Trivia / Winx Club

• Acting for Two:
  • 4kids: Lisa Ortiz is Musa and Icy, and Digit from Season 2; Caren Manuel is Stella and Darcy. Erica Schroeder is also Daphne, Piff, and Galetea.
  • Cinélume: Sarah McCullough voices Stormy and Musa for all of seasons 1 and 2. Anik Matern began voicing the two characters in season 3's third episode.
  • Atlas Oceanic: Adam Gregory is Nex and Brandon respectively. Charlie Schlatter voices Timmy and Thoren.
• Adored by the Network: In the mid-2010's (all the way until mid-2021), this show was adored by the British feed of Nickelodeon, which aired the show three to around four times a day, making it the most-aired animated series (SpongeBob only aired once a day during the late night hours).
• Cash-Cow Franchise:
  • The show surged in popularity in the early 2010s. To give an idea of how much it's worth, Nickelodeon spent $100 million on Winx Club advertising alone from 2011 to 2013. The show spawned three CGI movies, multiple spin-offs, and a monthly comic series among other merchandise.
  • A live-action series, inspired by Winx and aimed at young adults, premiered in 2021.
• Channel Hop:
  • In Italy, the series originally aired on Rai 2. Beginning with the sixth season, premieres moved to Rai Gulp. Premieres later moved again to Rai YoYo, a preschool channel, in tangent with the eighth season's Audience Shift.
  • After the Winx franchise was acquired by Viacom and they began producing a revived series, the show popped up on just about every Nickelodeon feed worldwide. In some countries, this meant that the show was pulled from various non-Viacom networks.
• Children Voicing Children: In the Nickelodeon dub, some of the teen characters were voiced by actual teenagers.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Straffi was unhappy with the initial pilot, feeling that it looked like just another Japanese-style cartoon. This is one of the main reasons the pilot has never been released in full.
  • He mentioned in an interview back in 2008 that he heavily disliked 4Kids' censored re-edits of the show. He was quoted saying, "I think [4Kids] removes something essential."
  • Straffi admitted in a 2023 Q&A to being unhappy with the show's quality from season 4 onwards.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Straffi has stated in interviews that his favorite Winx is Flora.
  • In a 2023 Q&A, Straffi stated that his favorite transformation is Enchantix.
• Dueling Dubs: The franchise's treatment into English is rather confusing. Mainly because the series was relaunched in 2011, there have been multiple English casts.
  • For the original series (seasons 1 to 4):
    • Cinélume, a recording studio in Montreal, Canada, dubbed all four seasons.
    • New York City-based 4Kids Entertainment dubbed the first 3 seasons. It's noteworthy that the show was originally supposed to end with the third season.
  • For the Nickelodeon revival series: The Atlas Oceanic studio in Hollywood was commissioned by Rainbow and Nick to dub the specials covering seasons one and two, as well as dub the new seasons five and six. Atlas also re-dubbed seasons 3-4 and the first two movies. Iginio Straffi helped to choose the main voices of this cast himself.
• Fake Nationality: For the Atlas dub, the white-skinned Stormy is voiced by the African American Kimberly Brooks.
• Franchise Killer: Season 8 ended up being this for the original continuity. It was meant to be a Retool that appealed to a younger audience. However, it instead ended up alienating both new and long time fans. In response, season 9 has been outright confirmed to be a full on Continuity Reboot.
• He Also Did: Series creator Iginio Straffi would later go on to create Huntik: Secrets & Seekers, as well as co-create the comic series Maya Fox. In 2019, Iginio produced Club 57, a live-action collaboration with Nickelodeon.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • While a few clips have been released for retrospective events, the show's pilot "Magic Bloom" has never been released in full. It might stay that way, as Iginio Straffi himself was not satisfied with it.
  • Seasons 7 and 8 have not seen a complete season set release on DVD.
• Milestone Celebration: Season 8 commemorated the 15th anniversary of the show.
• Missing Episode: The 12th episode of season 1, "Miss Magix" was pulled from the official YouTube channel in 2020 because of its racial connotations in the scene where a girl's hair became a thicker Afro. It's still available on several DVDs though.
• No Export for You:
  • The series has had quite a few tie-in games, with many of them being exclusive to Europe. Notable examples include all the games released for season 4, and DanceDanceRevolution Winx Club for the Wii. This culminates in Winx Club: Saving Alfea, which got a Nintendo 3DS version◊ and a Nintendo DS version◊ in 2014. The DS version was the last DS game released in the USA, not counting the Compilation Re-release of Big Hero 6: Battle in the Bay and Frozen: Olaf's Quest, which is just a compilation of two older games.
  • Japan never got anything from the franchise until World of Winx.
  • The Cinélume dub of seasons 3 and 4 were never aired in the United States.
    • For unknown reasons, Season 8 was only aired in a few countries. It didn't even air in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, etc.
• The Other Darrin:
  • For Cinélume's dubbing of the show, Bloom was voiced by Helena Evangeliou in the first three seasons. Angela Galuppo would take over as the voice of the character in season 4. Musa and Stormy were both voiced by Sarah McCullough in all of seasons 1 and 2. Beginning in season 3's The Fairy and the Beast, they were both voiced by Anik Matern and she continued to voice Musa up to the season 4 finale, Ice and Fire. In season 1, Tecna was voiced by Lezlie Karls up until season 2's The Mysterious Stone where Jodie Resther would voice her for the rest of the dub's run.
  • In season 6, Cassandra Lee Morris replaced Ariana Grande as Diaspro, which is understandable given that Grande's music career was skyrocketing in 2014. Grande voiced Diaspro from the 2011 Nickelodeon specials through the 2013 episode "Saving Paradise Bay."
  • While the Latin Spanish dub has remained in Venezuela since the beginning, every original cast member has left the country and the franchise as a whole. As a result, starting with the eighth season, the dub was changed from that country to Chile instead.^note There's also the fact the socioeconomic crisis Venezuela is suffering at the time of writing this (2019) makes almost impossible to keep dubbing the series in that country.
  • In Spain, Magical Adventure received an entirely new voice cast (based in Barcelona, not in Madrid like the series and the first movie), as its distribution company seemingly didn't give a crap about continuity. This is the only time this happened in the franchise, though, as even the owners of World of Winx made the effort of recovering the original cast (the only major voice change after Adventure was Mayte Mira replacing Carmen Podio as Bloom due to scheduling impossibility).
  • in the Dutch dub, where all original voice actors for the Winx but Tecna stayed. Some of the other characters got different voice actors at different points in time. The movies also used some different voice actors for certain side characters, but this didn't usually affect the TV series.
  • During the show's early years, the English dubbing was inconsistent, resulting in season 3 having three different English dubs. Since Viacom became the co-owner of Rainbow in 2011, every new season has had only one English cast.
  • As a result of cutting costs, Nick Jr. selected New York-based DuArt Media Services to dub the seventh season, replacing Atlas Oceanic. It helps that the studio is conveniently located just minutes from Viacom's headquarters. DuArt's successor studio, 3Beep, dubbed the eighth season.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Ariana Grande, who usually plays cheery Genki Girls, plays Diaspro in the Nickelodeon version. Some fans felt that it showed in how Grande was soft-spoken. She was replaced with Cassandra Morris in the sixth season.
  • In the Nickelodeon version, the villainous Valtor is voiced by Josh Keaton, who usually voices heroic/good natured characters. To a lesser extent, he also plays Bloom's biological father, who is good, but more stern than his usual laid-back roles.
• Post-Script Season:
  • Season 3's Enchantix transformation was meant to be the final and most powerful fairy transformation, combined with the conclusion of Bloom's Myth Arc in Secret of the Lost Kingdom. Thus, Season 4 plays this trope straight, with its plot centered around fairy hunters. Nickelodeon's dub added in a throwaway line about how Enchantix is simply the result of their graduation from Alfea in order to continue the series.
  • Seasons 5-8, produced when Viacom became the co-owner of the Rainbow studio, are effectively post-script seasons to the post-script season that was already Season 4.
• Production Posse: When Janice Burgess started working on Nickelodeon's revival, lots of her co-workers from her previous Nick creation joined the production team too.^note Backyardigans writers Jeff Borkin, Adam Peltzman and Carin Greenberg all carried over to Winx, plus the script coordinator Jonathan Foss. The show's lyricist McPaul Smith also wrote the Winx specials' theme song.
• Quarter Hour Short: Season 9, which is being produced under the Working Title Winx Club Shorts (according to an Imperoland article). Instead of the usual twenty six 22 minute half hour premise, the episodes will be 52 episodes with each of them lasting 11 minutes, much like Pop Pixie.
• Romance on the Set: The voices of Bloom and Prince Sky from the original English dubs of the movies, Cindy Robinson and Christopher Corey Smith, got married in 2022, although this was far from the only project they worked together on.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • Despite this being the first season to be produced by Nickelodeon after they purchased the franchise, and their flagship channel in the U.S being among the first to air it, America was one of the last countries to air the final episodes of Season 5 thanks to multiple hiatus periods.
  • The same thing happened with season six. After many more hiatuses, and the rise of a certainly foreign preschool series from Canada (Which premiered over a month before the Winx’s sixth season premiered) would become THE biggest show for Nickelodeon, the season's penultimate run of premieres in the U.S was preceded by the show's move to Nick Jr. in July of 2015. While the show would ultimately be retooled for the network's preschool audience in season 8, Moral Guardians weren't happy, especially coming off the NickMom block and other contributions to Nick Jr's Network Decay. The Channel Hop of yet another show from the main Nick network to one of its spin-offs also screwed over fans who didn't have Nick Jr. in their cable or satellite package.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The melody of "Love Is All Around" is to the tune of Katy Perry's "Roar".
• Unspecified Role Credit: For the 4Kids dub and the Atlas Oceanic dubs of the specials and season 5, the end credits only listed the voice actors' names and not who they voiced.
• Uncredited Role:
  • Cinelume's dub only lists the voices of the Winx and the Specialists between all four seasons. The first three seasons credit the voices of the Trix, and season four credits the voices of Roxy and the Wizards of the Black Circle, but no others.
  • DuArt's dub of season 7, and by extension, 3Beep's dub of season 8, only list main character voices; leaving a number of recurring characters and supporting characters voiced by the credited voice cast uncredited.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The initial pilot, called Magic Bloom, was made in 1999 and looked a lot different than the current show. The outfits were inspired by more traditional European fairies and were also more conservative than the final outfits. Character designs were also markedly different, with the most noticeable examples being that Musa has green hair and that Flora has purple hair and is white. Straffi was unhappy with the pilot and test audiences' lukewarm reactions to it. He later remarked that the it just "looked like just another Japanese-style cartoon... but nothing like [the modern] Winx."
  • At least one concept art had the Enchantix outfit featuring high-heeled shoes. This was abandoned after they went for bare feet and decorative ribbons instead. Conversely, concept art for Harmonix had the girls barefoot again, this time with stockings that covered half of the foot, but this was changed to regular shoes.
  • The Secret of the Lost Kingdom was initially planned to be the grand finale of the series, but the show's popularity caused it to continue into a fourth season and the additional movie Magical Adventure.
  • Roxy wasn't initially intended to be Demoted to Extra. The scrapped original description (search "seven") for Season 5 indicated that all seven fairies would be active members in the season. She was likely written out while the season was heavily reworked into a total relaunch of the show, and the premiere was delayed by a year.
  • According to Nickelodeon's calendar for the show,◊ a mermaid special was in the works and planned for a 2013 premiere. It ended up being cancelled.
• Word of God:
  • Straffi has officially stated in interviews that Flora is the second most powerful of the Winx, second only to Bloom herself.
  • All three of the show's production companies have officially stated that Roxy is a member of the Winx, despite her being Demoted to Extra after season 4.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Some of the voice talent from the 4Kids dub appear in the English dubs of seasons 7 and 8, owing to the fact that they were dubbed by New York based studios. Among them, Rebecca Soler (here credited as Jessica Paquet)^noteTecna in the third season, replacing Dani Schaffel voices Stella, Erica Schroeder^noteDaphne and Piff voices Faragonda and Icy, Marc Thompson^noteAvalon and Knut voices Brafilius in season 7 and Nex in season 8, Suzy Myers^noteStormy voices Roxy in season 7, Wayne Grayson^noteJared voices Timmy, and Lisa Ortiz^noteMusa and Icy voices Griselda. Moreover, Schroeder and Thompson reprised their roles as Piff and Knut in seasons 7 and 8.
  • In the English version of season 6, Cassandra Morris replaces Ariana Grande as Diaspro. Morris previously voiced Chimera in the 4Kids dub.
  • The English version of season 8 has an uncredited Christopher Corey Smith voicing Bloom's adoptive father Mike; Smith voiced Sky in Dubbing Brothers' dubs of the movies. Alyson Leigh Rosenfeld replaced Kate Bristol as Musa in this season; Rosenfeld voiced Miele in season 7. ^noteLaurie Hymes replaced Rosenfeld as Miele in season 8.

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