Your Clairy Godmother

Rose Petal Place: The Storybooks ("Lily Fair Learns A Lesson") Welcome back to my theater, my beautiful humans! Oh, that's right! Ha ha! You can’t leave until the show is over. We've held you hostage for the entire time as we made the additional parts of this retrospective. …Hey, this is what you get for entering a fairy’s domain and making a deal with her! You shouldn't have eaten the food I made you if you didn’t want to be trapped forever. Don’t fall for free popcorn next time! Oh, relax. The show will be over soon and you’ll be free. Now where were we?  If it’s been a while since you saw the first part of this retrospective where we looked over the two animated specials, or haven’t seen this retrospective at all, allow me to catch you up on our troubled tale. Rose Petal Place was an obscure American media franchise that lasted from 1984 to 1985. It had two animated specials made by Ruby-Spears Productions, a corresponding line of dolls made by Kenner, and mor...

Rose Petal Place: Real Friends (Animated Special)  The second (and final) special in the series, Rose Petal Place: Real Friends, was released in 1985- the year after the previous special, Rose Petal Place: A Garden of Love to Share, in 1984. All the previous voice actors return to play their characters, with newcomer Stacy McLaughlin joining the cast. The same voice actors from the first special also provide their voices to the new characters. Nastina’s voice actress, the late Marilyn Schreffler, also voices Marigold. Renae Jacobs, who played Orchid and Lily Fair, now voices two more characters with Sweet Violet and Cherry Blossom. And it’s time to be blunt very early on: I don’t like Cherry Blossom’s voice. Having a white actress put on a very shrill and stuttering Japanese accent with all the cultural respect of a 4Kids anime dub telling you a riceball is a jelly-filled donut… well, it’s not exactly in good taste. During the writing of this blog, I actually looked up if there ...

Rose Petal Place: A Garden of Love to Share (Animated Special)   Welcome back, my fairies! I'm your hostess Claire Aimée, your fairy Clairy Godmother. And we're here at my Fairytale Theater to begin our rosy retrospective series as we look at the first animated special of Rose Petal Place! Rose Petal Place’s animated specials were produced by the now-defunct Ruby-Spears Productions, and both were directed by former Disney animator Charles August Nichols, the co-director of the Hanna-Barbera's Charlotte’s Web. The specials credit a man named Mal Marmorstein as the writer, but there is unfortunately zero information about him to be found online. Ruby-Spears Productions was founded by the creators of Scooby-Doo, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, both of whom sadly passed away in 2020. Background information for this one is rather breezy, so let's get to the fun part of the actual cartoon. I definitely want to talk about the production values and art direction before the actual...

Have you ever actually tried to grow a garden? Sure, we see pretty flowers effortlessly bloom in the wild and go, "I can do that in my own backyard!" But when you actually try to grow anything, you realize that it's the most tedious and unglamorous mud-trudging you could possibly do. And then you give up and start farming potatoes like my mother, who (to her own admitted misfortune) can only ever seem to grow the most "boring plants". We don't grow magical fairy flowers that sing to you then steal your soul if you pluck their petals, and we don't grow giant tree-warriors that sprout legs and join your epic quest to defeat an evil lord of corruption and decay. Add that blunder to my growing list of fairy failures! I'm not a gardener and never will be, but I like flowers. Not because they're beautiful, but because they're the one thing no one expects them to be: flowers are strong. Flowers don't give up in sleet, snow, or sun. Flowers grow ...