The Real Tooth Fairies

» see realtoothfairies.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the real tooth fairies was a kids' website built around a simple idea. children took a personality quiz and got matched to one of six fairies. each fairy had a name, a personality, a song, a storybook, and a small world inside the site. you could send your fairy letters when you lost a tooth. you could buy outfits. you could play small games.

i never used this. by the time it launched in 2008 i was 24 and very much not the target demographic. and it was a US-focused kids' product, not the kind of thing that reached turkey. but the user who submitted it loved it as a kid, and that was the whole submission: please remember it. so this is a remembrance written from outside the experience.

the site was more elaborate than people might guess. each of the six fairies had their own theme song, recorded by real voice actors. there were illustrated books about each fairy's backstory. there was a male counterpart species called the time elffs, which is how the site spelled it. the elffs barely showed up in the main flow, but they appeared in the songs and the lore.

the virtual world part of the site shut down sometime in the mid-2010s. the rest of the site got a redesign aimed at a planned full-CGI movie that never came out. by 2017 the original interactive experience was effectively gone.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the format was familiar for the late-2000s kids' web. you started with a quiz. the quiz matched you to a fairy based on what kind of person you were, similar to how house quizzes worked on harry potter sites. once you had your fairy, the rest of the site opened up.

your fairy lived in a small explorable world. you could read about her hobbies, her friends, her storyline. you could send her a letter when you lost a tooth, and the site would integrate this with whatever your parents had told you about the tooth fairy. there was a virtual currency you earned through games, and you used it to buy outfits and accessories for your fairy.

the songs were the part that stuck with people. each fairy had a song that played when you visited her world. the production quality was higher than most kids' sites. the user who submitted this grave specifically remembered the songs as well-made, not the cheap karaoke loop you got on most kids' sites of the era.

~ the kids' web era ~

the late 2000s and early 2010s was the peak of the kids' virtual world web. club penguin (2005-2017). webkinz (2005, still alive but shrunk). neopets (1999, still around). build-a-bearville. fantage. moshi monsters. the real tooth fairies fit into this category. you visited a website, you had an avatar or character, you explored a small world, you played small games, you bought small things.

this whole category got killed by mobile apps. by 2014 to 2016 kids were on tablets, not desktops. the kids' virtual world format did not translate well to mobile. flash, which most of these sites used for the actual interactive parts, was being phased out. clubpenguin shut down in 2017. several others shut down around the same time. the real tooth fairies was one of these casualties.

some kids who grew up with these sites still remember them with real affection. the user who submitted this grave wrote about how much they loved it, and asked for it to be remembered. that is the whole reason it has a page here. somebody loved it. somebody wanted it written down.

~ what it left ~

not much, technically. the site is gone. the planned movie never released. the songs are scattered across youtube uploads from old fans. the storybooks were sold in physical form for a while but are out of print now.

what it left is the memory in the kids who used it. a small but real cohort of people who were 5 to 10 years old between 2008 and 2014, who spent hours with their matched fairy, who can still hum the song. that is a real kind of cultural artifact. it does not show up in tech press. it shows up in submissions to a site like this one, where someone says please remember this thing i loved.

that is enough to put it on the list.

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