The character was the recipient of piles of adoring viewer fan mail and three consecutive Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards for Favorite Animal Star. He does a smooth rendition of “Witchcraft,” but has also developed a more cat-like appreciation for getting scratched behind the ears. When not moaning about his fate or his fur-ball medicine, Salem reads The Economist, plays Risk, and poses as a woman on the Internet (“I like the attention”). The show’s wardrobe department was also tasked with fashioning Salem’s outfits, including several tuxedos.Īccording to the show’s lore, Salem Saberhagen was a hundreds-year-old warlock, sentenced to spend 100 years trapped in the body of a black American shorthair (though he was an orange tabby in the original comics) and stripped of his magical powers as punishment for attempted world domination. But on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, Salem was one of the show’s stars and main attractions: a sardonic, talking cat, realized by a cadre of artists and experts through a combination of old-fashioned puppetry, animatronics, and the training and wrangling of several real cats-not to mention surely some of the finest feline-centric writing ever seen on television. On the Netflix series, which returns with nine new episodes April 5, Salem-played by a squad of cats trained by Ian Doig-has a supporting and so-far silent role as Sabrina’s familiar spirit.
Nowhere is this more evident than in each show’s treatment of Salem the cat. Both center on the character of Sabrina, a witchy blonde teen who acquires magical powers on her sixteenth birthday.īut one is moody and murky where the other was mirthful black magic compared to cheerful technicolor.
and on Nickelodeon UK and CITV in the U.K., from 1996 to 2003.īoth were derived from the Archie spin-off comic-book series launched in 1971. Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina bears some resemblance to Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the series that enjoyed a 163-episode run, on ABC and then the WB in the U.S. Melissa Joan Hart as Sabrina, talks with Salem the cat in the 7th season of Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
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