Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular
Directed by	Ezekiel Norton
Produced by	Kevin Gamble Sharan Wood
Written by	Heath Corson Jill Thompson
Starring	Garry Chalk Noel Callahan Alex Doduk Brittney Irvine Britt McKillip Danny McKinnon Scott McNeil Adam Pospisil Tabitha St. Germain
Music by	Robert Buckley
Editing by	Anne Hoerber Patrick Carroll William Lau Craig Mcewen
Studio	Mainframe
Release date(s)	July 18, 2003 (SDCC)
Running time	48 minutes
Country	Canada

Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular is a 2003 Canadian computer-animated Halloween comedy film based on the Scary Godmother series of books by Jill Thompson, specifically a community theater stage production of the first book. The special depicts Hannah, while trick-or-treating with her cousin Jimmy and his friends, encountering the titular witch and her many friends for a Halloween party at the Fright Side. It stars Canadian voice actors Tabitha St. Germain, Britt McKillip, Garry Chalk, Noel Callahan, Alex Doduk, Brittney Irvine, Danny McKinnon, Scott McNeil and Adam Pospisil. It was directed by Zeke Norton (credited as Ezekiel Norton) and produced by Kevin Gamble and Sharan Wood with heavy involvement by Thompson.

Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular was produced by Vancouver-based animation company Mainframe Entertainment, notable for other computer-animated television series such as ReBoot (1994–2001), and was the company's first production to use a Softimage XSI pipeline as previously they used Softimage 3D; its animation consists of 3D characters and backgrounds that appear 2D (although most of them were actually modeled in 3D and cartoon-edged to appear like 2D watercolored backgrounds a la the source material). The special was meant to launch an episodic Scary Godmother series, but it never happened and the only other Scary Godmother was the studio's sequel to the special, Scary Godmother: The Revenge of Jimmy (2005).

Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular premiered at the San Diego Comic-Con on July 18, 2003 before it was released to region 1 DVD on September 3, 2003. It aired during that year's Halloween season in most territories except the United States, where it premiered on television the following year on Cartoon Network on October 1, 2004. The special was a ratings hit on its U.S. television premiere, well received by critics, and won Leo Awards for the program itself as well as its score and direction. It, along with The Revenge of Jimmy, continued to re-air every Halloween season on Cartoon Network in later years.

Plot

On Halloween night, Hannah Marie, dressed as a fairy princess, is about to go trick-or-treating with her spoiled cousin, Jimmy, wearing a devil hoodie, and his friends Katie, dressed as a black cat, Daryl, in a candy piece costume, and Bert, pretending to be a baseball player driving inside a powerful SUV that can shoot atomic lasers. Jimmy, annoyed with having to go with Hannah, conceives a prank to scare her home. While near an abandoned house in a graveyard, Jimmy concocts a myth about residents at the house (the "spook house") not feeding candy to monsters surrounding its exterior and being eaten as a result; ever since, candy has to be in the basement every year to prevent the monsters from killing other children in the world. Jimmy tells Hannah to go in the house and leave some candy. A frightened Hannah walks in the front door while the other kids lock her inside.

Inside, a friendly witch, along with her ghost cat, magically appears in front of Hannah and introduces herself as the Scary Godmother. She takes her on a broomstick ride to the Fright Side, a place where the Godmother's other friends live: Mr. Skully Pettibone, Harry the werewolf, a fuzzy monster that works scaring kids named Bug-A-Boo, and a vampire family of parents Count Max and Countess Ruby, and son Orson. They are having another annual Halloween party, described by Pettibone as the most "spooky phantom fest in the whole realm." Although at first frightened of the monsters, Hannah eventually warms up to them and parties. Antics include dancing, a chase throughout the house by most of the guests, bonding between Orson and Hannah, and Harry annoying the other participants by eating most of the food and talking a lot.

Outside of the "spook house," Jimmy, Katie, Bert, and Daryl have waited for hours for Hannah to get out. The typical trick-or-treating time has passed, and Bert, Daryl, and Katie all become worried about Jimmy's legend being true and Hannah's life in danger. They demand to go in and get Hannah, but Jimmy, out of nowhere, insists there's no monsters, declares himself the "leader" by winning a rock, paper, scissors game, and temporarily rules they all wait for Hannah longer. However, Jimmy's attitude quickly changes, and all four kids enter the house to look for Hannah.

Near the end of the party, Hannah tells the guests about the myth Jimmy told her. Jimmy's name rings a bell to Bug-A-Boo, who scares Jimmy every other Thursday; the monster is angry with Jimmy because he spreads rumors that Bug-A-Boo eats little girls. Scary Godmother and her friends decide to play a prank on Jimmy and his goons in response, which ends with Hannah pretending to scare away the monsters. The kids take the monsters as real and bolt out of the house. Before Hannah leaves, the Godmother gives her a skeleton key to go back to the Fright Side anytime.

Production

Workflow

Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular entered pre-production in January 2002 before beginning what would be eight months of production in July. The production team went from 25 animators, including "10 people who were there for most of it," to 50 individuals that included those working in-between other projects. Thompson was heavily involved in the development and production: "I co-wrote the show, worked as an editor, I directed art, I illustrated expression sheets, chose voices, suggested music, designed sets, [and] painted backgrounds (or anything else that was needed or helpful)." She was in her Chicago studio during production, so she faxed drawings and paintings to Norton while Mainframe sent videotapes of progress to the artist, which included storyboards, wireframe animations, and fully-rendered visuals. As the special was an hour-long project produced by a small crew testing new software, Mainframe's production protocol was altered significantly; for example, details about shots, such as quantities of them and their order of appearance, were documented on a gigantic whiteboard, whereas before the staff would learn about them during editing.

Casting

Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular's limited budget meant voice actors such as Scott McNeil (left), Garry Chalk (middle) and Tabitha St. Germain (right) were cast for multiple characters.

As with prior Mainframe projects, all actors were cast locally from Vancouver (some of whom had previously voiced in works by the animation studio) and recorded together in the same room. To get around the limited budget, some actors were hired to voice two characters each; Tabitha St. Germain was cast as Scary Godmother and Countess Ruby, Garry Chalk played Bug-a-Boo and Harry, and Scott McNeil portrayed Mr. Skully Pettibone and Count Max.

Most of the actresses that auditioned for the Scary Godmother put on, in Thompson's opinion, a creepy "Wicked Witch type of voice" unsuitable for the character; this also was the case with auditions for the stage show. Thompson described the witch as enthusiastic and only a little goofier than the average person, and she felt St. Germain's voice matched it.

Harry, who is an item collector and comic book fanatic, was based on fans of Thompson's work who were also collectors, thus she looked for someone that could replicate indescribable speech patterns common with them. The affectations were based the most on one fan who she described in a published interview as into "creepy fan art drawings" but refused to reveal his name to not embarrass him; at a convention, the fan was upset at Thompson for not mentioning him.

Animation

Scary Godmother series author Jill Thompson in 2011. She contributed her own paintings to the production, which would be used both as 2D image layers and textures on 3D sets.

Mainframe produced Halloween Spooktakular with 12 iterations of a new SoftimageXSI pipeline, moving away from Softimage 3D. Rendering was done with Mental Ray, while layers were composited together with XSI's FX Tree; the maximum number of layers for a shot was 30. The pipeline also had a setup where shots could be archived, re-looked at, and altered. 20 Hewlett-Packard and Dell computers running on a Linux operating system were utilized. Most backgrounds were modeled in 3D, with geometry sculpted with XSI and texturing done with GIMP and Photoshop; one method of replicating the source material's visual style was through black edging 3D objects with XSI's Toon Shader. There were also 2D animated backgrounds created with After Effects for the flash-animated "treats" scene, the dance, and the Scary Godmother's special recipe conjure. Thompson provided her own artwork for 2D images and 3D background textures; she watercolor-painted four angles of 3D sets first before parts of them were used as textures.

Being animated in key frames, the film's long shot lengths called for XSI's Animation Mixer, which allowed for the re-use and "blend[ing]" together of cycles; this was especially useful for the dance and chase scenes in the Godmother's home. As Norton explained, "We could quickly throw the characters together in a scene with general [animation] cycles, choose the spots where specific keyframed animation was needed, and then use the Animation Mixer to smoothly blend in the [new] movement." Animation Mixer was also used to blend and re-use facial expressions created with the lip-syncing tool Grimace. Indian dances, the Peanuts specials, the dream scene from The Big Lebowski (1998), and Scooby-Doo cartoons from the 1960s and 1970s were references for animating the dance sequence.

Fur was not only added to all of Harry and Bugaboo, but also on the Godmother's hair and skirt and Hannah's tutu. Due to Mainframe's originally-programmed fur-texturing software not being compatible with the new pipeline, XSI's built-in fur simulation was employed instead. The fur was the most difficult part of animating the special, particularly when it came to Bugaboo; because he was animated with several complex forward and inverse kinematics, "the extreme poses often made the hair do interesting things that we didn't want it to do, such as sticking straight up or even protruding through the character's mouth," explained Norton. These issues were hidden with FX Tree. The clouds seen during Hannah's flight with the Scary Godmother were another major challenge; they were modeled by displacement mapping simple sheets and balls, before FX Tree added several turbulent distortion, swirl, and blur effects to make them look fluffy and light. The clouds were presented by Softmage as part of an FX Tree showcase for the 2003 SIGGRAPH event.

Visual style

Hannah, Jimmy, Bret, Daryl, and Katie all meeting each other at a graveyard. The characters are animated in typical 3D CGI, while objects in the backgrounds are black-edged to give them a 2D cartoon feel.

In a 2001 interview, Dan DiDio, Mainframe's senior VP of creative affairs, admitted other investors were holding television computer-animated productions to the same standard as theatrical films; to avoid these comparisons, the company stylized their animation with productions like Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular. It was the first production where Mainframe used proprietary software; this led to more flexibility and tools to experiment, making it easier to achieve a unique visual style that Karen Moltenbrey of Computer Graphics World categorized as more reminiscent of The Nightmare Before Christmas (1994) than modern 3D computer-animated films.

The company's initial vision was being animated entirely in the same 2D watercolor painting style as the books, but Thompson decided that her characters be animated in 3D, a decision influenced by her love of stop-motion films such as The Nightmare Before Christmas; the final result was 3D CGI characters animated in front of what looked like still, 2D hand-drawn watercolor backgrounds (although most of them were modeled in 3D). Wrote Moltenbrey, this diversity extended to the character designs, "from the wide-eyed, anime look of Hannah to the simplistic style used for Jimmy and his friends to the softer, more sophisticated appearance of the creatures." One character design liberty was with Pettibone, who wore clothes in the books so Thompson didn't have to draw his rib cage but wore nothing in the special as animating cloth would have required too much processing power.

Release

In addition to a sneak peek trailer on Mainframe's website, Scary Godmother: Halloween Spooktakular was promoted with tie-ins from Halloween shops and candy producers. The special premiered at the 2003 San Diego Comic-Con on July 18, 2003 to favorable audience reception reported by Comic Book Resources: "As the special continued, there was more applause each time a familiar character appeared onscreen, with the biggest hand going to the arrival of the show's title character. It was clear the show was a hit from the start with this audience of devoted Thompson fans, with lots of laughter and appreciative applause and cheers throughout." It was also screened on Halloween 2003 at the Biograph Theatre for the first animation event of the Chicago International Film Festival, and on Halloween 2004 at the ION International Animation, Gaming and Short Film Festival as part of the annual event's "Kids Day."

Halloween Spooktakular was released on region 1 DVD on September 3, 2003 before making television debuts in Canada, Europe, and Latin America in October of that year. It aired in Canada on three afternoons on the YTV channel (October 26, October 30, and October 31) and on Disney International networks in Asia, Latin America, Germany, and Italy. It had its first television screening in the United States on Cartoon Network on October 1, 2004, and re-aired that month three times (October 12, October 29, and October 31). Also in the United States, it was released to DVD in September 2004 in two editions, one of which came with a glow-stick.

The special, along with The Revenge of Jimmy became an annual tradition for Cartoon Network to air during the Halloween season, with the latest reported airing being in October 2012. It also was included on compilation DVDs, including a PAL region Kids' Collection release alongside The Happy Elf (2005) and Everyone's Hero (2006) and Lionsgate's 2014 Kids Halloween 4-Pack that also featured The Revenge of Jimmy and two episodes from other cartoon series ("Eloise's Rawther Unusual Halloween" and "Wubbzy Goes Boo!"). On October 30, 2020, both Scary Godmother specials became available on the Canadian streaming service Crave.