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Do you have a spare dollar? If you do, then you could’ve bought the television and film rights for Sabrina the Teenage Witch back in 1996. That’s exactly what Melissa Joan Hart’s mother Paula Hart did, and that one-dollar investment quickly grew.

“We found the comic book,” Melissa Joan Hart says during a panel at Tampa Bay Comic Convention. “Someone handed it to her on a playground and said, ‘I think this would be a great project for Melissa.’ And it was from the 1950s, a Sabrina comic. And it was in the current Archies as well. They would do one comic a year. Sabrina was in the Archies, but she would have her own comic book once a year.”

Melissa Joan Hart had recently ended her time on the Nickelodeon series Clarissa Explains It All, and the Sabrina comic gave Paula an idea for their next project.

“My mom was like, ‘You know what?’ We’ve just been working on Clarissa, so we’ve been working with Viacom, and she was like, ‘I’ll go to Viacom and ask them.’ And they wanted to make it into a Showtime movie, and so that’s the movie we did with Ryan Reynolds. We filmed that in Vancouver in 1994 or 1996. Something like that.”

Of course, this meant they needed to obtain the rights from Archie Comics first. Luckily, the comic publisher wasn’t playing hardball.

“My mom went to Archie, she got it for a dollar, she sold it to Viacom, who sold it to Showtime to make the movie. And then she kept saying, ‘This would be a great series.’ And everyone kept going, ‘Yeah, okay.’ And so, when she was editing the movie, she put together a sizzle reel, and she sent that sizzle reel off to five different networks, and three of them bid on it in the room, but ABC was like, ‘We’ll give you the TGIF timeslot.’ And she was like, ‘That’s the one we’re going with.’”

Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a ratings hit and ran for seven seasons. Not bad for a dollar.

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