Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Harvest

So, I've been suuuper existential since I got THE BILL in the mail for school. I will be paying for my Bachelor's degree for a really long time and its really put into focus how unsure I am about being a counselor. So I, like a lot of other recent college graduates, have decided not to make any decisions about grad school just yet. And I reread some old journal entries and such yesterday and am reminding myself of things that are important to me that I have lost sight of in the last 6 years or so. I have really bought into how things are "supposed" to be...how society wants to automatize...I forgot that I used to want to be a writer and I used to want to program music and have a radio station, etc. I miss being a page at the library. I miss the physicality of it and the pure simplicity of never having to interact with patrons if I didn't want to. Lately, going to work has paralyzed me with anxiety thinking about all the interactions I'll have to face. And the truth of it is that I've always had this reaction to throngs of people. I've just tried to submerse it and plaster that big smile on my face. I'm not a social being, most of the time. This isn't me. I do want a job that deals with less people. If I could afford it, I'd go back to being a page in a SECOND. Best. Job. Ever. Anyway, I know I need a career plan, but for now I want to work more toward writing. Maybe I'll start freelancing in a few months, but for now my first project is:

One episode of Buffy per day with real-time blogging. I will blog as I'm watching the ep freeflow-style with minimal proofreading after ep is over. I will not think about how lame my writing is, I will just do it for the love of doing it. So, dust off those old Buffy tapes and watch along with me, kids! It'll be fun!

So, here I go: episode 2, season 1:

Some inconsistency with dusting vamps in the beginning here; sometimes they dust and sometimes you just hear them hit the ground with a thud. I should probably not get distracted with stupid continuity details like some uber-nerd, but I probably will.

A favorite quote from Giles reassures the audience that despite the wearing of crosses, Buffy is NOT a religious show: "This world is older than any of you know, and contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise."

The first scene after the theme is a big explainy-in-the-library scene. I love those!

The show started out a lot cheesier than it ended up, but that makes perfect sense as Joss meant for the series to mirror the kids growing up and right now they're sophomores, so their fears are cheesier (big Nosferatu-type vampire).

OMG, Xander and his weird computer-graphic mushroom button-up! Nice.

I love watching old TV shows; the dated styles and decor. The bad haircuts and the overly dramatic '90s makeup. Classic.

It's so weird when Buffy jumps over that big school gate...it's like 12 feet in the air! I know she's supposed to have super powers, but she never does this again! There I go with the continuity-nerd stuff again.

You know, I never noticed this until now, but it's pretty subversive that not only is a tiny little girl kicking serious metaphysical ass throughout this series, but apart from the occasional vampire taunting her for her tinyness, the humans around her hardly ever question why she can do the things she can even though she's "just a girl". In most other TV shows, they'd be harping on that aspect, constantly pointing out that she's no ordinary girl. In this show, it's apparent she isn't an ordinary girl, but this is focused on the grown-up nature of her responsibilities as Slayer, not in the fact that she's JUST a girl.

It annoys me when much older people play high school kids, such as Charisma Carpenter, who was 27 when the show started. Sarah Michelle Gellar still has some baby fat goin', so she's gotta still be in her early '20s (just looked it up--she was 20). However, with Charisma, she just looks older to me when she's thin. Later when she crosses over to Angel, she gains a bit of weight and looks a lot better, but here she's tiny. I like my women with a bit of meat. I liked Jennifer Aniston better in the first few seasons of Friends when she was a bit curvy too.

"Everything is life or death when you're a 16-year-old girl." -Joyce Summers.

Subtext! My favorite part of Buffy. If only I got all of it.

Skirts were so short in 1997. And the music was still good...I miss 1997. I miss it so much! The beginning years of this show make me so nostalgic. What's the metaphor for big scary Nosferatu-vamp being stuck in the between-world like a "cork in a bottle"? Is that vaginal or just coincidental? Has Mother Earth swallowed him whole and he's just too big of a dick to squeeze out on his own? I'm stretching...

No one ever bares their midriffs anymore like they did in the '90s. It looks, like their bare legs, so revealing. Why have we trended towards MORE prudish?

I love Giles' famous line at the end: "The Earth's doomed." He says this again in a mirrored bookend scene in the last episode of the series right before they go into their final battle on the show.

Commentary (by Joss Whedon) notes added 5.22.13: The Master was made to look like he was devolving into a bat. Joss is talking about how awesomely dark the lighting is on the show. I agree, as I've said many times before. You don't always need to see everything. First scene with Harmony ever and she's wearing a t shirt with a unicorn on it.

Joss just stopped talking for like the last 5 minutes...longest silence in a commentary ever! Wtf?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Welcome to the Hellmouth

I've decided, in order to occupy myself on sick days and other free time chunks of my life when I could be prone to too much self-analysis, to rewatch Buffy and write about it! Yeay: two of my favorite things: Buffy and academics!!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Journal of an Obsession.

Entry #1- Welcome to the Hellmouth shownotes: I love how the show starts out with a seemingly innocent schoolgirl being lead through the highschool at night by a teenaged boy and you suspect the boy’s a vampire because the girl is acting all goody-goody, but she’s really, SHOCKER, naughty naughty. She’s the vampire. This is, of course, Joss Whedon’s (creator/head writer of Buffy) intentional gender role reversal from the very first scene of the very first episode of this seven season epicly-spectacular series. Scene two shows the protagonist as a cutesy short blonde girl who, if you didn’t know the premise of the show, doesn’t seem like she could slay anything. From the beginning, you are to suspend all your typical beliefs about how things appear, and this theme is paramount throughout the show.

It’s pretty hilarious that Xander’s introduction to the show is on a skateboard, as he’s never seen with one again.

What school checks their textbooks out in the library? If this is how they do it in Sunnydale, how come there’s never anyone in the damn library?

I like how Buffy immediately gives a disapproval face to Cordelia when she insults Willow’s nerdy dress, instantly aligning herself with the misfits.

Valley speak? Perhaps this was an homage to the movie? Regardless, I’m glad they abandoned that after episode 1.

Xander is hilarious from day one. *sigh* Xander is dreamy. He has that vague highschool boy sleaziness that only an adolescent in the mid-‘90s can bestow: Michael used to have this same style-effect back in the day.

Buffy is such a Watcher-backtalker! Yeow! Loves it!

The first Big Bad is introduced already: a classic Nosferatu-type vampire called The Master. He is summoned with incantations from a pool of blood, of course.

Oh, there’s Angel. He looks so pale and young! I used to hate his guts, but now I kind of like him. So broody! Velvet jacket, though? They so did not have his wardrobe worked out, yet! Ooh, mysterious Angel, didn’t even tell Buffy his name, yet he gave her a cross necklace. What a dweeb.

I heart the Bronze! It’s the coolest ‘90s adolescent hangout ever. I wish this place existed in Joplin when I was a sophomore in high school! Oh, cute, Willow’s eating a box of raisins.

I wonder if they had a different wardrobe designer at the beginning, because everyone looks terrible. Willow’s bad nerd-dress, Buffy looks like a mom or a typical Christian character...was this how we dressed in 1996?

One thing I really love about Buffy is that I grew up with her. When the show started, she was a sophomore in high school and I would have been a freshman, I think...maybe I was in 8th grade, either way we were almost the same age throughout the series. Buffy, with its diversity and subtexty-parallels-to-real-life-themes, was a good influence on me in my adolescence like GaGa and Glee are to kids now.

I actually didn’t start watching Buffy until season three when Faith arrived. A boyfriend forced me to watch it and I was incredibly resistant, because I liked the movie and thought the show would be stupid, not unlike thousands of people over the years have assumed, and then later watched one episode and been totally hooked. I loved the show right away and watched it through the season. We lost the WB network on local TV after that year, so I missed seasons 4 and 5, rejoining season 6 when it aired late at night on UPN. It was a shocker at the beginning of the 6th season, *spoiler alert!* because I had no idea Willow was gay now or that Buffy was dead.

Ah, getting ahead of myself! So, the first episode gets a lot of the main details out of the way, like a good first ep should. I’m glad they didn’t name it “Pilot”. I hate that.

to be continued...

Commentary (by Joss Whedon) notes added 5.22.13: Joss says the mission statement of the whole show is that "nothing is at it seems". Unfortunately, usually that means the girls kick ass when you don't think they will. When Joss cast Willow he wanted to make sure he didn't cast the "supermodel in the horn-rimmed glasses" type and get an actual quirky girl. Glad he pushed for someone like Alyson Hanigan.

The decision to make the vampires be in and out of vamp face was because Joss wanted the "villains" to not always be obvious, but he wanted them to be seen as villains when B kills them. He made them "dust" because he didn't want the good guys to have to clean up the bodies and for it to be plausible for the vampires to remain unseen by the general population.