Sabrina the Teenage Witch
“Fo shnizzle my nizzle, make that bitch Amy's hair all greasy and frizzled!”
Sabrina Victoria Spellman, better known as Sabrina the Teenage Witch, is an Archie Comics character, who lives with her aunts Hilda and Zelda, studying to get her witch's license.
Growing up on the rough streets of Greendale[edit]
Sabrina discovered her god-like power to make her wildest wishes come true on her 16th birthday; previously, she had often wondered why aunties Hilda and Zelda wore those pointy hats all the time and why there was another dimension in the closet. Perhaps this is because Sabrina spent most of her time thinking about boys, fashion, and terrible things happening to Amy, the teenage bitch who stole Brad off the market; she's not like those private school teen witches solving mysteries for the magic police, so whatevs.
Most of Sabrina's education in the arcane arts and witch crafts comes from correspondence courses, textbooks, and homeschooling from her aunts. This, combined with her mad rhymes, wicked enunciation, and hella good ability to keep a beat, lets her throw improvisational rap battles on the fly and curse Amy into getting spitballs shot into her hair during English class. Sabrina briefly considered using her gifts to make the world a better place, but that would require a mask and a gaudy outfit that she wouldn't be caught being burned at the stake alive wearing. Yuck!
Powers lead to pain[edit]
Most of Sabrina's mystical answers to life's problems create twice as many messes as when she started. It's more incompetence than maliciousness, though she has a bit of a temper and a hair trigger that leads her to do things she immediately regrets having done. When it comes to maintaining her physique she's a drill sergeant, but would never resort to using magic for weight loss; just weight gain for cursing Amy and her mean girl-friends.
Whenever Sabrina screws up so much that she can't BS her way out of a tough situation she created (which is every other day), she just gives everyone amnesia, as she's worse than Professor X or the Men in Black when it comes to messing around with people's heads without a license to practice brain medicine. Although Sabrina could just mind control any boy in school into dating her (even the gay ones), it's easy enough to control men with sandwiches and a low-cut blouse, and she really doesn't need magic to do that. She can make her every wish come true; however, all Sabrina really wants is to Netflix and chill, eat at a nice restaurant, visit the beach, and go to a boss party every now and then, making her a relatively cheap date, considering all the medieval kings her aunts used to date back in the day.
Friends and foes[edit]
Sabrina's talking cat Salem likes sleeping, complaining about his food, and occasionally attempting to take over the world, which is why he's an inside cat. He wasn't always a cat, but that's what you get when you two-time Enchantra, a G-rated dominatrix who is the most powerful sorceress of this realm or the other realm. Granted, Sabrina still feels bad for him having to cough up furballs for eternity when it was a loveless marriage arranged by his parents; the magic community loves cool and unusual punishments though, and it's enshrined in the constitution of Other World.
Sabrina's best friend Harvey is sweet, though he's not as handsome as Brad, or Tad. She could just give him cosmetic surgery like she did do her aunts, only that would just get to his head. That tease Amy already has a boyfriend and doesn't even like Harvey, but she leads him on just to mess with Sabrina, the nerve of that snooty, spoiled, shallow snot. If Sabrina really wanted to be rich she could just turn all her pencil lead into gold, or go back in time and get an autograph from Leonardo da Vinci, but her mortal grandmother taught her the fun of doing things without zapping them magically into existence.
Abra-catastrophic crossovers[edit]
Sometimes, when the stars align and the council of interdimensional copyright lawyers so doth decree it be, Sabrina is capable of casting cross over magic and having adventures with KISS, Cthulhu, and The Predator, or someone less expensive whose rights on the comic book copyright plane are already owned by Archie, like Sonic the Hedgehog. Whether or not the half a dozen seconds it takes her to orate a powerful reality-altering spell would actually matter in the sights of The Punisher's much faster automatic weapons remains much speculated and debated by fans.
Riddikulus reincarnations[edit]
From 1970 to 1974, Sabrina appeared in a Filmation Saturday morning cartoon alongside The Archies of "Sugar Sugar" fame. Few remember this version, but it is notable for featuring a platinum-blonde Sabrina, unlike future incarnations where she's a regular-blonde.
But she is most well-remembered for her 1996 live-action sitcom series, where she was played by Melissa Joan "Clarissa" Hart. In this version, Sabrina learns about her powers when she is 16 rather than always knowing about them, and Salem is a wisecracking talking black cat instead of a mute ginger cat. Here, Sabrina's aunts Hilda and Zelda look more like actual humanoid aunts wearing civilian clothing instead of typically hideous witches like they were in the comics. The first few seasons were acclaimed for their endearing hokiness (particularly wisecracking animatronic cat Salem), but fans stopped watching when Sabrina went to college and the show increased in its usage of gratuitous adult jokes.
In 1999, there was a Disney animated series, set in what appears to be a bastardized canon that combines the original comics with the sitcom with original elements, where Sabrina already knows about her powers in junior high, but Salem is still a black cat who talks, Sabrina's aunts are sexy and young women who live with Sabrina's uncle Quigley, and Sabrina is voiced by Melissa's little sister Emily while Melissa is... the aunts(!). In the transition from live-action to animation, the occasionally-mature humor of the sitcom was zapped away in favor of cheesy "be yourself" aesops and predictable pop culture references. This show was at least alright for wasting time, unlike the 2003 sequel series Sabrina's Secret Life, which was so bad that it made the previous cartoon look like a masterpiece.
In 2012, Sabrina appeared in another cartoon, Sabrina: Secrets of a Teenage Witch this time poorly-animated in CGI, where the characters look like disturbing uncanny pixie-gremlins. Sabrina was rumored to be a character in the new season of 2017's Riverdale, played by Dove Cameron, but this rumor seems to be all for naught as Archie made a dark, gritty Chilling Adventures of Sabrina series in 2018 starring Kiernan Shipka. This series was done in much the same vein as the new The Flintstones comic, featuring the familiar prehistoric social satire retooled for a more cynical modern Stone Age family.