Sabrina the Teenage Witch remains a beloved sitcom of the late ’90s and early ’00s. Now, new generations of viewers can discover Melissa Joan Hart‘s spunky Sabrina Spellman through various streaming services. When Hart stopped by TV Insider and TV Guide Magazine’s offices, she reflected on her bewitching 1997 cover.
“Funny enough, I have this blown up very big on my wall at home,” the actress quipped about her TV Guide Magazine cover photo. “It covers my fuse box in my house.” She added, “I think I liked it because I had the smokey eyes, and back then I didn’t get to wear a whole lot of makeup like this.”
Inside the magazine, Hart embraced a much darker vibe than her effervescent teenage character. Decked out in a black corset dress, the young actress stood on a New York City fire escape alongside a skeleton in a suit. “This is one of the few times I actually went witchy,” Hart said about the Halloween-themed shoot.
TV Guide Magazine
In the feature, Hart opened up about how her closest friends were people she met working on the show. “We were a really tight crew, and we had a lot of fun and we traveled like all over,” she recalled. “We did the movies in Rome and Australia. We did episodes at Disney World [in] Florida. We did wrap parties in Vegas.”
The Bad Guardian star also discussed in the article about how she based Sabrina on her then 17-year-old sister. “I always felt like Sabrina was fighting against everything she was supposed to be,” Hart explained. “I didn’t really identify with her in that way. I identified much more with my character Clarissa [on Clarissa Explains It All] because I feel like we were growing up together. We were both tough, like, oh, you can’t take me down. Sabrina was very much like, leave me alone. Nobody look at me. I don’t know what I’m doing, and that wasn’t me at all.”
A section of the feature went in-depth about the highs and lows of Salem the talking cat. To bring the iconic feline to life onscreen, there were a plethora of options, including four real cats, a stuffed stunt double named Stuffy, and an animatronic cat.
“The cat caused so many problems, whether it was live or not,” Hart admitted. ” The only one that probably worked the most consistently was the animatronic, although that would break down here and there too, have a little spasm and took three people to run the animatronic.”
In looking back at the series, which totaled 163 episodes, the Season 3 episode “Pancake Madness” stands out to Hart.
“I love that episode personally because I got to do some physical comedy in it, and it’s the first time it really felt good to do physical comedy that I can remember,” Hart told TV Insider. “That sort of sparked me going, I want to do more of that. But also, it’s a great episode with an underlying tone of addiction. So when my kids won’t watch my shows or anything I do, if I need to explain addiction to them, I’ll show them that episode because it really helps.”
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For fans who really know Sabrina, before the TV show, there was the movie. The 1996 Showtime film, which premiered before the show, featured Ryan Reynolds in in one of his earliest roles. “You know, it was a little bit of a crushing thing happening then, but we had a lot of fun on that set,” Hart said about working with the Deadpool actor.
Sabrina the Teenage Witch ended in 2003 after seven seasons, with Sabrina going full Runaway Bride with Harvey on the back of his motorcycle. Hart revealed that she’s on the fence about reviving the character in the future.
“I would consider it,” she said about a revival. “I never say never, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I just think that it ended so well. I don’t want to have to redo an ending. With all the fan fiction and people for 30 years thinking about the way they would want it, I don’t think it’ll ever make anyone happy really.”
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