The Scary Godmother 2: The Revenge of Jimmy (2006)

TV. My youngest son and I have enjoyed the Scary Godmother stories on television each Halloween season so we were pleased to see the second show in the series on DVD. (Netflix does not even list these titles and availability has been constrained for the first show on Blockbuster.) We even watched the making-of featurette, which vaunted the creative and voice-talent processes quite entertainingly. Scary Godmother is like a cool aunt who just happens to live in a spooky alternate-dimension haunted house that only cutie-pie Hannah-Marie can enter with a special key. (Think Miss Frizzle with maniacally fluttering bat wings and a broom. She's actually a hottie in a frenetic, ghoulish-girl kind of way.) Skully Pettibones is her jumbly-tumbly gayish "broommate," as is Bug-A-Boo, a roly-poly polyoptic monster that has to hail from da Bronx. Harry the food-snatching werewolf hangs around and makes a pest of himself while a vampire family (Count Max, Ruby, and Orson) make polite if Gothic appearances. Jimmy is Hannah's mean older cousin who is always trying to ruin Halloween for all the other kids. The shows hew closely to the books by Jill Thompson so they portray a lot of whimsy and even some in-jokes. (Harry lives in Ackerman Forest which is a play on Forrest Ackerman.) The CGI characters occasionally reveal a bit of corner-cutting (in detail and resolution) but remain esthetically pleasing. The action is often springy and manic (but no more than Madagascar); it's a cartoon after all. These shows have become a tradition for us; maybe they will for you too. 3.5 stars. (3-31-08 updated 3-4-09)