"The Mane Event" is the second episode of Season 3 (and the 52nd episode overall).
It was produced in 1999 but first aired on Cartoon Network in the United States on July 28, 2000.
Plot[]
After Buttercup unwittingly rips one of Blossom's knots. Bubbles along with Buttercup give her a bad haircut, she gets ridiculed by everybody in the city, when an all-seeing monster appears.
Synopsis[]
It started off like any other morning: the sun rose up and shone through the girls' windows, awakening them from their slumber. Bubbles is the first to rise, her hair in tangles. Then Buttercup wakes up, her hair is equally a mess. But when Blossom wakes up, her hair is absolutely perfect: It's straight, luscious and shiny, the qualities any sane girl would want in her hair. Bubbles and Buttercup look at each other and smile as they silently form ideas.
Bubbles and Buttercup brushing Blossom's long hair
The two of them groom Blossom's beautiful hair until they end up angering her with their ridiculous styles, including a racetrack with hairpin turns, and a stuffed rabbit made of hair called “Fluffy the Hair Bunny”. "Give me a real hairdo!" Blossom demands, so they begin combing out the tangles, but when Buttercup finds a knot, she begins to tug on it, subsequently ripping out a large portion of her hair. Shocked at what's befallen them, they casually state that they just have to trim it up a bit, but all that does is worsen the situation. Just then, the hotline rings. Blossom picks it up as per usual, but when she orders the girls to "move out," they can just barely hold in their laughter, but they won't tell her what it is. So she flies out downtown, not wanting to deal with the girls, which is when they fall over laughing, even the narrator is laughing at her atrocious haircut.
Just then, a giant floating black ball with eyes on all sides arrives, vaporizing everything in sight with deadly eye beams, including tankers, water towers, and some fighter jets scrambled to attack it. When the girls arrive, Blossom berates the Evil Eye for what it's doing and provides an ultimatum. However, instead of heeding her warnings, it laughs at her hair. She still doesn't realize what's going on, but as Bubbles, Buttercup, and Townsville's citizens look and laugh as well, she turns to a glass window and sees her horrendously butchered hair revealing the reason why everyone is laughing at her. Blossom gets so humiliated that she rockets, out of sight, leaving Bubbles and Buttercup the only line of defense against the monster hiding under the Professor's bed sheets and feeling upset. Upon her departure, the Evil Eye continues its raid on Townsville. Bubbles and Buttercup try fighting it off with everything they got, but everything they find to throw at the multi-eyed menace is vaporized. Not even a sneak attack is viable, as the Evil Eye's infinite field of vision allows it to attack in any direction in space.
As Blossom watches the live news, she can't help but feel even worse. The reporter says that since the Evil Eye can see everything, the girls just won't be able to defeat it. Moreover, he goes on to help the people cope with their inevitable doom by reminding them of Blossom's mortifying haircut, even going so far as to ask if she got into a fight with a pair of scissors and lost. The Professor spots her, comes in and comforts her until she's finally comfortable with her hair—when she gets an idea. She thanks the Professor, and speeds off, leaving him in a fit of laughter.
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Bubbles and Buttercup pay for their poor hairdressing skills (or lack thereof).
She goes back downtown, this time acting like the clown she looks like. Not only does the Evil Eye laugh at her hair, but also at the jokes that she so calmly tells him. It laughs so hard that with all his eyes shut, Bubbles could ready a large steel bar with which Buttercup slams him and sends him into space. The townspeople celebrate and Blossom thinks they're making fun of her, but they're laughing because they're safe and they apologize for laughing at her, which Blossom thinks is funny and she laughs. When Bubbles asks if they're even, Blossom zaps their hair into hot messes and tells them "they're even" (and ends up getting the last laugh). This results in Bubbles and Buttercup's hairdos being as bad as Blossom's--the two of them paying their price for their cosmetic vandalism as the Narrator asks, "Who says justice is blind?"
So once again the day is shaved—thanks to the Powerpuff Girls!
Characters[]
Major Roles[]
Minor Roles[]
Trivia[]
- Morals:
- Making the most of a bad situation is difficult, but not impossible.
- When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. But sometimes, you have to think outside the box when you feel like the lemon.
- Everyone can get embarassed all the time. That doesn't make you less of a person.
- Cosmetic vandalism is no joke, because it ruins a person's life by making them the butt of everyone's joke.
- Making the most of a bad situation is difficult, but not impossible.
- This episode premiered in some countries before the United States.[1]
- This episode premiered in Australia on January 21, 2000.
- This episode premiered in Canada on March 4, 2000.
- This episode premiered in the United Kingdom on April 9, 2000.
- This is the first episode in which Blossom's hair bow is excluded entirely. This instance happens once again in the episode "West in Pieces" (though she was a different Blossom).
- The 2016 reboot episode "Bubbles of the Opera", has Bubbles go through a similar event that Blossom experienced in this episode.
- This episode surprisingly shows Bubbles at her meanest. Specifcially, unlike "Bubblevicious" where she was purposely being brutal to prove herself that she can be "hardcore" in front of her sisters, in this episode, she was downright mean-spirited to Blossom, along with Buttercup (who is just generally callous to anybody), by laughing at Blossom's butchered hairdo that the two of them are responsible for.
- One of the Citizens of Townsville that laughed at Blossom's Butchered Haircut has a similar nose that resembles Mr. Krupp and Ms. Ribble's nose from the Captain Underpants Books.
- During the scene where Bubbles and Buttercup try to hold their laughter in while looking at Blossom's messed up hair, a drawing of a Smurf can be seen behind Blossom.
Errors[]
- Blossom's dress was blue like Bubbles' dress at 5:16. The same thing happened to Buttercup in the episode "Nuthin' Special" and “That's Not My Baby”.
- When Bubbles snaps the chain with the ball on it, in order to stop the Evil Eye, in a brief second, she hasn't any stockings.
- This is the only episode where the Powerpuff Girls wore long-sleeved variants of their nightgowns. In all other episodes, they only wore sleeveless versions of them.
Production Notes[]
- Although this episode premiered in the United States on July 28, 2000, it was actually produced in 1999 according to the credits.
- This episode was finished in November of 1999.[2]