SpacePOP: Princess Power (2017)

“When the evil Empress Geela takes over the Planets of The Pentangle, the five teenage princesses disguise themselves as musicians and form a band called SpacePOP. Their mission: Spread the message of freedom and joy through music and join the rebel resistance force to vanquish Geela, who has taken over their home planets and enslaved the inhabitants”

-Michael A. Medlock, IMDB.

SpacePOP: Princess Power is brought to us by Genius Brands International. The company is headed by Andy Heyward, who previously headed DiC Entertainment. The company was formed after DiC Entertainment, which Andy Heyward acquired from founder Jean Chalopin, was merged with Cookie Jar Entertainment. Among other credits, Andy Heyward is credited as one of the co-creators of the Inspector Gadget cartoon series.

Some thoughts from me (Potential spoilers below)…
SpacePOP, like many other films to grace this blog, came up randomly on Youtube for me (Thanks Youtube algorithms!). SpacePOP is a webseries that aired in 3-5 minute chunks on Youtube starting in 2016. I can’t find much background information about the series (Hence the pretty sparse blurb about the film above). What I can tell you is that SpacePOP somehow managed to burst onto the scene with a webseries, doll line, clothing line, series of novels… All I know is that someone somewhere managed to pull some strings and get SpacePOP well established in-spite of how awful the animated series is.
As mentioned above, SpacePOP first aired in bite sized pieces on Youtube. This movie collects about half of the first season of episodes into one feature length film.

SpacePOP is an amazingly sumptuous feast of terrible plot, terrible animation, terrible songs… everything is a different flavour of awful. The only thing they do right is the core concept of SpacePOP, which is the whole “Princesses form a rockband to fight tyranny” which, I know sounds crazy, but it’s just the kind of weird plot that appears in a lot of ‘magical girl’ shows. With SpacePOP, There’s something for everyone to enjoy.

Sadly, I fear that we’ll never see the conclusion to the SpacePOP story. I can’t find a source for this other than the trivia section of TvTropes, so you might need to take this with a grain of salt, but SpacePOP has apparently been officially cancelled “due to lack of interest” and the fact that SpacePOP was just not profitable for Genius Brands. 

At some point before the series was cancelled, the SpacePOP Youtube channel rebranded itself to the more generic “Kid Genius Cartoons”, and started reposting old episodes of SpacePOP alongside other new ( but equally bad) cartoons. This was presumably an attempt to diversify the channel before SpacePOP was officially shelved. However, it seems like it was all in vain. The channel went from receiving 400k views per episode to barely reaching 200 views. At the time of this post (November 2018), the last upload to the channel was an old episode of SpacePOP, re-uploaded in June, that has a total of 400 views. I find it a genuine shame, if only because I would’ve loved to have seen where the series would’ve gone. 

So check this one out, prepare yourself for an amazingly bad film. I only wish that SpacePOP could have gone on forever, but at least it’ll live forever in my heart.

References

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑

%d bloggers like this: