; a spoiled evil brat named (what else?) Princess; and a strangely androgynous devil-like creature called Him--who together actually manage to defeat the Girls and rampage through the town. What ultimately stops the Brutish invasion is not the force of opposition, but the friction that arises within the Bad Four when Mojo Jojo turns his attention to a new girlfriend, an atonal simian soul mate named Moko Jono.

Not all of the episode’s gags and references are verbal. The Beatles themselves appear twice in animated form, first in designs that ape their incarnations from the old 1960s Saturday morning cartoon show, and later looking like their Peter Max-esque forms from the 1968 feature “Yellow Submarine.” So does a familiar-looking police official named Sgt. Pepper.

On top of it all, though, is the Beatles-infused musical score. Series composer Jim Venable, another self-described “Beatles freak,” buried himself in research for the episode’s score, not only to create the snippets of sound-alike music that run through the show, but also to replicate orchestrations, and even to get into the mind-set of the group.

“I approached the show in terms of, how would the Beatles have scored this?” Venable says. “What were the things they liked to do to get different emotions, and what means did they use to convey emotions? I read a lot and looked into anything I could find on the recording of ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and read about how George Martin did it.”

The composer went so far as to dig up the sounds of a Mellotron, an early ‘60s precursor to today’s digital sampler, which was used by the Beatles to create the distinctive flute-calliope tones at the beginning of “Strawberry Fields Forever.”

“Martin had a 40-piece orchestra at his disposal, and I basically had all of my samplers at my disposal,” Venable says. “I couldn’t do something exact, but my version of it ended up sounding pretty much similar.”

Obviously, given the detailed attention to in-jokes, some of which are subtle to the point of being esoteric (one character is named Stuart Best, a combination of pre-Fab group members Stu Sutcliffe and Pete Best), the episode is aimed at more than a base audience of kids, who may be familiar with the insect kind of beetle.

“We try to make it so that there’s an underlying story that [kids] can get,” says McCracken, “and they can understand that these four bad guys have defeated the Powerpuff Girls, and how are they going to get out of this situation? But then on top of that are all these references that the parents and, hopefully, the older kids will get.”

And while McCracken and his crew have always seasoned the show with pop culture jokes and references--the show’s opening, for instance, parodies the animated credit sequence from the 1960s “Batman” series--they have never before used it as the basis of an entire episode.

“We never want the parody to take precedence over the characters that we’ve created, because then what you’re doing is using your characters as sounding boards for other jokes and not really respecting the characters that are in the show,” he says, adding, “This one is really not a normal show.”

If the timing of the show’s production proved to be a lucky coincidence, the date on which the episode was completed and ready to screen, Dec. 8, 2000, provided a much eerier one. For most people that date was just another Christmas shopping day. Hard-core Beatles fans, though, recognize it as the 20th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon.

“I had the tape in my hand but I wouldn’t watch the show that day and I wouldn’t show it to anybody on the crew, even though it was finished, out of respect,” says McCracken. “We couldn’t laugh at it [that day]; it was too strange.”

“Meet the Beat Alls” was made without the input of any of the remaining Beatles or their people, and no one really knows if George, Ringo or Sir Paul are fans of the show and might tune in. But the thought of direct contact with one of the legendary musicians because of his toon tribute is something that appears to take McCracken’s breath away.

“Oh, God!” he says with a gasp. “That would be unbelievable!”

* The “Meet the Beat Alls” episode of “The Powerpuff Girls” can be seen tonight at 9 on Cartoon Network. The network has rated it TV-Y7-FV (may be unsuitable for children younger than 7, with special advisories for fantasy violence).