Hocus Pocus 2 resurrects the delightfully devilish Sanderson sisters for some fresh hell-raising around Salem, Massachusetts. While there’s plenty for newbies to enjoy, one of the sequel’s sequences of shenanigans will give die-hard fans of Hocus Pocus cause to cackle. The new movie has plenty of callbacks, ranging from song numbers and catchphrases to Easter Eggs, but there’s one section that harkens back to a sequence that never even made it into the original movie!
It all begins when teen witch Becca (Whitney Peak) and her bestie Izzy (Belissa Escobedo) try to stall Winnie (Bette Midler), Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker), and Mary (Kathy Najimy) from eating the souls of children as a youth serum. Naturally, the girls usher the Sanderson sisters into the fluorescent-lit aisles of a Walgreens for lotions (“Sounds like potions!”) that promise restored youth. Enthusiastically, the sisters begin guzzling skincare products and munching a beauty mask — which they assume is the skin of a baby’s face — to get a glow-up.
While this makes for fresh fun, it’s slyly a nod to a sequence that was cut from the 1993 film. In it, the Sanderson sisters run amok (amok amok!) in a grocery store.
Kathy Najimy dropped some details about these deleted scenes in 2018, during a Q&A screening for Hocus Pocus at Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse. (Full Disclosure: I was the Q&A’s host.) “That was so fun,” she’d told the packed house of the grocery store shoot. “In it, Mary got to be set loose in a supermarket.”
But this market mayhem is not all that was lost.
Najimy revealed Hocus Pocus radically changed between scripting and release. “It was cut and edited completely differently than it was filmed,” Najimy said. “[Originally], it was really more about the witches and less about the kids, and Disney decided that they wanted it to be more kid-centric and kid-friendly.” Imagine: We could have had so much more Sanderson sisters! According to Najimy, there “are like five huge scenes with the witches that never made the movie.”
The original footage might be long gone, but you can still find traces of it in the early trailers for the movie. In the one below, at the 16-second mark, you’ll see Najimy’s Mary in a cleaning products aisle, squirting back a clear liquid, then eying a baby before Winnie scolds her, “No time for snacking!”
While these bits might only live now in snippets online and in the memories of Hocus Pocus‘s stars, Hocus Pocus 2 gives the more, more, more of the Sanderson sisters that we’ve craved for nearly 30 years. Plus, thanks to the new beauty aisle sequence, you’ll never look at a facial mask the same way again!
Hocus Pocus and Hocus Pocus 2 are now streaming on Disney+. (opens in a new tab)
