"The Worst Witch" is a 1998 British-German television series based on a series of children's books by Jill Murphy. The show revolves around the adventures of Mildred Hubble, a clumsy and accident-prone young witch-in-training at Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches. The show featured a talented cast of actors who brought the characters to life. Georgina Sherrington played the role of Mildred Hubble, the main protagonist. Sherrington portrayed the character with great charm and captured Mildred's well-meaning but often bumbling nature perfectly. Felicity Jones played Ethel Hallow, Mildred's nemesis at the school.
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I could not disagree more, and reading it made me think about Old Gods of Appalachia, the podcast I covered in this week s episode of Unsolicited Podcast Opinions. I find it troubling how many cis folks are comfortable debating trans rights without ever really listening to those most impacted by the conversation.
Felicity Jones played Ethel Hallow, Mildred's nemesis at the school. Jones brought a delightful mix of haughtiness and cunning to the role, making Ethel a memorable antagonist. Emma Brown portrayed Drusilla Paddock, Mildred's loyal best friend.
Funny / ContraPoints
- Any time when Natalie (or one of her characters) addresses the viewer in a highly articulate, sophisticated and formal manner but casually peppered with profanity.
- When Natalie tries to describe the absence of feeling of identifying with any gender in Non-Binary Genders:
Natalie: I look inside myself and ask: "Do I feel like a man or a woman?" And the answer is that I feel like shit.
Twitter user: So now "woke" @ContraPoints thinks child abuse is funny. I personally drowned several of my babies and it was very traumatic for me-
Natalie: *sigh* Why did I become an SJW again?Natalie: Life is suffering, happiness is not enough to sustain you through suffering, so you need a higher purpose in your life. But I knew that already. I learned it at the AA meetings I refuse to go to.
- From the same video, Lady Foppington's take on Peterson's lobster argument.
- Followed up by Natalie'sown reaction - "I need new roommates."
- Natalie apologizing all throughout the section in which racial slurs are used to describe chads and virgins of color. Even the framing where the names are given has a gold star on the corner saying "I'm so sorry".
- When the conversation turns to how incels and pick-up artists are related philosophically, Natalie decides to bring up one of the PUAs she deconstructed in her video on pick-up artistry. She then brings in a cut from one of his vid-logs where he is publicly 'outing' himself as someone who makes his own bread, and insists how this is not 'baking' but 'bread science' because cooking is for women while men like science, and he's still extremely manly. Natalie says she hopes he enjoys his life as a hypermasculine, not baker, bread scientist.
- "I don't want my gender to be "tolerated" in the way that liberal Christians "tolerate" other of course false and heathen religions. I am an evangelical transsexual. I don't want toleration dammit, I want converts." *cut to Natalie at the door* "Excuse me sir, do you have a moment to talk about my womanhood?" *camera goes black and white and a scare sting plays* "Sure, go ahead. Touch it."
- The conclusion of the first half of the science fiction double feature show:
"Oh yes, the classic argument "HOW DO I EXPLAIN TO MY CHILD?" Kill your shitty child for all I care, that's simply not my problem. I regret every night I spent with you Ben Shapiro. I'm in a new relationship now, with a lesbian. You and I are through! I'm getting an abortion and you can't stop me!"
Tabby: Oh, fuck you, you fucking racists! (Gives the audience the finger.) Death to capitalism! Hail Satan! (She flashes the horned hand and hisses as the audience boos, then bends down to pick up her baseball bat and hisses some more.)
- Justine also tries to redesign the cover of a Marx book which includes a Vaporwave styled one.
- "As always my aspiration is to derive a woke conclusion from edgy premises, to shitpost my way to the moral high ground." Doubles as a moment of Awesome.
- Natalie discusses whether there is such a thing as 'a male soul trapped in a female body and vice versa', adding that she personally doesn't believe it but is admittedly biased because she once sold her soul to a Sudanese businessman and all she got was a Ketamine habit. This bizarre tale is then accompanied by some. Intriguing imagery .
- Natalie drinking directly from her teapot and immediately Corpsing.
- When talking about the age when transitioning , Natalie brings up two examples in Kim Petras and Caitlyn Jenner. Her different levels of enthusiasm for these two women couldn't be more palpable.
- When she talks about the TERF crowd portraying the feminine experience as one primarily defined by male-inflicted trauma, she brings up the counterexample of Shania Twain's hit "Man, I Feel Like a Woman," arguing that Shania wasn't talking about being mocked for menstruating or being sexually assaulted. She then says "Man. I feel like shit!" and the camera freezes on her disgusted expression while the song's upbeat, rocking intro plays in the background.
- ♫ No one knows what it's like, to be a sad tran" ♫
- "It's important to remember that I am both 'not real' and 'not valid.'"
- Natalie states "I don't like things that are gauche." Then there's a brief cut to her "inner radfem," who pushes her breasts towards the camera.
- Describing her "inner radfem" leads to this bit: "It's like being stuck in an elevator shaft with the ghost of Anita Bryant." [. ] "Wait, is Anita Bryant even dead?" *checks phone* "Scholars remain divided."
Natalie: When you're raised like I was, as a middle-class white boy with no athletic talent, parents and teachers treat you like a fucking genius. Like Einstein nutted a load in Mozart's bussy, and Mozart shat you out while he was getting a rusty trombone from Vincent van Gogh! It inspired his famous painting, Starfish Night.
- Natalie struggles to find a name for her current occupation as a former PhD student that dropped out of academia to make videos. She finally settles on "cam-girl".
- The Running Gag of Natalie's mind being dominated by thoughts of dancing Detective Pikachu.
- At one point, Natalie gets distracted by feeling up the sequins on her shirt. (Don�t worry - they�re biological sequins.)
- In her early video, Everyone's A Bit Racist Sometimes, the way she reads the rather butt-rapey responses from fans of the Far-Right people she covers, musing on how this is supposedly "The triumph of masculine reason" for them. She then wonders why male/male anal rape is the go-to metaphor for guys who profess to be homophobic heterosexuals.
- In fact; Whenever she reads any trolls comments in her early videos, like the guy in "Why The Alt-Right Is Wrong" who sounded like a thesaurus vomited and is incomprehensible (complete with Upper-Class Twit voice ending with a 'Woohoo!').
- In the end is a somewhat darkish moment involving Natalie during a bad Acid trip. She's run out of the meds that help her weather the effects so she decides to read some of Plato on the toilet in order to keep sane. only to read of Socrates quoting one of those Jerkasstrolls with the butt-rape metaphors from early in the videos.
- She also makes a brief joke about how she hates Belgians. Jump Cut to a waffle she's hitting with a hammer.
Natalie: "Fuck this waffle!" note At the very end of the video, she apologizes to Belgium and states she doesn't really hate them.
"As for how many genders there are, I'll take the centrist route and say two and a half." Baltimore: Namaste, bitch! Justine: I'm not gay.Narrator: Justine was extremely gay. Protest though the lady may, there simply is no stopping gayness.
Justine: I love catgirls! I hate catgirls, but I also love them! Narrator: O, abominable fate.- In the middle of the video, Natalie comments that offline, she is just trying to blend in, rather than her shameless persona in her videos. She then speaks into a megaphone: "Sexual confession, everybody! Sexual confession! I have abnormal urges!" Then she stages whispers to the camera "It's one am, my neighbors can definitely hear me!" She then adds that it doesn't matter, since her neighbors already know she has abnormal urges.
- Her difficultly opening a bottle of malt liquor, declaring that she �needs a man� to open it for her and ultimately deciding to get some pliers: �The lesbian solution.�
- Called back to later when she�s on a new bottle and struggles with it, saying she needs to get the lesbian pliers back out.
- When joking about electric shock therapy, Natalie gets out a violet wand note It's a kink toy that zaps you if you touch it and uses it on her arms.
- The Reddit "cringe" stories in the introduction are pretty hilarious, especially the one where a simple pizza delivery goes catastrophically wrong for the poor deliver-ee.
- The icing on the cake is a note at the bottom of the story that the poster initially got the pizza brand wrong when recounting the story and then corrects it at the end in the screenshot.
- When talking about HBomberguy's videos on Davis Aurini that turned the cringe compilation tactics of the right wing back onto them, there's a clip of Aurini saying, "I'd start with the premise that all women are whores," before the camera freezes on his face — and incredibly goofy expression — for an uncomfortably long time.
- Most of the stuff regarding Natalie�s one-sided "feud" with "Vanessa" (Blaire White) is gold. In particular, the part where she describes Blaire's typical video thumbnail, with Blaire on one side ("Looking fish, looking cunt.�) and a "dump truck in a maladjusted wig" (represented by Edna Turnblad) on the other. She then adds that she's allowed to say dump truck because she used to be one of #HerDumpTrucks.
- The Running Gag of her contacts constantly rotating or otherwise refusing to stay in place.
- Her (possibly ironic?) embrace of the Cat Girl aesthetic after repudiating it as "visual baby talk" and discussing her discomfort with it in Cringe.
- Natalie tries to flip open and twirl a fan in midair before catching it, but ends up dropping it on the floor and corpsing before a successful take.
- Let's spill some shade! Throw some tea! (Natalie literally throws a teapot across the room)
- In a Call-Back, she bathes with a mannequin that wears the face of Daniel Radcliffe, discussing whether objectifying him is a result of comphet pressure. The sequence is hilarious as she pours milk on it ("expressing my love the only way I know how"), the mannequin falls apart in her arms, and then she throws it out of the bathtub in pieces, saying goodbye to the last remains of her heterosexuality.
- Natalie gets frustrated by the rose petals in her bath migrating to one corner and fixes them. The cut after she does has her saying she "redistributed the rose petals" as the Soviet anthem plays and she facetiously calls herself a socialist icon.
- Natalie wryly noting how trans women who haven't had bottom surgery throw a wrench in Freud's theory that fetishes stem from men learning female bodies don't have penises.
- When discussing the "crossdressing killer" trope Rowling used, she mentions Buffalo Bill, describing him as an "animal lover and talented seamstress", but can't quite take the description seriously.
- Natalie can barely keep it together when she starts applying modern trans-Twitter lingo to the movies she's analyzing, giving us gems like "Hannibal Lecter is a truscum!" and "You're a fake transvestite, Norman. Trender alert!"
- Natalie skillfully holds her phone centimeters above the bath water for half of the video. and then later claimed on Twitter she managed to drop it in the water for real during the next bath she took after filming. Naturally she said it was the audience's fault for jinxing her.
Virginia: I have glimpsed the gates of Hell where unrepentant souls endure the horrors of sin. Away from God, shut out from grace, tormented by unyielding guilt and shame.
Justine: Yes, we've all been to Cincinnati. Justine: What was she? A Capricorn? Virginia: No, a Sagittarius. Justine: Well, there's your problem. Next time maybe try a water sign.- Then there's Jackie's contribution to things.
Natalie: Now you might be wondering, "Why would I think that a person who has been carrying a God Hates F*gs sign for most of her life would be the correct person to lead an international conversation about the intricacies of LGBT issues?"
Krusty the Clown: Because I'm an idiot! Happy?!I resurface from the depths to bring you . MY NEW #PODCAST! 🙀 Unsolicited Podcast Opinions takes a different podcast each episode and examines everything from the nuts & bolts of their craft to the big ideas they explore and what we can learn by looking at them through a critical lens. The first three episodes drop this Friday, but you can check out the trailer now! https://lnkd.in/gRus2rea
Brown brought warmth and loyalty to the character, making Drusilla an endearing presence throughout the series. Other notable cast members included Clare Coulter as Miss Cackle, the headmistress of the school, and Una Stubbs as Miss Bat, a teacher at the academy. Both actresses brought a sense of authority and charm to their respective roles. The ensemble cast of "The Worst Witch" worked well together, creating a dynamic and entertaining show that was loved by audiences. The actors portrayed their characters with skill and dedication, bringing the magical world of Miss Cackle's Academy to life. Overall, the cast of "The Worst Witch" 1998 series contributed significantly to the show's success. Their performances elevated the story and made the characters relatable and likable. The show remains a beloved classic for its talented ensemble cast and magical storytelling..
Reviews for "The Evolution of Witchcraft in Hollywood: Comparing 'The Worst Witch 1998' to Modern Interpretations"
1. John - 2/5 - I was really disappointed with "The Worst Witch 1998 Players." The acting was amateurish, and the story felt rushed and poorly developed. The special effects were also lackluster, and it seemed like the budget was extremely low. Overall, I found it hard to get invested in the characters or the plot, and I wouldn't recommend this production to anyone looking for a well-executed witch-themed show.
2. Sarah - 1/5 - I have to say, "The Worst Witch 1998 Players" was a complete letdown. The performances were subpar, with the actors lacking the necessary presence and skill to bring the characters to life. The script felt weak and uninspired, leaving me bored and uninterested throughout the whole production. The set design was also lackluster, and the overall production value was below average. I would strongly advise skipping this performance and looking for a better witch-themed show elsewhere.
3. Robert - 2/5 - "The Worst Witch 1998 Players" was a disappointing experience. The acting was unconvincing, and the dialogue felt forced and unnatural. The pacing was off, with certain scenes dragging on while others felt rushed. The lack of chemistry among the actors was evident, making it difficult to believe in the relationships and conflicts portrayed on stage. Overall, I found this production lacking in both artistic merit and entertainment value, and I wouldn't recommend it to others seeking a quality theatrical experience.
4. Emily - 1/5 - What a waste of time! "The Worst Witch 1998 Players" was a poorly executed production in all aspects. The sets were cheaply made, and the costumes looked like they were thrown together last minute. The performances were lackluster, with the actors displaying little enthusiasm or talent. The story was predictable and uninteresting, failing to engage the audience. I walked out of the theater feeling extremely disappointed and regretful of the money I wasted on this production. Do yourself a favor and avoid this show at all costs!
From Page to Screen: How 'The Worst Witch 1998' Adapted the Beloved Book Series