In this installment of Cartoon Country, we’ll be looking at a short featured on Cartoon Network’s The Powerpuff Girls titled “Nuthin’ Special”. This is a short that I particularly like because it focuses on my favorite Powerpuff Girl, Buttercup. This short is from PPG’s third season, so by this time it’s already been established that in addition to the collective super powers that all 3 of the girls possess such as super strength, flight, super speed and laser vision, that Blossom has the power of ice breath (which first manifested in the short “Ice Sore” ) and Bubbles has the ability to communicate with animals and easily understand and speak foreign languages. So in this short, PPG’s writers finally address a question that no doubt many of the shows’ fans have also been asking during this time: What’s Buttercup’s individual super power? Does she even have one? Well, that question is finally answered in this short, which I’ll now show in it’s entirety:

Amusing, but here’s the thing, though; Buttercup already had a special power! We saw her fire green energy blasts from her hands all the way back in season 1 in the short “Octi Evil”, and she does this again in season 3’s “Nano of the North”. That could easily have been Buttercup’s special power. One of the things that Buttercup does in this short is engulf herself in green flames that don’t burn her, which we’ve already seen her do in the short “Super Zeroes”. However, in this short, we discover that Blossom and Bubbles can do this too (with their flames being their own colors, pink and blue, respectively), even though they don’t do this in any other episode besides this one. In fact, the girls boast a number of super powers here that they don’t use at any other point in the series, such as the ability to create multiples of themselves and the ability to shrink to tiny size. On that topic,…

“Riddle me this…”

…If the Powerpuff Girls have the ability to shrink, then why did they need Professor Utonium’s machine to shrink them in “Nano of the North”? Anyway, the writers actually acknowledging these details would actually ruin the punch line, and all nitpicks aside, “Nuthin’ Special” is an still an enjoyable short, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense from an analytical standpoint.

Also, speaking of Buttercup, while the Powerpuff Girls Z anime series wasn’t great, or even good, Buttercup did have a nice design on that show, so there’s that.

I like the hair. It’s punk chic!