When I was little, I used to watch Sunday morning cartoons with my brother at the breakfast table. This was a couple of years before my dad installed Roku around the house, so there was no Netflix or Hulu. Instead, we were given a whopping seven local stations to peruse.
We would spend hours — scratch that, minutes, since our attention spans were that of gnats — arguing over the channel we wanted to watch.
Ultimately, we would settle on some form of animation, like “Dragon Ball Z,” if my brother won, or “Ben 10,” if we wanted to compromise, or “Winx Club,” if my brother was willing to acquiesce to my demands (To be fair, he did enjoy “Winx Club” to a certain extent, too — what can I say, it has a lot of action).
If you don’t already know or didn’t have a sister to force you to watch it growing up, “Winx Club” follows the story of a group of girls who attend a school for fairies and learn how to harness their inner powers, which coincidentally align with certain elements, like fire, water and earth. The fairy school is bordered by a school for witches and a school for Specialists, which are over-glorified soldiers, essentially.
Now, fast forward 10 or so years, and I see “Winx Club” recommended to me yet again on Netflix. This time, though, the show is called, “Fate: The Winx Saga,” and the girls are played by real actors instead of animated stick-figures (Let’s just say, the original "Winx Club" animation did not promote healthy body images).
I’ll admit, seeing a childhood classic readapted for the live screen was disconcerting. All one has to do is see “Avatar: The Last Airbender” in live-action to understand that remakes are never all that good.
But, I promise you, there is some happiness to be garnered from this show, not least of which is the feeling of nostalgia invoked by the first 5 minutes, when Bloom arrives at Alfea — then the monsters come. Intrigued? Here are some more reasons:
It’s completely different from the animation.
I know a lot of people will hyperbolize to you that a show is good, that it breaks the mold and is spectacularly different. While some of those people were honestly lying, I'm not when I say this show takes approximately 5 percent of the original plot from the animation and then runs with it.
Besides the fairy aspect, whereby the main characters, Bloom, Stella, Aisha, Musa and (insert random character in the animation) Terra, all attend a fairy-training school, Alfea, the rest of the plot is completely different.
For one thing, fans of the original will cringe to hear that Sky, Bloom’s love interest in the animation, used to date Stella. In a fourth-wall-breaking style, the couple even acknowledges their relationship in the show as, “We are codependent at best, toxic at worst.”
For another, these characters do have a white-washed tinge to them, which you might think would be impossible as the characters were literally a shade of white in the animation.
Musa, the fairy that is portrayed as being able to read minds in “Fate: The Winx Saga,” was of Asian descent in the original but is played by Elisha Applebaum, who, although part-Singaporean, doesn’t look like the race her character she was based on.
Furthermore, it had seemed, initially, that the Latinx character, Flora, was replaced with white actress Eliot Salt and her character Terra until it was explained that Flora was actually Terra’s cousin.
Then there is also the introduction of these villains, the so-called “Burned Ones.” My friends and I joked that these spindly, dark creatures were a great use of the CGI budget, especially considering how we could barely see them through the entirety of the six-episode series, but when the all-important fairy transformation scene occurred in the last episode, the wings were in full lighting in all their photoshopped beauty.
It’s actually genre-defying, and that’s not a bad thing.
Jokes aside, I wasn't expecting to get a horror kick out of this series. I was obviously mistaken. The first few minutes of the first episode were enough to get my heart pumping — as you can probably tell, I don't do well with horror.
But, I honestly was excited that this show wasn’t going to go directly off the plot line of the original “Winx Club” because, to be honest, the original was cheesy, light, fluffy, sticky and even icky at times. It was meant to be childhood, laugh-inducing fodder, and it did its job nicely.
Nice enough that none of us expected to go into the show that had used “Winx Club” as its inspiration fearing that we would get a heart attack.
Besides its explicit reference to "Harry Potter" and the school looking like Hogwarts, this show stands on its own. It has allusions to darker dystopian and fantasy-fiction book adaptations but still manages to shock you at points when you least expect it.
Not to mention, when’s the last time you saw fairies as beings to be feared? Their powers might take the form of mystical pretty flowers or dancing flames, but the actual hurt that comes from them is very real.
Be forewarned, this show isn’t adverse to killing people off. That’s enough indication that the children’s show turned live-action is something of its own.
It’s fun, and really, isn’t that all that matters?
As a college student, I don’t have the attention span nor the capacity to sit and watch hours of television, especially during a full course-load semester. I just don’t. This show meets all the perfect requirements of being short, simple and interesting enough that I don’t feel like my brain is turning into mush while watching it.
There are also moments where I genuinely felt empowered by the show. Going into it, I expected nice fairies who would be bullied for half the run-time and then find their way into standing up for themselves at the last second.
Terra, in particular, seemed like the meek, shy girl who would be bullied until the end of time itself but very quickly proved me wrong by strangling her tormenter with a vine. Now, while I don’t condone that level of violence, it’s still pretty cool when a character proves us wrong and shows us that she knows what she can do with her powers.
And, to be honest, how many times did I scream at the TV when I was younger, imploring the fairies to use their powers instead of getting beaten up all the time? The one downside to children’s animations is that all conflict gets summed up pretty quickly with a magic spell instead of an actual win for the good guy.
I don’t think many of us mourn the loss of the content that was shown on those innocent Sunday mornings — unless you truly thought the dialogue in “Dragon Ball Z” held literary merit, but we may mourn the loss of just being able to gather around a story and hang out together.
This show is the perfect blend of thriller and fairies, something I never thought I’d say, which also makes it the perfect show for you and your friends, who may all have different tastes, to watch together. Best of all, it’s been renewed for season two, so you and your friends will have time to watch and rewatch the show until they return.
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'Fate: The Winx Saga' takes darker, sophisticated spin on original animated series - RU Daily Targum
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