The In Praise Of Buffy Thread.

[hepcat]

but we've been watching Buffy rather religiously over the past few months while waiting for Breaking Bad to return.

i did a doubletake when reading that and had to check tv.com. i didn't realize it was starting up so soon. can't wait for some more walt and the gang!

[Freezer-TPF-]

Breaking Bad is back in July? Awesome.

Buffy S6 is uneven but there is plenty of good stuff in there. Buffy S7 is a bit of a mess with less good stuff than S6 and some pretty bad stuff, but it's at least worth watching for completion, plus the good stuff that is in there is pretty good.

[Blackhawk]

The thing that throws season 7 off is the fact that it is one long story arc. Many of the individual episodes aren't even standalone in season 7. Like I said, it is wort watching to see how things pan out. There are some major changes to the universe that happen in chapter 7.

Oh, and Felicia Day is almost every episode.

[Skinypupy]

A few reasons reasons why Season 7 was my least favorite out of all of them. Keep in mind I originally posted these thoughts right after finishing the season. Granted, watching Angel helped smooth a few of these issues over, but without that context, there were some major plot holes/convenient events:

Spoiler:

- Never warmed up to the whole “army of whiny teenage girls” idea.  I half figured that Buffy's "ultimate plan" was to have them simply annoy The First to death.

- So the Scooby gang will follow Buffy unquestioningly through thick and thin for 7 years - no matter how bad the odds or how crazy the plan - yet they all decide to not only turn on her at the same time, but actually ask her to leave?   Ooooookay…  :saywhat:  Then when she shows back up, everything just automatically goes back to the way it was before.

-  I always found the Buffy/Spike relationship to be little more than creepy, even before the attempted rape.  Making him a “good guy” felt very forced, and while he and Buffy were great as enemies, they didn't have much chemistry as friends/lovers.  That said, seeing him go out a hero was pretty damn shiny.

- The only time Faith was interesting was when she was a bad guy.  Having her come back and try to play the “hero” just didn’t work at all. Her appearance seemed very sudden and seemed to throw off the group dynamic.  And once again, my god she is a terrible actress.

-  Didn’t like Willow’s new girlfriend at all.  Part of what made the relationship with Tara so cool was the obvious connection they had.  Kennedy just seemed far too macho and in-your-face for Willow, which made the entire relationship seem very out of character for her.

-  Maybe I missed something, but why was The First able to manifest itself as Buffy?  They were very emphatic that it could only mimic people who were dead, so that never made sense to me.  Also found it more than a bit silly that Buffy is on death's door after getting stabbed one moment, then leaping across the rooftops of buildings the next.

-  Convenient that the ultimate magic tchotchke in the universe just happens to show up right before the end to make everything go boom.

- Arya's death almost seemed like just an afterthought. "What should we do with her?". "Eh, let's just kill her off."

The two bright spots were Fillion as Caleb (how that guy isn’t a huge Hollywood star is beyond me) and Woodside as Principal Wood.  Otherwise, I thought it was a kinda disappointing way to end a truly fantastic show. 

[MonkeyFinger]

A comment on one item in your spoiler:

Spoiler:

"Maybe I missed something, but why was The First able to manifest itself as Buffy? They were very emphatic that it could only mimic people who were dead, so that never made sense to me."

Same reason why Faith was 'activated' - Buffy died. Twice, as she notes in Once More With Feeling. So not so much as dead but at least 'was dead' was enough for The First, it would seem.

[Smoove_B]

We're about halfway through season 6 now (just finished the Doublemeat Palace) and it's really been a struggle. I think part of the issue is the lack of a "big bad" which was such a driving issue for the previous five seasons. I can see where they are going plot-wise, but it's really dragging out. The wife has threatened to bail on the show and I too am struggling knowing there's still ~33 or so episodes to go in the series.

I have no idea whether or not it was intentional, but the whole "Buffy's friends were incredibly selfish in bringing her back and wanting her around" almost seems like a meta commentary on the show itself - returning from cancellation. Well, it's back and now we all have to live with what that means. Specifically, she's around but she's not exactly the same as she used to be.

[Freezer-TPF-]

S6 will get better again and have some more high points as you get towards the end of the season. Try to stick with it.

[Blackhawk]

Happy 20th anniversary, Scooby Gang!

[AWS260]

[AWS260]

This is depressing.

[MonkeyFinger]

Yeesh.

[Hamlet3145]

This is depressing.

Had to stop watching because it was making me mad.

[Freyland]

Can someone quickly summarize the badness? At work, can't watch.

[Unagi]

Done without any care.
Color is all off.
lighting is all off (some night scenes now look to be day, some sunset scenes no longer have sunset colors)
Special Effects are mostly just rescaled and take away from the feel.
New HD screen ratio cropping was done horribly and actually now includes camera men and microphone booms, or characters now on screen that originally weren't , who's lines are dubbed in and the actor isn't actually talking...


It's a hot mess.

[Blackhawk]

1. They went back to masters, but didn't reapply the filters. This changed all the colors, and did things like turning nighttime scenes into daylight scenes. In a show with vampires.

2. In order to get widescreen, instead of using the side matter in the masters, they regularly cropped the 4:3 into a widescreen resolution. They even cropped actual widescreen shots into super-zoomed shots. When they did use side matter, they did so in a way that sometimes showed the set, the soundstage, and even the film crew standing there, or added in stuff that was originally cropped out in order to add a line (resulting in characters talking without their mouths moving.)

[Max Peck]

Apparently this is old news. The Mary Sue was talking about it back in 2014.

Remastered HD Version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Is Full Of Problems (and Crew Members)

When Buffy first hit the airwaves in 1997, it was filmed in standard definition with a 4:3 aspect ratio. Nowadays many TV owners have 16:9 widescreen sets capable of much higher definition. So what do you do when you want to go back and rewatch those old shows—leave them in the correct aspect ratio and do what you can to improve the quality of the original film? No, in the case of 20th century Fox’s remastered version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you totally ruin them and make whatever the heck changes you want regardless of creator intent. Whee!

Sometimes it seems like there is no end to Fox's desire to fuck with Joss Whedon.

[Bakhtosh]

Still have the box set of DVDs - I'll just stick to them.

[YellowKing]

For you comic fans, there was a fantastic (and canon) run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics from Dark Horse that continued where the show left off.

Recently BOOM! Studios acquired the comic license and started a new series that basically modernizes the Scooby Gang to present times. It's strange to read because while the characters' likenesses are familiar from the TV show, this is definitely a "reinvention."

I'd highly recommend both to Buffy fans, though.

[Hipolito]

Thanks for posting that video. I'll be hanging on to my Buffy DVDs too.

Lately I've been noticing people on screen whose makeup seems too perfect. Now, having seeing that video, I wonder if it was because of digital noise reduction.

For you comic fans, there was a fantastic (and canon) run of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics from Dark Horse that continued where the show left off.

I've read seasons 8, 9 and 10 of the Dark Horse comics. Season 8 was amazing, and perfect for the comic book medium because it would be too crazy to televise. Seasons 9 and 10 I thought were just OK in comparison.

[gilraen]

Still have the box set of DVDs - I'll just stick to them.

Yep, this.

[Unagi]

bought!
Urban Outfitters is selling a limited lp of "Once More With Feeling" (the musical episode).





https://www.urbanoutfitters.com/shop/bu ... &color=066


Also apparently available on Mondo, but not sure if that is still a pre-order....

[Blackhawk]

Oh, Xander. How far you have fallen.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE' STAR
NICHOLAS BRENDON BUSTED IN INDIANA Over Prescription Drugs

It's his sixth arrest, and damn he looks awful (and a little methy.)

The only reason that I'm even bringing it up it that he was apparently at the grocery store getting the drugs while I was there shopping. I wouldn't have recognized him even if I'd seen him.

[coopasonic]

I hope my son, Xander, doesn't hear about this. But yeah, dude is totally unrecognizable.

[Smoove_B]

Wow. Wouldn't have recognized him at all. Quite sad; it's pretty clear how this is going to end.

[Sudy]

Uncle Brendy turns up at Blackhawk's for a Labour Day barbecue and they catch him rifling through the medicine cabinet?

[Daehawk]

Tom Lenk is nuts and talented.

163 Times Celebrity Outfits Were Hilariously Recreated By Former ‘Buffy’ Star Using Only Stuff He Found At Home

They are all worth a look.

[Blackhawk]

Ok, those are hilarious. And Tom Lenk was one of my favorite Buffy actors (he was Andrew from season 6 and 7.)

[Pyperkub]

Been re-watching Buffy on Amazon Prime streaming (for Halloween, and Beyond!), and I'm partway through s3 and I even got the itch to dig up my old xBox copy of the the game (it's a "lost episode" from early in s3, apparently), and I'm having a blast with it (it's not backwards compatible past the 360, but I still have that around for Rock Band: Beatles and a few other games).

Having so much fun that I bought the second xBox game Chaos Bleeds off of eBay, just so I could play it (heard it wasn't as good, but it's getting hard to find)...

[Blackhawk]

Consider the extra seasons that Joss Whedon wrote after Season 7 - they were published as comics, and were very well received. It's available in omnibus format. It went all of the way to season 12, and is all considered canon.

They did the same thing with Angel.

[Pyperkub]

So yeah, I think maybe back in the Gone Gold days, I posted a thread shortly after the dvd release of Buffy Season 1, saying "Hey, this is pretty good, I *get* this show now."

Yeah, maybe not. I managed to get through the end of the 12-episode first season, and then moved on. I think I intended at some point to watch further adventures of Buffy, but the more I looked back on the show, the more I became convinced that it probably wasn't as good as my initial impresssions.

So, about three weeks ago, I started watching season one again. There's definitely some good things going on, but also a lot of not so good things. It's uneven. I'll leave it at that.

And so iTunes and Amazon have the entire season 2 available for digital download now, so I decided to take a chance. The first episode of season 2 is kinda "meh". It takes a little time for season 2 to find it's bearings....

...and then it sorta explodes into one of the best single seasons of television I've seen. Holy hell, NOW I GET IT!

The interaction between Buffy and Angel might be enough. The romantic interaction between the various team members (trying not to be too spoiler-y here) is awesome.

But really, what makes Season 2 (and hopefully Season 3, which I start on when I get home, thanks to the DVD's arriving via Amazon this afternoon) go way, way, way beyond the first season is the quality of the villains. Spike and Drusilla are simply the real folk blues, baby. "The Master" of season one was a laughably unworthy foe for Buffy and friends. He was an inept idiot. "The Anointed One" wasn't much better. Ooh, scary. Little kid in sneakers.

Spike and Drusilla though? They're the anti-Buffy, just as clever and driven as she is, as mean-spirited and evil as she is good. The final episode when Spike explains why he actually *likes* the world and doesn't want to destroy it is so pragmatically beyond evil that it made me think "yeah, if I was a vampire, that's exactly how I'd be too...."

Anyway, if you haven't yet discovered the wonderfulness of Buffy, or if like me you stupidly only watched the first season, do yourself a favor: get going on season 2. It's rare to see a show get so many things right all at the same time.

Happy 25th Anniversary Buffy!

"25 years ago today I had the honor to introduce the world to my version of Buffy Anne Summers. It was an uphill battle," she captioned the image. "A mid season replacement, on a new network based on a movie, that was by no means a giant success."

[Kraken]

Wife and I are watching Buffy and Angel in their entirety again, and it still holds up pretty well. As you said, S1 is weak and S2 takes some time to find its footing. This being the era of 22-episode seasons, there are too many freak-of-the-week episodes, some of them just awful (like the notorious "Beer bad!" episode). But Joss Whedon was a master at writing characters and dialog, and they're still enjoyable today.

[Blackhawk]

Wife and I are watching Buffy and Angel in their entirety again, and it still holds up pretty well. As you said, S1 is weak and S2 takes some time to find its footing. This being the era of 22-episode seasons, there are too many freak-of-the-week episodes, some of them just awful (like the notorious "Beer bad!" episode). But Joss Whedon was a master at writing characters and dialog, and they're still enjoyable today.

Demon in the internet.
Preying mantis teacher.
Hyena people.

Ugh.

And yet one of my favorite series of all time.

[Pyperkub]

Wife and I are watching Buffy and Angel in their entirety again, and it still holds up pretty well. As you said, S1 is weak and S2 takes some time to find its footing. This being the era of 22-episode seasons, there are too many freak-of-the-week episodes, some of them just awful (like the notorious "Beer bad!" episode). But Joss Whedon was a master at writing characters and dialog, and they're still enjoyable today.

Yeah, for Halloween last year, I started re-watching the series, as well as (re) playing the original xBox Buffy game that I never finished (and finished it, with game 2 - Chaos Bleeds queued up for sometime in the future), and diving back in was a joy. Buffy, Angel, Giles and the Scoobies are all so great, and when Spike/Drusilla show up and replace "The Annoying One" (as Spike so awesomely puts it), it really gets fun. I did stop partway through s3, as the 1st Game takes place then (around ep 7/8), as the equivalent of a lost episode (or episode arc, given how it's rather longer than an episode).

[Bakhtosh]

Hyena people.

What? "The Pack" is a great episode.

Also, was reading back through the thread where someone was asking Why Fillion wasn't a big star. Glad he got his series.

[Blackhawk]

I didn't look up the reference, but Fillion had his own show first. Firefly was before Buffy season 7. You can tell when Firefly got canceled when all the stars began showing up in Buffy and Angel.

[Max Peck]

I presume that "got his series" refers to Castle rather than Firefly.

[Bakhtosh]

Yeah. Castle ran for 8 seasons. That, and he does a lot of voice work.

[Isgrimnur]

[Pyperkub]

Yeah. Castle ran for 8 seasons. That, and he does a lot of voice work.

And his ABC show "The Rookie" is still running.

[Baroquen]

Yeah. Castle ran for 8 seasons. That, and he does a lot of voice work.

And his ABC show "The Rookie" is still running.

Still running and has an early renewal for the 5th season aleady.