Retroversy

One of the most popular blog posts I have ever written — and that’s “popular” with the scariest of scare quotes — was a reflection on what little I remembered about Sailor Moon from my childhood. The occasion back then was the premiere of a reboot — yeah, remember that was a thing that happened? — so it seems no more than obvious that now, a few days before Netflix revives another magical girl franchise that defined my childhood, I would share my feelings on this show as well. Unlike the cultural touchstone that is Sailor Moon, though, Winx Club may not exactly be fresh in everyone’s minds, so allow me to refresh your memory. Imagine magical girls, crank the Power Rangers tropes up to eleven and — this is a European production from the mid-noughties, after all — drag in some Harry Potter similarities for good measure. Douse it in gallons of glitter and hot pink straight off the shelves of the girls’ aisle at the toy store, and you’ve got yourself a Winx Club.

Winx Club is obnoxiously corporate in its girly splendor, painfully of its time and on the technical level exudes so much direct-to-DVD energy it’s a miracle it didn’t get stuffed into its locker by Disney’s concurrent and suspiciously similar W.I.T.C.H. franchise. Yet still, Winx Club was everywhere when I was a kid. At a certain point, it even aired on multiple channels separately, so you didn’t even really have any choice in getting a slice of that delicious fairy pie. I honestly can’t remember whether I was on board as soon as this tidal wave hit, but I sure as heck ended up sticking along for four seasons, so this show must have done something right. Oh, just for clarity’s sake, when I’m talking about Winx Club, I’m mostly talking about the first four seasons. From its fifth season onward, the franchise — at that point co-produced by Nickelodeon — lost a lot of its appeal as it was retooled into a cheaper, inferior production aimed at a much younger audience, which really isn’t worth talking about at all. Take my word for it: when someone over the age of, like, ten, says they love Winx Club, they mean the stuff made by the Italians and the Italians alone.

Created for the Italian public broadcaster Rai by Inigo Straffi and first airing in the blessed year of 2004, Winx Club tells the story of Bloom, a generically nice girl with an impossibly slim waist who one day discovers an aptitude for magic and promptly gets spirited away to Alfea College, where she learns to harness her powers and transform into a fireball-slinging fairy warrior. Joining her on her adventures are Stella, a vain but enterprising princess with solar magic and a fashion sense bound to make dads happy to watch along; Flora, a wallflower with the power to — you’ll never guess it — control plants; Musa, an emotionally volatile tomboy with sound-based magic and questionable taste in men, and Tecna, a geek whose true talents lie not in spellcasting, but in operating all the goofy technology the muggles in the magical dimension use to survive amidst all the wizardry and witchcraft. Together, they sit through detention, do assignments, throw pajama parties and do battle against the Trix, a trio of mean girl witches who seek to follow in their ancestors’ footsteps by conquering the world. You know, regular school stuff.

If none of this sounds particularly interesting, that’s because it isn’t. Winx Club is many things, but riveting fantasy fiction is not exactly one of those. Most of its developments, while competently told, can be ticked off of a checklist, from the incessant accumulation of barely distinguishable power-ups over the introduction of a sixth team member who is more interesting than the five others combined, to the revelation that Bloom is actually the last surviving princess of a long-lost kingdom… or planet… or dimension, I guess? It’s not exactly clear. Heck, the worldbuilding in Winx Club is so wishy-washy it makes your average isekai anime look like a Hugo Award nominee. Admittedly, most of it is the kind of stuff only nerds used to having the media they consume come with entire libraries of lore and backstory would care about, but sometimes the audacity with which Winx Club contradicts, obfuscates or refuses to explain itself has to be enough to tick off even the primary target audience of tweens.

What it lacks in a particularly engaging plot, however, Winx Club more than makes up for in terms of character work. Admittedly, it’s a show that fleshes out its characters horizontally rather than vertically — broadening their individual worlds in lieu of fundamentally developing their characters — but the wringers it puts Bloom and co. through are often of a sort you hardly ever saw in cartoons of its ilk. Whether it’s Stella’s parents getting a divorce, Musa grieving the premature loss of her mother or Bloom learning that she’s adopted, the show tackles the themes it deals with like a champ, and probably owes a lot of its popularity to its ability to make mature themes palatable for younger audiences. Heck, season two even features Bloom being corrupted by a handsome, charismatic new teacher in a story line that brings to mind pedophilic grooming! Yikes. For a show made by middle-aged men to sell colorful merchandising to little girls, that is going above and beyond.

Unfortunately, the lens through which the aforementioned middle-aged men regard their viewers’ gender is questionably narrow and almost comically muddied. A lot of this — like how the “good” fairies all wear primary colours and fashionable frills while the “evil” witches all dress like punks and goths — is bread-and-butter cartoon storytelling, but sometimes, especially in later seasons, Winx Club goes above and beyond in reducing femininity to a single platonic ideal. All of a sudden, Musa and Tecna start wearing skirts and growing out their hair, and the characters’ brattier character traits get quietly let out through the back door in favour of a saccharine sweetness that codifies them as role models more than as flesh and blood people.

Perhaps most egregiously, however, the Winx also never really do much of anything without being accompanied by their entourage of hot boy bodyguards. Enter the Specialists, a crew of spandex-clad swashbucklers from the neighboring Red Fountain Academy for Being Completely Fucking Useless, including Prince Sky of Heraklion, his pageboy Brandon and Riven, the token bad boy who is so much of an asshole you wonder why a guy like him is studying to be a peacekeeping knight in the first place. Armed with their woefully ineffective laser swords, the Specialists on one hand hammer home the series’ girl power themes by getting their asses kicked on an episodic basis, while on the other hand existing mostly because the show insists that every single girl with more than a walk-on part gets a (male) sweetheart to fawn over. Granted, these romances lead to some of the most interesting character writing this show has on offer — including a depiction of an abusive relationship and a rather brilliant twist in which it turns out Sky and Brandon were posing as each other to protect the former from assassins, and Stella struggles to find the right person to blame for the disillusion that comes with her boyfriend not being the dashing prince she thought he was — but still, the fact that this show defines its female protagonists mostly through the relationships they have with their designated hot boy love interests furrowed my brow even fifteen years ago.

In the end, Winx Club’s dedication to Bush-era heteronormativity shows how much of a child of a time it is. It is to the 2000s what Masters of the Universe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are to the 80s and the comics of Rob Liefeld are to the 90s. Still, I wouldn’t say this means that any and all love for the franchise is just nostalgia. There is a reason why I can’t stop thinking about Winx Club while so much of the other baloney television beamed into my sockets every morning doesn’t even get to be a painful memory. There is the aforementioned willingness to bring reality into its world of magic and miracle, obviously, but that’s not all. There’s the strength of the show’s pacing in its first three seasons. There’s the unapologetically colourful art direction. There’s the original character designs for the Winx’ transformations, individual yet striking in their simplicity. Within a work so tied up in the eccentricities and blemishes of its era, there is a core of timeless charm and because of this, Winx Club seemed perfect for a reboot. Until they announced one.

Fate: The Winx Saga, coming to Netflix on January 22nd, looks to be the worst kind of reboot — a show that at least seems to understand why people would want a reboot in the first place, but ends up trying to grant these desires in all the wrong ways. Based on the first trailer, it’s already immediately and undeniably obvious what’s the issue here: This is not a show made for older fans of the Winx Club franchise, as it was proudly announced as. This show has about as much to do with Winx Club as Riverdale has with the old Archie Comics. It seems to be yet another dreary, dime-a-dozen teen drama with the name of something popular from the past slapped onto it for easy marketing. The Winx name and brand offer Fate a little head start in the cutthroat competition that is Netflix’ ratings, but being Winx Club is not the goal here. Being cheap to produce and appealing to as large an audience of impressionable teens is. And so we end up with fairies who suddenly don’t have wings anymore, let alone transform into colour-coded uniforms. Alfea College is now a generic Victorian mansion in a forest and fan-favourite characters like Tecna and the Trix seem to have been cut entirely for reasons probably only a number of suits in a boardroom somewhere can adequately explain. Oh, and there’s whitewashing. Because no terrible live-action adaptation is complete without whitewashing. Obviously.

Being the fool I am, I was looking forward to a more mature reboot of Winx Club. Because I assumed anyone who has seen the first few seasons knew what that meant — that the show was already quite mature, and that rebooting it in an era of animation characterized by intelligent storytelling meant highlighting those aspects and updating them for modern sensibilities. Yet Fate doesn’t seem to acknowledge this at all. It looks at the reasons why the show is still so beloved by older fans and scoffs at them. It’s ashamed of what it used to be, and more than willing to alienate everyone who loved that in order to attract an audience that already has too much to watch. Too often the exhilarating prospect of getting to relive and recontextualize something we love is dangled in front of us, only for the end product to be not a blast from the past, but a reminder of the unbearable mediocrity and greediness of the present. The former is why we believe reboots are made, but the unfortunate truth is that all too often, the latter is closer to the truth. Say, did anybody say Sailor Moon Crystal, or am I just imagining things?