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Post by Karen on Dec 6, 2005 19:41:06 GMT -5
online.tvguide.com/special/holidayguide2005/frosty-favorites.aspBuffy the Vampire Slayer (Season 3, "Amends") Not your typical holiday fare, but this touching episode highlights the tormented relationship of Buffy and Angel while bringing in the haunting ghostly themes from stories like A Christmas Carol. As the holidays approach and Buffy and her pals plan their celebrations, Angel is being plagued by nightmares and visions of Jenny Calendar (or a possessed version of her), whom he killed the previous year. Convinced that he will never be able to escape his demon side and that he'll always be a danger to those he cares about, the vampire with a soul heads to a mountain to commit suicide (of sorts) by sunlight. Buffy vainly tries to convince him that he is worthy of staying alive, but he refuses to budge as daybreak nears. But miraculously, it begins to snow for the first time ever in Sunnydale, providing a sun-free Christmas and extending Angel's existence on earth.
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Post by Sara on Feb 26, 2007 9:28:25 GMT -5
From the NY Times. February 25, 2006
Sing Out, Buffy!
By Beth Schwartzapfel Published: February 25, 2007
THE lights had just dimmed when a young woman wearing a flowered dress made her way along the first row of seats of a theater at the IFC Film Center in the West Village with a pile of dry cleaning in her arms. “Do you want to dance on stage with us during the ‘They Got the Mustard Out’ song?” the woman whispered to members of the audience as she handed out freshly laundered shirts.
“They Got the Mustard Out,” a little number about the joy of having a competent dry cleaner, is not part of a new musical about the daily grind of living in New York. On the contrary, it is part of a sing-along inspired by “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the cult television show about a tough young blonde who, along with her nerdy friends, fights demons and vampires in Sunnydale, Calif., her fictional hometown.
With a tip of the hat to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” which set the bar for audience-participatory midnight screenings, the sing-along is based on “Once More With Feeling,” a musical episode from the show’s sixth season. The event is the brainchild of Clinton McClung, a 36-year-old film programmer who lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and whose preference for sweater vests and tweed jackets makes him a natural for the role of Buffy’s bookish “watcher,” Rupert Giles.
Mr. McClung created the sing-along in 2004 when he worked at the Coolidge Corner Theater near Boston and brought the show to New York when he moved here last summer. Ever since, this “Rocky Horror Picture Show” for the postmodern set has been gaining steam, with the February rendition marking the fifth monthly, over-the-top, costumed, live-cast, sold-out, audience-interactive midnight performance.
“It’s all for the love of Buffy right now,” Mr. McClung says. But the sing-along has fast become his (mostly unpaid) full-time job, and as word spreads, he is ushering it onto stages around the country. The show has played in Huntington on Long Island, Chicago, Tucson, Pittsburgh and Austin. Mr. McClung, who said he has a licensing agreement with the distributor of the television program, is planning a national tour this summer.
What audiences around the country will see is the sort of thing that took place at midnight last weekend, when 200 people braved 10-degree weather in a line that snaked two blocks down the Avenue of the Americas, waiting for the theater to open.
Nerina Garcia, a psychology graduate student at Fordham University who described herself as “in love with ‘Buffy,’ ” was huddled in line with her boyfriend. “If you really analyze each episode, it’s not just superficial,” she said. “Every time I watch it, there’s something deeper.”
Each guest received a red plastic goody bag filled with bubble soap, vampire teeth, party poppers shaped like champagne bottles, and a rule sheet. The first rule: sing along. Others included shouting “Shut up, Dawn!” in response to the comments of Buffy’s clueless younger sister, played by a 23-year-old business analyst named Meghan Wherrity. The bubbles were for use during a ballet number — “to give it a Lawrence Welk feel,” Mr. McClung explained. The champagne poppers were to be popped at the “ahem, climax” of a love song.
After a round of “Buffy Jeopardy,” the room went dark. In this episode, a musical demon causes the residents of Sunnydale to sing and dance their secrets, sadness and joys. As the intricately choreographed numbers played on the big screen, a ragtag and goofy approximation of the show proceeded on stage below. The audience responded by singing, shouting lines along with and at the characters, waving lighters, and making a wave with their goody bags during a number called “Walk Through the Fire.”
At evening’s end, fans trickled reluctantly back into the cold. Among them was Joy Abella, a 33-year-old advertising account supervisor. The next day, Ms. Abella said, “I called my sister up, and I said, ‘Sheer genius.’ ”
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Post by Sara on Mar 20, 2007 10:30:37 GMT -5
If anyone's interested, an excellent article about Buffy, Angel, narrative structure and endings can be found here.A sampling: See, look:
When Buffy and Angel broke up right before the prom, the fans didn't all turn off the TV. No one wanted them to split up, and probably few fans were self-deluding or cynical enough to think that they'd get back together. But fans love the moment of their breakup, and that episode. Why? We enjoy hardship as long as it's happening to an avatar. One curious feature of narratives is that they push us to enjoy things we don't want. That's a crucial paradox of fandom: fans are distinguished by the specificity and intensity of what they want from the text, but are most rabid about shows that demand a form of masochism from them. You can turn immediately from wondering 'Will they ever get together?' to wanting to see the breakup scene again. And here is where structural integrity comes into things: the Buffy/Angel love story (for instance) was doomed from the start. Had it not been doomed - the 'great forbidden love of all time' and all that - then the writers of Buffy would've had to put imperil it to generate narrative tension anyhow. The threat has to be real. The way to show the threat is real is for it to come true. That's why I can't care at all about, say, old Star Trek episodes: there's absolutely no chance that anything will change. The show is offering a different satisfaction: it's a comedy. (And we're not really talking about comedy here.)
Authors are readers, and authors desire order and satisfaction as well. But the job of an author is to suspend satisfaction, that is, to sustain the reader's desire so she'll finish the story. Therefore the author's discipline is to resist the narrative path-of-least-resistance - in simple terms, to put off the happy ending. In order to balance security and risk/conflict, the author plays on generic expectations, so that the reader is simultaneously reassured (by the appearance of familiar tropes and structure) and challenged (by some appearance of newness - the fiction that this time it might be different).
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Post by Sara on Jul 16, 2007 8:49:41 GMT -5
A nice little article that appeared in yesterday's NY Daily News: Buffy is Back.A new comic book revives a favorite slayer BY ETHAN SACKS Sunday, July 15th 2007, 4:00 AM Those fans of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" who didn't know the character is still kicking pointy teeth in four years after the series finale shouldn't feel bad. Creator Joss Whedon hasn't even told Sarah Michelle Gellar or the rest of the cast about the new comic series that picks up where season seven of the hit television show ended. "I have not told them," says the 43-year-old Whedon. "I can tell you right now what everyone's reaction would be: 'My nose doesn't look like that!'" What the actors have been missing in Dark Horse Comics' "Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8" is the first four issues of a planned 40-issue run. The story, drawn by artist Georges Jeanty, pits the titular heroine against an army of zombies and a military of a more traditional kind. Issue No. 5 goes on sale Aug. 1. After a series of frustrations in Hollywood - including the cancellation of a television series, "Firefly," his abrupt divorce from Warner Bros.' "Wonder Woman" movie, which he was slated to write and direct, and the slow development of "Goners," a supernatural thriller - Whedon said he needed an escape to the four-panel world of comic books. Whedon has been working in the medium for the past few years. Scoring a gig writing Marvel Comics' "Astonishing X-Men" was a particular "nerdgasm," he explains. "It's like a weekend at a spa," says Whedon, comparing the comic book industry to Hollywood. "You have a creative concept and instead of going through an endless array of suits to realize it," he says, "instead of spending millions of dollars of someone else's money to realize it - which is why the suits come along - you give it to an artist." There are other perks. Whedon turned Buffy's sister Dawn Summers into a 50-foot giant, which would have blown an entire season's worth of special effects budget in real, and reel, life. "It gives us enormous freedom, particularly because our show was never terribly expensive," said Whedon. "There was just a limit on where our imaginations could go." And while Gellar and company may not be rushing out to get the next issue, plenty of others are, said Mark Friedman, owner of Cosmic Comics in midtown Manhattan. "We're selling out every month," said Friedman. "My usual customers are buying them, but we're also getting lots of new people, [mainly] women." All the more reason for Whedon to dust off his favorite female warrior and give the medium's dominant muscle-bound supermen a run for their money. "I realized that there were lots of fun things I could do," says Whedon, "and with the exhaustion of seven seasons now passed, I see there was no reason we didn't have an eighth other than the physical grind of it."
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