About

The Powerpuff Girls Opening Parodies also known as Professor Utonium Spilling Chemical X refers to memes based on the intro of the animated series The Powerpuff Girls, and specifically the scene where professor Utonium messes up his formula by accidentally adding chemical X. The screenshots and video clips from this scene have been used as meme templates for object labeling, mostly in pictures illustrating characters or franchises that are overall admirable, or could've been, but with one major flaw, with the scene's early meme history being in the form of GIFs.

Origin

The series Powerpuff Girls debuted on November 18, 1998 on Cartoon Network. At the beginning of its opening sequence, Professor Utonium, the father of the PowerPuff Girls, is shown mixing "sugar, spice and everything nice," in an attempt "to create the perfect little girl," only for him to accidentally break a vial of chemical X, which spills into the cauldron, leading to the creation of the Powerpuff Girls. On March 24th, 2016, the YouTube^[4] channel HDTVSeries uploaded the opening intro, where it gained over 2 million views in eight years (shown below).

In the beginning of its history online, there were two ways in which it was used in memes. In the first instance, it was used in GIF format with the professor mixing the pot before hitting the Chemical X, which would be replaced by something else causing a Bait-and-Switch by surprising the viewer with something unexpected, as seen in the two anonymous examples from 2012 below.

The secondary usage for the scene in memes was for it to be the subject of Redraws, a meme genre that has persisted for decades. For instance, on July 9th, 2012, Nik, from the blog M!NiCR!T,^[1] posted a comic about Team Fortress 2 (below, left) using the scene as a reference. On August 28th, 2013, on Tumblr,^[2] accordingtodevin posted another such comic (below, right) talking about the Biblical genesis, which gained over 471,000 notes.

Spread

One of the earliest uses of the scene as a proper meme template was with it being a five-panel meme, with the original four-panels being from the intro sequence, in which the professor is adding the different ingredients, which are accented by Object Labeling, and then a last panel reflecting what the result of the various chemicals mixing together ended up creating. This can be seen in the early example uploaded to Tumblr^[5] by user Noragito on June 10th, 2014, in which the character Satsuki from Kill La Kill is used as the end result (shown below).

This format continued to be the dominant way to use the meme in the following years, with people adapting it to new characters in fiction that came out as a way to keep it fresh. An example of this comes from the /r/DDLC subreddit, which is devoted to the indie game Doki Doki Literature Club, in which the character Sayori is used as the end result, uploaded on January 26th, 2018 by the Redditor^[3] /u/BlueHouseSky, earning over 3,000 upvotes in six years (shown below).

Relevant Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References