| The Mane Event | |
| Episode name pun on: The main event | |
|---|---|
| |
| Airdate: | July 28, 2000 |
| Credits | |
| Director: | Genndy Tartakovsky |
| Story: | Don Shank |
| Writer(s): | Lynne Naylor-Reccardi |
| See also | |
| episode transcript |
image gallery |
| Episodes | |
| Previous "Fallen Arches" |
Next "Town and Out" |
| Rating | |
"The Mane Event" is the second episode in the third season of The Powerpuff Girls (1998 TV series). It is the fifty-second episode overall.
Synopsis
After Bubbles and Buttercup give Blossom a bad haircut, she gets ridiculed by everybody in the city, when an all-seeing monster appears.
Plot
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 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. 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 (a racetrack with hairpin turns, and Fluffy the Hair Bunny). "Give me a real hairdo!" Blossom requests, 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 the 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. When we finally get to see the results of their work, 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. When the girls arrive, Blossom berates the Evil Eye for what it's doing. However, 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 ruined hair revealing the reason why everyone is laughing at her. Blossom gets so humiliated that she flies home, hiding under the Professor's bedsheets and feeling upset. Upon her departure, the Evil Eye continued it's vaporizing on Townsville. Bubbles and Buttercup tried to fight it, but everything they tried to throw at the multi eyed menace got vaporized. As she 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. The professor comes in and comforts her until she's finally comfortable with her hair—when she gets an idea.
And so, once again, the day is shaved, thanks to the Powerpuff Girls!
She goes back down to downtown, this time acting like the clown she looks like. No only does the Evil Eye laugh at her hair, but also at the jokes that she so calmly tells him. It laughed so hard that he shuts all his eyes, allowing Buttercup to send it into space. The towns people celebrate, and after Bubbles asks if they're even, Blossom zaps their hair into hot messes and tells them "we're even." This results in Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup all receiving bad haircuts.
So once again the day is shaved—thanks to the Powerpuff Girls!
Trivia/Errors
- There is an error on Buttercup's dress, it was pink like Blossom's dress at 4:19. The same thing happened to Bubbles in the episode "Nuthin' Special".
- 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.
- This the first episode in which Blossom's hair bow is excluded entirely. This instance happens again in the episode "West in Pieces".
- This is one of the only three episodes of season three that Genndy Tartakovsky directed.
- 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.
- The sound effect of the eyeball monster's beam is the same for Mojo's liquid-electron gun in "Mo Job".
- At 2:43, behind Blossom, there is a drawing with a character similar to The Smurfs.
- This episode's plot is similar to that of Bubblevision, except there it's Bubbles who looks stupid.
- This episode has been noted for having a plot similar to the Recess episode "Bad Hair Day".
- Behind the scenes this episode was an animation disaster, having to draw Blossom's hairstyle differently than normal.
- The title of the news about the Evil Eye's attack on the city of Townsville, is "Eye carumba", which is a reference to Bart Simpson from The Simpsons and his famous catchphrase, "Ay caramba!".
- The Evil Eye closely resembles the Eye of Folger, a giant floating black orb from the anime OVA Giant Robo: The Night The Earth Stood Still.
- Blossom's bad haircut looks a lot like that of Ms. Gradenko in the first Spy Kids film. But since this episode aired on Cartoon Network in 2000, the first Spy Kids film was not supposed to be out until next year in 2001.