Buffy the Vampire Slayer (unaired pilot)

Welcome to my viewing diary for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eventually, I will cover the whole series; for now I am posting brief overviews of the film and the unaired pilot as prologues. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.

Story (created in 1996/written & directed by Joss Whedon): On a typically blue-sky Californian day in the mid-nineties, and this is very mid-nineties (or earlier, given the House of Pain needle-drop), Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) shows up for her first day at a new high school. And what a school, designed more like the Disneyland version of a Renaissance palazzo than your more usual boxy public building. All is cheery, sunny, and colorful - or at least it probably would be if this episode wasn't just available in washed-out bootleg quality online. The show, however, begins before this bright introduction, as one night a couple breaks into the school, trespassing in the auditorium before the young woman morphs into a vampire and kills Buffy's first victim. When the corpse falls out of a locker with two fang marks in his neck, Buffy realizes she can't escape her destiny: she's a slayer, as immediately recognized by the school librarian Rupert Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), clearly sent there in anticipation of her move, to be her handler. Buffy is more interested in being a typical teenager, but that's not in the cards - after rescuing her new friend Willow (Riff Regan) from a vampire encounter, she accepts that she's a slayer whether she wants to be or not.

My Response: 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the film

Welcome to my viewing diary for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eventually, I will cover the whole series; for now I am posting brief overviews of the film and the unaired pilot as prologues. I have never seen this series before so there will be NO spoilers.

Story (theatrical debut on July 31, 1992/written by Joss Whedon; directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui): The story begins, briefly, in the middle ages when we might expect to find vampires and vampire slayers, passing rituals down through the generations to fight the undead. But then, with a sharp shift even in the font of the graphics, we are in a mall with a bunch of Valley girls, pop rock blaring on the soundtrack. What could these two worlds have to do with each other? Buffy the Vampire Slayer very consciously sells itself as a high-concept mash-up, albeit a light-hearted one. It's right there in the title of course (a vampire slayer named Buffy??!) which the show retained, but it's also highlighted in the posters, which mix the iconography of vampires - specifically the deadly wooden stake which hasn't changed much over the centuries - with the fashion of early nineties Southern California high schoolers. And the film makes the most of these juxtapositions, contrasting its gothic action with the bright day-glo colors popular a quarter-century ago on the West Coast (at least its southern, non-grungey precincts). The characters are also studies in contrast. Buffy (Kristy Swanson), the materially spoiled but emotionally neglected daughter of a couple yuppie socialites, discovers she has incredible martial talents and powerful instincts. An initially creepy but ultimately harmless older man named Merrick (Donald Sutherland) awakens her to these latent skills, letting her know that he and she are inheritors of an ancient tradition, in which Watchers train Slayers to battle vampires. Eventually, she must survive on her own, with only the intermittent, occasionally feckless help of Pike (Luke Perry), a slacker whose best friend received the bite of immortality.

My response: