Charity the Wicked Witch: The Cruse of the City

***Charity the Wicked Witch: The Cruse of the City*** is a 1998 animated fantasy comedy-horror film based on the Nickelodeon animated television series *Charity the Wicked Witch*. Produced by Nickelodeon Movies, Games Animation and ClearWorld Entertainment. It was directed by Tianna Hopes and written by Hopes, Thalia Ward, Len Blum, and Jonathan Roberts. The film follows Charity and her friends on a quest to find her real, biological father and stop her mom from taking over the world. It also served as the series finale of the series.

Plans for a *Charity* film adaptation, along with *Ren and Stimpy*, *Rugrats* and *Doug*, began when Nickelodeon made a contract with 20th Century Fox to produce films between 1993 and 1995. However, the contract expired with only *Toony Tales: Attack of the Aliens* got into production. Around the same year when contract expired, development of the film restarted with Paramount Pictures since Nick's parent company, Viacom, purchased the studio in 1994. Themes of the film included parodies of pop culture and well-known horror flicks.

The film was the first animated film from Nickelodeon Movies and the first film from ClearWorld Entertainment, as well as the first to be based on a Nicktoon and the only ClearWorld Entertainment independently-produced film before its transferred into JeremyWorks Entertainment in 1999. *Charity the Wicked Witch: The Cruse of the City* was released by Paramount Pictures in the United States on May 1, 1998. The film received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics, praising the the film's jokes, animation, story, performances, humor, score and celebrity caricatures, but criticizing its story, but was a box office success, earned over $435 million worldwide on its $60 million budget, making it the fifth highest-grossing film of 1998, the highest-grossing animated film of the year, and the highest-grossing non-Disney animated film at the time.

## Cast

* E.G. Daily as Charity
* Candi Milo as Ryan
* Charlie Adler as Calvin
* Frank Welker as Franklin
* Jim Cummings as Beckett, Charity's real, biological father
* Jennifer Hale as Cristina

*More coming soon!*

## Production

### Development

The talks about having *Charity* making it onto the big screen existed since the beginning of the series. The first attempt was in 1993, when Nickelodeon made a two-year contract deal with 20th Century Fox to produce new material, but a Nickelodeon executive did not rule out the possibility to make films based on their properties, one of those properties that mentioned was *Charity*, alongside that the others were *Doug*, *Rugrats* and *The Ren & Stimpy Show*, but the contract expired in 1995, with no movies produced (although *Doug*eventually got a theatrical film from Disney in March 1999). In 1994, Viacom acquired Paramount Pictures, and Paramount would distribute the movies instead, development on the movie immediately started a year later after both the acquisition of Paramount and the deal with Fox expired.

*More coming soon!*

## Release

*Charity the Wicked Witch: The Cruse of the City* was originally set to be released as a direct-to-video film in fall 1998, but in November 1996, Paramount announced that the film would be released theatrically for a May 15, 1998 release, which in turn was later pushed back two week on May 1 to avoid competition with Warner Bros.' *Quest for Camelot*.

### Home media

*Charity the Wicked Witch: The Cruse of the City* was released on VHS and DVD on October 20, 1998 by Paramount Home Video, which was reprinted many times. Paramount also released the film on Laserdisc. In addition, it was re-released in some movie sets by Paramount, in 2016 with all the non-sequel Nickelodeon-animated movies up to *Barnyard*, as well as a separate 2-disc set with *Arlene: The Story Begins*.

## Transcripts

### Main

To see the main transcript of the film, click here.

### Trailers

To see the transcript for the trailers of the film, click here.