I'm a big fan of the TV series Castle so it surprised me when I was reading on a Castle fan site that Molly Quinn, the young actress who plays Richard Castle's daughter, is the voice of one of the main characters on Winx Club. I began poking around Keyframe to see if that were the case, but found a completely different cast list. I then went to IMDb and found that yes, Molly did a voice in the 2011 version of Winx Club... but then I tried to find out of this was a case of a rebooted series or what...
After a helluva lot of digging, I found out what happened... Winx is an Italian animated series that has been dubbed in English three times... THREE TIMES?!... with varying degrees of accuracy between the versions--at least when compared to the original script.
IMDb has the 2011 dub by Nickelodeon as a separate series, but I'm almost inclined to keep the whole thing together under one profile with some kind 'explanation of the dub insanity' in the Of Interest tab.
Thoughts?
Winx Club insanity
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Sounds familar to something I did once for another TV series with a convoluted backstory of - three different - translations. I went the explain the history route, wondering if it would cause some issues in the future.
I can't remember if I added that Italy to the series, or if you added it just now; I do remember that I found the show completely and utterly devoid of merit, with the only reason I spent any time at all with it was that someone requested it and I was able to watch it and grab screens.
It makes me wonder why three separate companies thought it worth buying the rights to and then re-dubbing the whole things, was it really that big a thing. Although it's a lot easier to dub a foreign production than to make your own from scratch.
The having to re-dub it doesn't surprise me in the least, companies keep the rights to their soundtracks, including their recordings of the voices, and these can be hard, or too expensive, for others to get the rights to. Or in the case of Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky, objectable to the original creator.
I thought it was a brand new season that started airing long after this show became irrelevant, but apparently Nickelodeon just picked up the third and fourth season and repackaged it with new voice actors and a new subtitle. This thing stopped airing in 2009!
However, Nickeledeon is fully in charge of an upcoming fifth and sixth season.
The fact that Winx Club got more episodes and is more popular than the vastly superior W.I.T.C.H. is a travesty in and of itself.
Actually, I prefer the new Nick dub for Winx Club much more than the 4Kids dub [and badly-edited version. Ew. Strangely, I still can't stand Stella's voice in either dub]. The Rai English dub isn't bad either, and a part of me wishes that the US got this dub instead of just redubbing it with more... American voice talent [some of them being talented actors/actresses like Keke Palmer and David Faustino. What the what.]. At least the 5th Season looks good and sounds interesting, introducing a new fairy level that deals with mixing two things Barbie tends to utilize in her DTV movies: fairies and mermaids. Oh my.
I'm actually quite a fan of the show, and I'm glad that it got a better dub and a chance to be the show it was meant to be in the US, especially since little girls love princesses, fairies, fashion, friendship and magic... so why not mix them together, right? It's not realistic, I know... and I agree that W.I.T.C.H. is, story-wise [and most times, art-wise too], much better than Winx, but I still enjoy it.
And W.I.T.C.H. totally deserves a DVD release, as does Winx Club [like season releases; too bad they can't treat it like anime and give us both English dubs and the original Italian... *sigh*].
- Juuchan17
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