Thursday, April 22, 2021

Coming attractions: A live-action Fairly OddParents??

 Apparently, it isn't enough that there will be a live-action version of the Powerpuff Girls. Now, Nickelodeon wants some of that action.

One of Nick's most popular shows of the last two decades, Butch Hartman's Fairly OddParents, is being rebooted as a live-action series for Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access).


Nick played OddParents into the ground at one point, something Chumptoon Network does today with Teen Titans Go!, but what makes them think a live-action OddParents will actually work? Hartman is on board, as is Fred Siebert, who was a producer at Nick back in the day.

Grown-ups like me couldn't see the humor in the repetitive plotting surrounding a dimwitted grade schooler and his fairy godparents. Cosmo wasn't exactly a brain surgeon himself, as Wanda was always the sensible one. And, just like the CW's pending Powerpuff, PP's OddParents, which begins filming in June, makes little sense to nostalgia marks.

It's one thing that PP will be home to some new Star Trek-related projects and a revival of another Nick series, iCarly, but this has the potential to be a bomb.

4 comments:

Silverstar said...

Eh, I was never a Butch Hartman fan; none of his stuff ever clicked with me for whatever reason. His shows, particularly OddParents, just came off as repetitive and mean-spirited to me. (Hartman's not exactly a prince of a guy in real life, either; he's bilked a bunch of his fans into donating to a Kickstarter campaign to launch his Christian streaming service Oaxis, which has yet to manifest in the to-date 2 years since, plus he recently got busted for copying someone's original art, but that's neither here nor there.)

Also, FOP has just been on for way too long; they've already done everything they could possibly do with that premise, both in animation and live-action (there have previously been a couple of live-action FOP specials and TV movies on Nick).

hobbyfan said...

If ViacomCBS wanted new content for Paramount+, they could've skipped past OddParents and chosen a remake of, say, Hey Arnold!. However, OddParents is like Teen Titans Go! in that its audience doesn't care if they see the same episode 5 times a week.

Steven Dolce said...

Hard to believe this show came out 20 years ago in 2001. Back in the 2010's, Nick released three live action movies based on this show.

hobbyfan said...

Which, I guess, justifies their harebrained decision to try a live-action version.