Ever since Tim Burton’s The Addams Familyinspired work debuted in the Netflix catalogue, fans have begun to question the same choice of translation: How did the protagonist’s name who was originally called “Wednesday” become “Wandinha”? ?
Englishspeaking countries adopt the name “Wednesday”, which in literal translation means Wednesday (yes, the day of the week).
Those who watched the production should remember that during the first episode, Mortícia Addams (Catherine ZetaJones) enrolls her daughter in the Nunca Mais school, revealing that the name was inspired by a nursery rhyme.
“Her name comes from a line in my favorite children’s poem. Wandinha is just gross,” the matriarch said. In the plot, the protagonist explains that although she is called “Wednesday”, she was actually born on a Friday the 13th (correct, of course). This idea arose from the creation of the character in the original version written by cartoonist Charles Addams in the 1930s.
The author of The Addams Family gave the character the name Wednesday, inspired by the nursery rhyme published in 1838 that defined children by the day of the week they were born. The original text says: “Wednesday’s child is full of woe”, which we can translate as “Wednesday’s child is full of suffering” the word “woe” can also be translated as “fear” or “disgust” in English.
The poem reveals that only a child born on Wednesday has something bad, while a child born on Monday is beautiful and a child born on Tuesday is full of grace. Listen to the whole song:
“Monday’s child is beautiful
Tuesday’s child is full of grace
Wednesday’s child is full of worries
Thursday’s kid goes far
Friday’s child is kind and generous
The Saturday kid works all to live
And the child born on the Sabbath day
She is beautiful and cheerful, good and happy.”
Given the day of her birth, naming the character makes little sense as she was born on a frightening Friday the 13th and should therefore be christened “Friday”. However, children born on Friday are shown in the poem to be kind and generous, and as we know Wandinha Addams, it is the complete opposite of that.
lost in translation
Anyone who is a fan of Sessão da Tarde knows perfectly well that when the foreign names of films and series arrive in Brazil, they usually go through this “Brazilian style”, right? So the Mexican mouse Speedy Gonzales Speedy and the chipmunks Chip and Dale Tico and Teto.
When the Addams Family stories got here, Wednesday’s name was translated to Vandinha to better understand the public who tend to buy better names that sound good in Portuguese. However, Netflix changed the letter “V” to “W” so it could look a little more like the original name.
“Wednesday” became Wandinha in 1965 in the first Brazilian version of the series, performed by the extinct Dublasom Guanabara.
“It’s a question of history, of our affective memory. It’s been Wandinha for ages, so there’s nothing better than being now too. I’ve also seen it translated to other countries, and here everyone thinks of the Addams Family when they hear that name,” explained Felipe Drummond, Wandinha’s voice director, in an interview with the newspaper Metrópoles.
It is worth noting that in the Brazilian version not only the name Wandinha was changed. Uncle Chico is called “Fester” in English while younger brother Ugly is called “Pugsley”. The famous Addams Family mascot was also renamed: The little hand is called “Thing” in English.
A curious fact about the original story is that Wandinha and the other members of the Addams Family were given these names more than 30 years after their birth. Charles Addams created them as characters from The New Yorker magazine strips, but he did not name any of them. In the end, the clan was so successful that they got a TV series in 1964 when they were finally christened.
The Wandinha/Wednesday story resonated so much on social media that even Netflix got involved:
IS IT GOOD FOR YOU NOW? pic.twitter.com/rp7eSXRR4x
netflixbrasil (@NetflixBrasil) December 5, 2022
Wandinha is a spinoff series from The Addams Family the fifth to date. The production premiered on Netflix last Wednesday (23) and features a total of eight episodes, all of which will be released simultaneously. Recently, the Tim Burton production attracted an impressive 341.2 million hours of views in its first week of streaming and made the top 10 for the week of November 2127.
Wandinha holds the record for most hours watched by an English TV series on Netflix, beating Stranger Things 4 season 4.
The series is a detective supernatural mystery that follows Wandinha Addams’ years as a student at Nevermore School, where she attempts to master her psychic abilities, investigate a monstrous rampage that has been terrorizing the town, and solve the murder mystery in which her parents were involved a long time ago, 25 years. All while dealing with the complicated issues of an antisocial teenager arriving at a new school. Check out the production trailer: