By one of those coincidences that leads me to suspect witchcraft — or perhaps just the more banal dark magic of social media — this week has renewed some heated online chatter about the dubious cultural legacies of two very different movies. One of them is James Cameron’s 3-D wonderment “Avatar” (2009), which recently returned to theaters as a warm-up act for “Avatar: The Way of Water.” That soon-to-arrive sequel will test some of the more persistent putdowns of the first “Avatar,” namely that it was a rare box office juggernaut with a negligible pop-cultural imprint. It was an event movie that everyone saw, the argument goes, but few really loved.
The other movie is the family-friendly supernatural comedy “Hocus Pocus” (1993), which, like “Avatar,” has now spawned a long-awaited follow-up. But unlike “Avatar,” “Hocus Pocus” set no box office records on release, broke no technological ground and received mostly indifferent to hostile reviews. The 10-year-old me who saw it in theaters (and countless times afterward on VHS) would have supplied one of the more enthusiastic notices, won over by its wanly funny-spooky vibes, its now-creaky visual effects and the shrieky rapport of Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker as the Sanderson Sisters, a trio of 17th-century New England witches with a taste for young children and archaic second-person-singular pronouns.
Mini-me also would have been delighted by the prospect of a sequel, if disappointed to hear it would take almost 30 years to get off the ground. That lengthy gestation speaks to the long, weird shelf life of the first “Hocus Pocus,” received as a campy misfire but reclaimed, over the decades, as a Halloween staple and (oc)cult classic. It occasioned fan guides, TV specials, theme-park attractions and wildly popular anniversary screenings, some of them attended by ye olde original cast and crew. Parker even launched her own spinoff sitcom, “Hex and the City.” OK, I madest that up.
