Winx Club and What Couldn’t Have Been

Originally, I wanted this post to be a review of Fate: The Winx Saga, the new live-action Netflix adaptation of the 2004 Italian-American cartoon, Winx Club, a show about colorful sparkly fairies attending magic college. However, even though the first season is only six episodes long, I am pretty bad at watching TV shows and also have a lot of other stuff going on, so I couldn’t find the time this week to get through the entire first season. Still, I am close to finishing, and have a lot of capital N Notes on my capital T Thoughts.

But one of the things that kept coming up in my watching of this show, and keeps coming up in the online discussion of it, is the idea of nostalgia.

See, a surprisingly huge talking point about this remake when it first came out, despite the much more blatant issue of the whitewashing of Latina character Flora and Asian character Musa, was how its aesthetic missed the mark. Whereas the original Winx are saturated and sparkly, wearing skimpy Y2K crop tops and low rise jeans, the girls in Fate Saga are all in jewel tones and knee-length skirts and sweater vests. It was a battle of the aesthetic. A show once garish in its Y2K gaudiness reduced to a bland, dark academia vibe. Did anyone at Netflix even watch the original show?

Worse still was the idea that the show was missing the opportunity to use the Y2K aesthetic at a time when it’s very much back in style. Rather than a charming vintage callback to a style long dead, if Fate Saga had dressed its characters in the same styles as the original cartoon, it would be fresh. In style. Something the teens could really relate to.

Now, to you, this might not seem like a conversation about nostalgia. This is simple lamentation of a show that could have been. Constructive feedback about artistic decisions in the remake that don’t serve its quality as a whole. But let me ask you a question: would Fate have truly been improved by a Y2K aesthetic more in line with the original cartoon?

Because, let me say, that is not, by far, the biggest problem with this show. Certainly, if it had a different aesthetic, it may have been more fun to look at. Maybe it would have sparked in viewers a reminder of the cartoon it’s based on, bringing that sense of childhood joy and wonder. Maybe if it looked more like Winx Club, it would have been more nostalgic.

Let me ask another question: Why are we so obsessed with remaking shows from the past?

This is a question I briefly considered in my post a few months back about the upcoming Netflix adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Why is it that so many animated classics of the early 2000s are being dredged up and made into “serious” live-action remakes? Back then I posited that it’s because our culture doesn’t take animation seriously, and therefore needs any “gritty” remake to be live-action. But allow me to expand that further.

Why must we remake shows in general? I mean, the show is still right there. Especially now, with online streaming making older shows more accessible than ever, why must it be remade? You can just the watch the old one again if you want.

And yeah, okay, I know why creators are remaking old shows. It just makes business sense. Rather than taking on the risk of an entirely new property that may or may not attract an audience, with an already-existing property there already is a fanbase you can build on.

But why do fans like it when their favorite shows are remade? Why was it that when I heard Winx Club was getting a remake, despite everything I know and feel about how remakes usually go, I was excited?

To answer that, let me tell you about Winx Club. And a little girl who really loved it.

I was six years old in 2004. I don’t remember if that was exactly the age I was when I first came across Winx Club, I very well could have been seven or even eight. But I do remember loving the show. I loved fairies and magic and adventure back then. I loved shows that captured my imagination like that, I loved pretending to be magical and powerful, and Winx Club played to that love better than just about any show I found at the time.

The girls in Winx Club were beautiful and sparkly. They had wings and cool transformation sequences. They had cute pets and nicely color-coordinated outfits. Power and beauty, that was what I wanted to be.

My friend Abby and I loved to play-pretend that we were the girls from Winx Club. Abby was always Flora, the pink-clothed fairy of nature, and her little sister Chloe was Stella, the yellow-clothed fairy of the sun. And I was Bloom, the leader of the fairies. She wore blue and had red hair, and it was a big deal when, late in the show, she discovers that rather than a normal Earth girl she is actually a fairy of fire. It was a big plot twist, I remember, because she wore blue, and I didn’t really associate blue with fire. Masterful writing, clearly.

I remember jumping around in the basement of my childhood home with Abby and Chloe, acting out the transformation sequences shown in the show. I don’t remember much about what these games amounted to. I don’t remember any kind of plot they had, just that we were the fairies in those moments. We had those powers, those sparkly outfits, and those friendships.

When I heard that Netflix was planning on remaking Winx Club, I didn’t think about aesthetic. I didn’t think about realism. I didn’t even really think about what could be done to complicate and add intrigue to the original plot of the cartoon. Quite frankly, I don’t remember much about the plot of the original cartoon anyway. But what I did think about was those games of play-pretend in the basement. I thought about Abby and Chloe and how it felt to pretend to be powerful, beautiful fairies with them. The unrestrained and uncomplicated joy of being a kid.

The idea of a show coming into my life now that could bring me similar feelings of uncomplicated joy… well, that just sounded wonderful. I would love a show that made me feel powerful. I don’t feel very powerful nowadays.

But then, I have to remind myself: there is no possible show that could bring those feelings back. That kid in the basement pretending to be a red-headed fairy of fire is long gone, and she can’t come back. Even if Fate had that Y2K aesthetic. Even if the characters acted exactly how their cartoon counterparts did. Even if the plot was exactly the same. Even if they just re-aired the exact same show and called it new… I can’t be that little kid anymore.

It’s really tempting to long for the rosy world of nostalgia, and the easiest way to picture finding it again is through the media we used to love. After all, unlike us, it stands unchanged. If I went back to watch the 4kids dub of Winx Club I watched as a kid, it would be the exact same show that sparked all those wonderful emotions and games. But the reality is, that show doesn’t spark those same feelings anymore.

So then, maybe remaking it will do the trick. If I have evolved, so too must Winx Club. If I’m hoping it’ll create those same feelings, maybe that’s the key to going back to when things were so uncomplicated.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, friends. But I don’t think there was any version of Fate that could have reminded us of what it was like to be powerful, beautiful fairies fighting evil. That’s not to say that Fate couldn’t have been a good show or a good remake (believe me, it’s not either of those things, but it definitely could have been), but no matter what it couldn’t have fulfilled the shining ideal nostalgia makes us long for. It couldn’t have turned back time. It couldn’t be what Winx Club was, not really, because we’re not who we were when we first watched it.

Believe me, I still want to tear into Fate and talk about all the things that make it a horrible trainwreck. I still want to bemoan the ways it could have been a good remake, or at least an interesting one. And I will. Hopefully next week, when I get a chance to finish it.

But I also want to push against the idea that the things that make it bad was a failure to bring back those feelings that the original did. Because it really couldn’t have. It could have been a really great show, but it wouldn’t have been Winx Club. It can’t be. Nothing can ever be Winx Club again. Not because it’s a perfect show or anything, but because the world isn’t what it was when I was six years old in 2004. And that longing I feel for that show to come about again is misguided.

I don’t think the idea of remaking shows is always a bad idea, granted. I think it could be cool to expand upon media of our past. I think that could bring about a lot of meaning. But we can’t expect these remakes to recapture the past in a perfect little bottle. If anything, we need to expect remakes to do the exact opposite. We probably need them to change. We need them to evolve. Not because they need to become what we expect of them, but because we need them to remind us that things have changed.

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