Here's How The "Julie And The Phantoms" Characters Compare To The Original Show
The Netflix show is based on a Brazilian series from 2011.
Julie and the Phantoms is a delightful musical dramedy on Netflix about a teen girl who meets a trio of ghosts from the '90s and joins their band.
It's actually based on a Brazilian show, Julie e os Fantasmas, which had 26 episodes that aired in 2011 and 2012. But while the premise and name are the same, there are lots of little differences between the two shows.
Julie is a teen girl with musical ambitions and stage fright in both versions of the show.
However, in Julie e os Fantasmas, her mother is still alive — a huge difference, considering how much grief informs Julie and the Phantoms, and especially Julie's character and journey.
Most of Julie's plot in Julie e os Fantasmas centers around Julie's everyday problems, dealing with her crush on a boy at school (more on that in a sec) and her musical ambitions.
But both girls do have a supportive best friend and an ex-best friend-turned-enemy who is threatened by Julie's musical talents.
The band, and how Julie finds them, is quite different in the original show.
In Julie and the Phantoms, Julie comes across the Sunset Curve CD in her mother's things. It's likely that Rose, the girl who we see in the first episode who the band gives a t-shirt to, is Julie's mother. When Julie listens to the CD, the boys appear, and learn they are ghosts after having apparently been in some kind of limbo since the '90s.
In the original show, Julie and her family move into a new house, and Julie finds an old vinyl record of a band called Apolo 81 in the room she's staying in. When she plays it, the band appears, and the boys reveal they've been ghosts since the '80s — and are very aware of what it means to be a ghost, unlike Sunset Curve.
The bands being from the '80s vs the '90s means their looks and sounds are very different.
Apolo 81's makeup is also not just a strange '00s attempt at '80s style, but much more ~ghostly~. They're super pale, basically.
Meanwhile, the Sunset Curve boys appear like regular guys from the '90s. Or, well, the 2020 take on the '90s, which is slightly better and more polished than how everyone actually looked back then.
The differences between the two bands are more than superficial, though. For starters, they're entirely different characters.
Both are a trio of himbos, sure, but that's about where the similarities end. While Sunset Curve is made up of Luke, Alex and Reggie, the Apolo 81 members are Daniel, Felix and Martim.
Like Julie and Luke, Julie and Daniel have a strong connection. But the Apolo 81 guys have less developed arcs of their own. There's not as much delving into their backstory or their desires.
Speaking of which — the ghost boys in Julie e os Fantasmas are able to show themselves to select people (though it's against ghost rules) and when it comes to performing, rather than appearing as 'holograms' they wear head-to-toe costumes (complete with masks) like some modern day invisible men.
The villain in Julie e os Fantasmas is completely different.
While Sunset Curve is threatened by the sneaky Caleb Covington, who wants to own their souls and force them to work for eternity at his Hollywood Ghost Club, Apolo 81 has to stay on the right side of the Spectral Police. As the name suggests, they're ghost cops who enforce the rules of ghostdom — like not showing yourself to humans.
BTW, because Caleb doesn't exist in the original show, Willie doesn't exist either — he's an entirely new character in the American series.
Finally, Julie's crush, Nick (or Nicolas as he is in the original), is pretty much the same, with some minor changes.
Nicolas is actually more of a prominent character in the original series, and he gets more development (although we may see more for Nick in future). The two are both popular boys that Julie has a crush on, and who are dating her rival/ex-friend. With no Caleb, Nicolas, of course, never gets possessed by him, so that's a huge point of difference.
Julie and Nicolas are endgame in the Brazilian series, but that doesn't guarantee that Julie and Nick will be if the Netflix show gets more seasons (and hopefully it does). The creators have already shown they're not afraid to make changes — and often, they're for the better. While Julie e os Fantasmas is a cute series, it doesn't quite have the heart that Julie and the Phantoms does. And there's not an "Unsaid Emily" in sight.