Wendy the Good Little Witch

The First of May is a witching time and so we may be forgiven for attributing (probably nonexistent) significance to the fact that Wendy the Good Little Witch first saw light of day in the May, 1954 issue of Harvey Comics‘Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Unlike Casper, Wendy was not originally an animated cartoon character, but (like their mutual “nice monster” pal Hot Stuff, the Little Devil) a straight-to-comic book concoction, calculated to maximize sales. She was in the sweet innocent tradition of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, or other Harvey characters like Little Dot and Little Audrey, but imbued with a spooky twist. Like Casper, she had three much larger bossy antagonists, in her case Aunts Thelma, Velma, and Zelma, always trying to egg her on to the evil side. But she was blonde, like a Disney Princess — or for that matter (the later) Samantha Stevens! And she wore red, like Little Red Riding Hood, instead of black! And had the same name as the girl in Peter Pan! And whereas Casper was merely “friendly” (even politicians and sleazy Hollywood agents are “friendly”, after all), Wendy was actively good, i.e. altruistic. She did good deeds instead of casting evil spells. While not unprecedented (the Oz books also had good witches), her advent was a bit of an innovation in that the character was a child, and perhaps paved the way for things like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and the Harry Potter books, if only in the broadest of ways.

After debuting in comic books, THEN Wendy began to be added to the Casper animated shorts as a character in 1958, originally voiced by Mae Questel.

In 1960 Wendy got her own comic book title, which ran for about 30 years.

And then in 1998 there was the fairly inevitable straight-to-video family film Casper and Wendy, a sequel to the Casper movie reboot series. It looks dreadful of course, but I can’t declare that I’ll never watch it, because the epic cast includes 10 year old Hillary Duff, Cathy Moriarity, Shelley Duvall,Teri Garr, George Hamilton,Richard Moll (from Night Court), Vincent Schiavelli, and Pauly Shore. I’m not saying I’d watch the whole thing — though. I’m neither as good nor as friendly as a Harvey character.