The Fairly OddParents is a fairly odd show. Created by Butch Hartman, it began airing in 1998 when it premiered on Oh Yeah! Cartoons, and new episodes are still airing today. The show follows Timmy Turner, a ten year old boy with fairy godparents, and it shows his day-to-day life for the most part. He’s often forgotten and neglected by his parents, who leave him with a horrible babysitter, Vicky. This is what got him his godparents in the first place.
After its stint on Oh Yeah!, Fairly OddParents was turned into its own show, which began airing in 2001. The show appeared to end in 2006, but was revived in 2007. The episodes are pretty formulaic, at least in the early seasons. Each episode would consist of two 11 minute episodes that were combined into a full length episode for TV. Timmy wanted something for usually selfish reasons, so he wished for it to become true. His wish would backfire on him, and he would wish it away after he learned his lesson. I vaguely remember watching some of the episodes when it was airing as part of Oh Yeah!, and I know that Tara Strong redubbed most of the shorts when she was cast as Timmy. Looking back at the episode descriptions of the Oh Yeah shorts, I can tell that they either expanded the shorts from a seven minute runtime to a full 11 minutes, or they slightly rewrote the shorts to make full episodes out of them. The episodes can be very unique, and a few of the jokes can still make me laugh.
Even though I grew up watching this show, I admit that I haven’t seen many of the episodes that aired after Poof was introduced in 2008, and by the time Sparky was introduced in 2013, I had pretty much stopped watching entirely. When researching the show for this review, I was shocked to learn that the latest season has Timmy sharing his godparents with a neighbor kid. But it seems that many people hated Sparky as much as I did, and he was removed from the show after only one season. The reason I stopped watching is simple: I grew up, but the show did not. The show is aimed for elementary aged children, and when I aged out of elementary school, I was looking for slightly more mature shows to watch. The generation who grew up watching the show in the late 90s and early 2000s now seems to be the driving force behind all the theories surrounding this show. And some of these theories are very entertaining. A prominent one is that magic is making Cosmo (and Wanda to an extent) dumber, even though Butch Hartman said that the reason Cosmo seems to be getting dumber in the show is because Daran Norris kept voicing his voice higher and higher, so they changed the character to match the voice. Still, this doesn’t stop people from theorizing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAqGUABq5iQ
Timmy doesn’t have a free-for-all with his wishing, as noted by Da Rules, a giant rulebook that dictates what Timmy can and can’t wish for. Some are basic, like no cheating, no stealing, no ripping apart true love. Others aren’t quite as obvious, like you can’t wish for someone else’s fairies to go away. He can wish for stuff to torture people, but he can’t wish for them to be physically hurt. He has also been shown using magic to manipulate the outcome of trials. In one episode, a new rule was added: You can’t wish for it to be Christmas every day. While Timmy can never break the rules, he likes to push his luck with how far he can take some of his wishes. Norm was added so they could show the dangers of rule-free wishes. The biggest rule is that if anyone discovers that he has fairy godparents, then they will go away forever and Timmy will forget all about them.
There’s some debate over whether or not the show has jumped the shark yet. I say, if it didn’t jump the shark when they added the baby, then adding the fairy dog was definitely it. Sparky was highly annoying and, in my opinion, pointless. However, he’s supposedly been dropped due to negative reactions from fans. Yet they added Chloe Carmichael to seemingly replace him. I have no idea if she will last, but based on the YouTube comments I’ve read, it seems like not a lot of people like her and want her dropped from the show. And I can’t say that I disagree. I know I haven’t seen any episodes with her in it, but after reading a character description of her, and seeing the show refuse to die in recent years, I had a bad feeling about her.
Very few shows that have been cancelled then rebooted do well. Fairly OddParents has survived being cancelled. In fact, it survived being cancelled five times, according to Butch Hartman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43VxQEuKqww The show proved to be so popular that it has ten seasons, three hour-long crossover episodes with Jimmy Neutron, and countless TV movies and specials. (The movies, however, are basically long episodes and are incorporated into regular seasons.) The show was supposed to end in 2006 with the third “Jimmy/Timmy Power Hour”. When the show was rebooted in 2007, they added Poof to the cast and started to limit appearances from older characters, like Chester, AJ, Trixie, and Mark Chang. They also changed some of the voice actors for the minor characters. Even Vicky, the very reason Timmy got his godparents in the first place, hasn’t appeared as often in recent seasons. Fairy godparents are assigned to miserable children, and they leave once the child has grown up. Well, Timmy isn’t growing up, and it’s not just because of the floating timeline.
The show has a huge cast of characters. However, as stated earlier, many of the supporting characters have been phased out over the years and replaced with new characters. I have mixed views on the various characters, and I know that I don’t always have the popular opinion on certain characters. I’m not going to talk about every single character that’s ever appeared, and I’ll try to hit most of the main/recurring characters, but if I miss your favorite, I’m sorry.
Timmy Turner, voiced by Tara Strong, is a ten year old boy who has an evil babysitter and parents who constantly ignore him. He is known for his pink hat and buck teeth. He was given fairy godparents because of how miserable his childhood is. He is an incredibly selfish child, although there are times when he tries to help other people out, usually his parents or his friends. He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer, putting it mildly, and he relies on magic to get him out of pretty much everything. It’s been shown that he wishes for things far more than the average child, but he has also kept his godparents much longer than the average child. “Abra-Catastrophe” was all about how he had kept his godparents for a year, which rarely happens. He loves his godparents and would do anything to keep them. He even used a rule-free wish to get them back after he had lost them at the end of “Abra-Catastrophe.” However, at the end of “Channel Chasers,” when a grown-up Timmy is shown, it seems that he’s forgotten all about what he went through as a child with Vicky and his parents, since he seems to be doing the exact same thing to his kids.
Cosmo and Wanda, voiced by Daran Norris and Susanne Blakeslee, are Timmy’s fairy godparents, and Poof’s parents. Cosmo and Wanda have changed over time, Cosmo moreso. I liked the voice he had in early seasons better than the high pitched voice that makes ears bleed he has now. And he wasn’t so dumb! Don’t get me wrong, he was always dumb, but not as dumb. Wanda wasn’t the nag she is today, and she and Cosmo were very obviously in love with each other. I don’t get that feeling from them in current episodes. Poof, voiced by Tara Strong, was added when the show was rebooted. Apparently in season 10, they got rid of Poof to make room for Chloe and said he was at a special school or something. Why? Poof’s an okay character. Not a necessary character, but an okay character. He has that cute factor going for him. Why get rid of him? I can understand getting rid of the dog because the dog was absolutely awful, but Poof? It makes absolutely no sense! One thing I don’t get is that whenever they turn into something to hide their existence, they’re a pink/green/purple version of whatever it is. However, when they’re in their goldfish disguise, they’re the color of real goldfish. I don’t get it, and it’s always bothered me.
Mr. and Mrs. Turner, voiced by Daran Norris and Susanne Blakeslee, are Timmy’s parents. Their first names are never said, and if a character does say it, then the audience won’t hear it because of something else on screen blocking it out. Even the characters in the show will refer to them as Timmy’s Mom/Dad instead of their first name. They love Timmy, but they’re really awful parents. They constantly leave him with an evil babysitter, or they ignore Timmy when they are home. They even forget his name at times, usually calling him Tommy when they forget the name that they gave him. Dad is a pencil pusher and Mom is a real estate agent. Mr. Turner believes that their next door neighbor, Mr. Dinkleberg, is evil and is constantly trying to prove this or do something to Dinkleberg. In reality, the Dinklebergs are very nice people and Dad is just a jealous moron.
Vicky, voiced by Grey DeLisle, is Timmy’s evil and psychotic babysitter. She is sixteen years old and in love with money. She’s willing to do almost anything for money. She enjoys torturing kids, especially Timmy, who she calls “Twerp.” She appeared in almost every episode at first, and is featured in the theme song. She has a huge crush on a singer named Chip Skylark, and even kidnapped him once and nearly forced him into marrying her. She’s been interested in a few other boys over the course of the show, including a boy named Ricky and Mark Chang’s teenager disguise. Her own parents are shown to be afraid of her. I can only imagine what her teachers must go through when she’s at school all day. One or two episodes did show what would happen if she was nice to other people, but it never lasted. When I grew up, I came to the sad realization (and anyone who’s worked a day in retail or food service can verify this) that too many people in this world grew up to be icky like Vicky.
Chester McBadbat, AJ, Elmer, and Sanjay are Timmy’s friends. Not much is known about their personal lives. Chester, voiced by Frankie Muniz and Jason Marsden, and AJ, voiced by Ibrahim Haneef Muhammad and Gary Leroi Gray, were Timmy’s original best friends, while Elmer and Sanjay, both voiced by Dee Bradley Baker, were added in later as “back-up friends.” Chester is trailer trash who lives with his dad who is “the worst baseball player ever” and has to wear a paper bag over his head, AJ comes from a wealthy family and is a genius with a secret lab that he hides from his parents in his bedroom, Elmer has a giant evil boil named Bob on his face, and Sanjay is Indian, is possibly gay (it’s hinted at a couple times, but never stated), and has a step-dad who is in the military. Like a lot of characters, Timmy’s friends were slowly phased out of the show, but they might appear in the background here and there. Chester is an interesting character. He is the only one of Timmy’s friends who could qualify for fairy godparents. In fact, in some alternate timelines, he’s been given godparents. He had Cosmo and Wanda when Timmy wished he was never born, and Norm was his fairy godparent briefly in “Fairy Idol,” but that timeline was erased. Why Chester doesn’t have a fairy is unknown. Who knows, maybe he does have a fairy and Timmy just hasn’t found out about it yet, although this is highly unlikely.
Tootie, voiced by Grey DeLisle, is Vicky’s younger sister and Timmy’s stalker. She has a huge crush on Timmy and has gone to extreme lengths to spy on him. How she hasn’t discovered Cosmo, Wanda, and Poof is unknown, but it’s good news for Timmy. Maybe Cosmo and Wanda interfere with her cameras or something, I don’t know. Timmy, of course, finds her incredibly annoying, but he does feel bad that she’s related to Vicky. It’s possible she does end up with Timmy in the future, base on what his kids look like at the end of “Channel Chasers,” but he could also end up with Trixie. Heck, he could end up with someone else that we haven’t met yet, we just don’t know. Personally, I think Timmy can do better than both of them.
Trixie Tang, voiced by Dionne Quan, is Timmy’s crush. She is very rich and spoiled and refuses to talk to anyone who isn’t rich. She’s a stereotypical rich girl who loves shopping and always has the latest and greatest things. But she does have a secret love of comic books, and refuses to let it tarnish her image. Her best friend is Veronica, voiced by Grey DeLisle, and they are often accompanied by Tad and Chad, voiced by Tara Strong and Grey DeLisle respectively. Veronica seems to be secretly obsessed with Trixie and also has a crush on Timmy. Tad and Chad are just the basic rich boys for the girls to hang out with. The two guys look very similar, and only a couple of episodes distinguish the two (Chad is African American and Tad is white). All four will constantly bully anyone not as rich as them, but especially Timmy and his friends. They also have a bodyguard who mainly just keeps poor people away from them at lunch. He might work for Trixie and/or the Tang family, but it’s never stated who actually employs him.
Mark Chang, voiced by Rob Paulsen, is an alien from the planet Yugopotamia. He is the prince of Yugopotamia, but is hiding on Earth from his evil fiance, Mandie. Like all Yugopotamians, he is always ready for battle and destruction. However, Mark is a teenager, or at least the Yugopotamian equivalent of a teenager, so even though he’s a skilled fighter, he’s a bit on the lazy side. All Yugopotamians find pretty and cute things to be horrifying, and disgusting things to be awesome. Timmy is considered a strong warrior of Earth because he ate a bar of chocolate. He falls in love with Vicky because of how evil she is. He uses his alien tech to disguise himself on Earth as a kid, and later as a teenager. On Earth, Mark is perfectly happy to be living in the dump, and I guess no workers ever find his spaceship, and he’s also been shown to eat manure, as he considers it a delicacy. I have mixed feelings about Mark Chang. I didn’t like him at first, but I didn’t dislike him either. He works well in some episodes, but others are kind of meh. Rob Paulsen is one of my favorite voice actors, however, and it’s always fun to try and figure out which background/guest characters he voices when they bring him on the show.
Mr. Denzel Crocker, voiced by Carlos Alazraqui, is Timmy’s teacher who lives with his mom. When he was a kid, he had Cosmo and Wanda as his godparents, but after he lost them he turned into a bitter person. He loves failing all his students (sans AJ), but there was one time when he was shown giving out D’s instead of F’s to students. Crocker is not only convinced that fairy godparents exist, but that Timmy has some. He’s right, of course, and he will go to extreme lengths to try and capture Timmy’s fairies. Everyone in town thinks he’s insane because of it, and he has sought help (or been forced to seek help) once or twice to cure him of his obsession. One of my favorite episodes in the whole show is “Back to the Norm.” Crocker teams up with Norm the Genie to try and take down Timmy, and Norm gets so fed up with Crocker that he gives the lamp to Timmy to teach Crocker a lesson. I don’t know why this episode sticks out in my mind, but it was very entertaining to watch. I wasn’t a big fan of Norm, and I’m glad he only appears in a couple episodes, but I just love this episode. Norm and Crocker are very different, and it shows in their personalities (Crocker is very “Let’s trap them in this Rube Goldberg contraption,” and Norm is very “I can just zap the kid”), but they play off each other well and make it work.
The polar opposites of the fairies, the anti-fairies are very interesting. Whatever a fairy is like, the anti-fairy will be the exact opposite. For example, Jorgan is a tough military fairy, while Anti-Jorgen is a ballerina. Anti-Cosmo seems to be their leader. He’s intelligent, devious, and speaks with a British accent. Anti-Wanda, on the other hand, is dumber than a bag of rocks. It’s hard to tell who’s dumber, Cosmo or Anti-Wanda, but they seem to be on the same level. I don’t like Anti-Poof, aka Foop. He’s supposed to be Poof’s opposite, but Poof is still a baby, and his personality is still developing. And Foop is outright evil and wants to destroy Poof. But without Poof, Foop would not exist, and Foop doesn’t seem to realize this. But it does beg the question, what would happen to Foop if Poof was destroyed?
I love the Pixies. I don’t know why, since they’re very dull and boring characters. Only two Pixies have been named, Head Pixie (HP), and Sanderson. Voiced by Ben Stein, they all have the same stoic voice, but HP’s voice is slightly different because he’s in charge of the group. They’re businessmen, and they dress and act this way. They treat everything, even granting wishes, like a business. In “School’s Out: The Musical,” they rapped, which I still don’t get. I get that having them sing a normal song would probably be very boring to listen to, but why rap? Why not have them be the only characters without a song, since that would be more realistic for their characters? I wish they appeared more, but I get that you can really only do so much with them.
Jorgen von Strangle, voiced by Daran Norris, is the toughest fairy. He is very large, doesn’t fly, speaks with an accent, and is totally a parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He used to be a godparent, and at one point he was even shown with a godkid. However, that didn’t go too well, and he was taken off godparent duty. Instead, he’s basically in charge of everything. However, he was Timmy’s godparent in one episode when Cosmo and Wanda were reluctant to grant his extreme wishes. Like Cosmo, his voice was different in the early episodes of the show. He is in love with the Tooth Fairy, and he proposes to her in one episode, using Timmy’s tooth as a ring. They may or may not be married at this point.
Francis, voiced by Faith Abrahams, is a bully. He is twelve years old, but was held back, so he’s in the same class as Timmy. He is very large for his age, and has gray skin from lack of sunlight. He is extremely tough and doesn’t care about authority at all. He’s been shown beating up Timmy’s dad when Timmy couldn’t stop him. He would regularly bully Timmy and his friends early on in the show, but has been phased out. Once or twice, Timmy would manage to beat him in a fight, but it was rare and changed nothing about their relationship. His dad was once shown to be in jail, and Crocker and the other teachers are never shown trying to discipline him, so Francis will most likely end up in jail later in life after he picks on the wrong person.
Chet Ubetcha, voiced by Jim Ward, appears to be Dimmesdale's only news reporter. He is always reporting something to an unknown news station. He would appear sporadically throughout the series. He is very short, which I appreciate. Not many cartoon adults are shown to be short. Other than Chet Ubetcha and Crocker’s mom, I can’t think of any other short adult in a cartoon. (If you can, comment it below.) In an episode that took place in the past, it was shown that he used to be a normal sized person, but radiation from early cell phones shrank him. Why this radiation didn’t affect anyone else is unknown. He is never not in reporting mode, and always talks like he’s giving a live report, even if he isn’t.
Doug Dimmadome, owner of the Dimmsdale Dimmadome, is a very wealthy man who owns half the town. Voiced by Jim Ward, he dresses like a cowboy, and he speaks with a thick Southern accent. In early seasons, his hat was so tall that the top was never shown on screen. However, he was given a normal sized hat for later episodes. Sometimes he serves as an antagonist, but not always. He usually acts in whichever way will be the most profitable. He can be reasonable at times, like when Timmy found his long lost son, he got Timmy a job selling lemonade so he and his friends could see a sold out show at the Dimmadome. I like Doug Dimmadome, because you never know if he’s going to help Timmy or not, and I wish they would use him more.
The Crimson Chin and Crash Nebula are two fake superheroes that Timmy admires. In the first couple of seasons, Crash Nebula was shown more often, but he was later dropped and replaced with the Chin. Timmy often wishes himself into the Chin’s comic books and serves as his sidekick, Cleft. Crash Nebula was voiced by Daran Norris and the Chin is voiced by Jay Leno. Butch Hartman tried to make a spinoff show about Nebula, and one of the episodes was the pilot for the spinoff, but the show never took off. The Chin seems to be more popular and has lasted longer. He’s your basic superhero, but with a massive chin that somehow gives him superpowers. It’s not meant to be taken seriously.
One of my favorite cameos ever is Adam West playing TV’s Adam West. TV’s Adam West, for whatever reason, is delusional and believes that he is Catman, a part human/part cat superhero with no actual powers, but he’s actually a character he played on a TV show many years ago. I grew up watching the 1966 Batman TV show with Adam West on TV Land. It was super cheesy and corny, but my 4-5 year old self didn’t know any better. Seeing him on Fairly Oddparents and watching him just embrace being typecast was very entertaining. If they ever manage to get Burt Ward to do a cameo with Adam West, I think nerds everywhere will rejoice. There was one episode where Catman was wished into a Crimson Chin comic book, and the two had a superhero battle years before that fad was brought to the big screen.
Chloe Carmichael, voiced by Kari Wahlgren, is Timmy’s neighbor. The two share Cosmo and Wanda because for whatever reason, there’s a shortage of fairies. I find this hard to believe. I know Poof was the first fairy baby born in like 1000 years, but it has been stated that kids rarely keep fairies for more than a year. Also, there are plenty of fairies floating around Fairy World, why not train one of them? Chloe is described to have the perfect life. So why does she have fairy godparents? Godparents are meant for miserable children, not all children. I guess her parents tend to ignore her, but as far as I know, she doesn’t have an evil babysitter making her life miserable. Granted, I haven’t seen any episodes that have her in them, and I have no desire to see any episodes with her, but going off what people are saying on YouTube and her official Wikipedia description, she shouldn’t qualify for godparents. And why make him share his godparents with a stranger? Chester has been shown to have godparents in alternate timelines of the show, so why not have him and Timmy share Cosmo and Wanda. That could work, maybe. It would still be dumb, but it would probably work better than Timmy and Chloe sharing their godparents.
The animation has gone through a few changes over the years. The Oh Yeah! animation was very meh, but typical for a series of shorts at that time. When they turned it into its own show, the animation was stepped up to reflect this, and it looks so much better. If you watch the show from the beginning, you can see the evolution of how the characters were drawn, and how everything is brighter and more crisp now compared to 2001. But you can tell in the first season that the animation wasn’t where it could be. Supposedly, Timmy was originally supposed to have a blue hat. I haven’t been able to 100% confirm why it was changed to pink, but most likely because otherwise it would’ve blended into the background of his bedroom. But the pink hat is now iconic, along with the buck teeth.
Hartman recently announced that he was leaving Nickelodeon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4faDISwSVo What this means for the future of The Fairly OddParents is currently unknown. I say the show had a good run, but it’s time for it to end for real. It had a nice long run. This show is determined to die a slow, painful death and it really should’ve ended long ago. There were multiple opportunities to end it! They could’ve ended it after the third Jimmy/Timmy Power Hour, like was originally planned. They could’ve ended it after “Channel Chasers,” or any of the other movies. They could’ve ended it with Poof’s birth if they played their cards right. But no, it’s still going. However, between Butch Hartman leaving Nick, and (at least in the U.S.) the show being moved from Nickelodeon to Nicktoons, which is kind of like Cartoon Network’s Boomerang, so no one is expecting the show to last much longer. In fact, while I can’t prove with any amount of certainty that it’s been cancelled, I also can’t find any evidence that the show has been renewed for another season. The last episode aired in July 2017, almost a year ago. I think that the show shouldn’t be renewed for another season, and should be left alone to die. It’s a fun show, but all good things must come to an end.
I’m SJ, and these are my real thoughts on The Fairly OddParents.