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Amy Poehler: From “Saturday Night Live” to Saturday morning

Your morning bowl of Froot Loops is about to taste even sweeter: Amy Poehler is coming to Nickelodeon’s Saturday morning cartoon lineup. Now instead of waiting until 11:35 p.m. for your weekly dose of Poehler, you can have a colorful, animated version of Amy, bright and early, beginning this weekend.

Poehler’s new gig is the voice of Bessie Higgenbottom, a lovably annoying 9-and-¾-year-old with a substantial lisp and an overactive imagination, in The Mighty B!

Your basic run-of-the-mill hyperactive youngster, Bessie is a devout and loyal member of the Honey Bee Scouts (think Brownies or Girl Scouts) with an obsession for earning Bee badges. She has a can-do (albeit extreme) optimism that will hopefully rub off on the young girls who watch the show, teaching them that girls can do anything.

When I was a young tot, female cartoon leading ladies were few and far between. Sure, we had some ‘toons to look up to: The ever cheerful Rainbow Brite immediately comes to mind, and I would be remiss if I did not mention the “truly outrageous” Jem, but they were such, well … do-gooders that it made them kind of stale. We never had a Dennis the Menace or a Bart Simpson; we had Wilma, Betty and Thelma, and let’s face it: They never got the roles or the dialogue they deserved, so I cannot in good consciousness credit them with knocking down any barriers for the women’s cartoon movement. I think it’s long overdue that an animated character like this one has come around. Bessie is the feisty and funny cartoon we have been aching to see.

As scribegrrrl pointed out, Bessie has a lot of Poehler’s SNL character Kaitlin in her, and how can you not love that? (“RRRiiiickkk, cover for me Rick, cuuuuuuvvvver for me Riiiiiiiick!”)

They even look alike:

In an interview with TV Guide, Poehler – who is not only supplies the voice of the main character, but also the co-creator and executive producer – describes her character as “Animal meets Gilda Radner meets Daffy Duck meets Jimmy Stewart: energetically optimistic … We wanted to do a show that had a strong female character who didn’t have too many rainbows and unicorns.”

Check out Bessie and Amy out for yourself in this promo on The Mighty B! site.

With her new movie Baby Mama coming out this weekend (could we be more excited to see this?), SNL, Thursday Night Live and now The Mighty B!, my Poehler fixations will surely be satisfied.

You can catch The Mighty B! this Saturday morning at 10:30 a.m. on Nickelodeon. Set your TiVos – you’re never too old for this kind of ‘toon.

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