ZP review: Fairly Odd Parents: A New Wish
Didn't think I'd do this again, but here we are. 2024 has been a bleak year for animation so far. The Ghost and Molly McGee was unceremoniously ended by faithless executives less than a month into the new year. Hailey's on It looks to meet a similar fate, and story-driven cartoons seem to be given the old heave-ho. Never again will we see tales like Amphibia and The Owl House. Not to mention the strikes because jobs are under threat from AI. I'm pretty sure this is how the Machine War in the Matrix started.
Anyway, I'm getting off-topic. I was faced with a choice for a new cartoon after the aforementioned finales, and my path forked. One of my choices was Disney's answer to the Casagrandes. I say answer, more like blatantly obvious Chinese knock-off. Honestly, did the people hearing this pitch see this and not draw any parallels? How thick are these people? On second thought, don't answer that. I don't want people coming after me.
My other choice was a reboot of an old classic from back in the day, and since I don't want to give any attention to a show whose main VA can go on an offensive tangent about the Spanish language and still retain her employment as a response to valid criticism, I went with Fairly Odd Parents: A New Wish. I have a strange relationship with this franchise. It came out just as I was starting secondary school, and thus deemed too old for such shows, but young enough not to let that stop me. I sneakily caught it if it was on, but never paid much attention to it. What I do remember is that Timmy Turner was an average kid that no-one understood, had two fairies of questionable competence grant his every wish, and he would learn life lessons after some hijinx. It wreaked of something you could stick on for half an hour to shut your kids up and not have to worry about over-arching plots.
I also remember the show started to decline in quality after some poor creative decisions. Seriously, whose idea was Sparky the fairy dog? Or Chloe, for that matter. The show was ended just as The Loud House was picking up steam, and mercifully so, where it was dutifully preserved in its original image. Ha! Just kidding! Of course Nickelodeon tried to milk this cash cow. It didn't go so well, what with those crappy Drake Bell movies, and the less said about 'Fairly Odder', the better. Let this be a lesson; the transition from animation to live-action doesn't always go well. I'm looking at you, 'Really Loud House'!
However, I am pleased to say that 'A New Wish' doesn't fall into this trap. Yes, it uses a new animation style, but it grows on you after a while. This new iteration of the show centres on Hazel Wells, a kid that has moved from the suburbs to the city of Dimmadelphia. Real creative naming, there, guys. She's on her own because her older brother Anthony has just started college, and thus, fairly sad, and that qualifies her for fairies, but in a really clever twist, rather than be assigned to fairies, said fairies actually adopt her. Yes, Cosmo and Wanda are back, and as retirees, or at least, they were. They adopt Hazel as their godchild and…..well, you can guess what happens next.
But what's this I see over the horizon? An over-arching plot that only brushes the surface of stand-alone episodic stories? What kind of sorcery is this? A New Wish actually has arcs for its characters. Well, some of them, anyway. Actually, just one, this real prick of a kid called Dev Dimmadome. Yes, he's the typical asshole rival you'd find in an early Pokemon game. Through the course of the show, he antagonises, befriends, then falls out with Hazel, only exacerbated when he gets his own fairy called Peri. He used to be called something else, but I refuse to use said name because I have dedicated every ounce of my being to making my corner of the Internet a safe space for the LGBT.
Dev's whole deal is that he has daddy issues. Gee, haven't seen that before. He's constantly trying to win his father's love, despite his father being a money-obsessed capitalist douchebag who stalks Hazel because she, shock-horror, isn't buying any of his products. That may be due to the fact that she has fairies. I'm pretty sure this kind of behaviour gets you on lists. Come to think of it, where is Dev's mother? I assume he has one somewhere, unless Dale bought Dev from an orphanage or something. I half-expected him to have what I call a 'Zuko moment' in the finale, and in some ways, he does, but it's wiped from his mind by the end. I know revealing and conquering Fairy World should have consequences, but Jorgen couldn't have been lenient for a first offender?
What about the other side characters in this show? There's Winn, the non-binary skateboarder. Yeah, points for pissing off conservatives with that one. There's Jasmine, the wannabe singer with a terrible voice. They're…..present. That's all I can say. We don't get too much about these kids despite the fact they're Hazel's best friends. We knew more about Chester and AJ than we did about Winn and Jasmine. That's a bad sign. Not like Hazel herself is much better. She starts out as a quirky child and pretty much stays that way, even with Cosmo and Wanda as her fairies.
Speaking of those fairies, have they improved since their tenure with a buck-toothed, pink-hatted kid with neglectful parents that should've been in jail ten times over? A little bit, yes. As the original show went on, the dynamic between Timmy, Cosmo, and Wanda evolved into dim-witted Cosmo, impulsive Timmy, and nagging Wanda, which dragged on after a while and probably contributed to the original show's final demise. In this new version, they thankfully get back their 'two halves of a whole idiot' dynamic, what with them foolishly using magic even after their retirement, Wanda coming up with stupid ideas for solutions to problems instead of Cosmo, or Wanda blindly going along with whatever Cosmo came up with. They were goofballs, and it was refreshing to see. They even retained their original voices. Top marks all round.
In conclusion, I would describe 'A New Wish' the same way I described Season 5 of the Loud House; a new loaf of bread made using the same ingredients, love, and care that went into the first one. It could stand to improve a few things; the side characters don't get much time in the spotlight, and we know barely anything about them other than their assigned character traits, but they can do all that in Season 2, IF THEY GET ONE!
Author's note: Never thought I'd do another one of these. Blame Grace for this one. He planted the idea in my head with his review of my last ZP-style review of Hailey's On It. In all seriousness, I did initially brush off 'A New Wish', but I gave it a shot, and it's charming. I wouldn't put it above cartoons such as Amphibia, The Owl House, and The Ghost and Molly McGee, but if you're either attached to the original, or just want to see what the fuss is about, I'd say go watch it. The creators could use the support when it comes to streaming. After all, how else will we get a second season? The usual disclaimers, I own nothing, all properties belong to their respective owners. Enjoy.