Ok so from the multiplicity of tests below, I have thoroughly proven my geekdom; but up until recently I never really like Buffy The Vampire Slayer (the series. The movie was a fluffy surrealistic pillow of fun). Or rather, I liked it; but I didn't have the almost universal geekish devotion to it.
I've always been a big Angel fan, but Buffy just never did it for me. I think a major reason for that was when Buffy premiered I was rather busy doing other things, and I didn't regularly watch TV during it's first couple of seasons. By the time I WAS regularly watching TV again, it was the middle of the series run, and I just hate starting in the middle of something. Angel on the other hand I got to watch much of the first couple seasons of; and I got into it fairly solidly.
Anyway the point is I never watched much Buffy.
Then I was mostly unemployed for several months...
Daytime TV REALLY sucks...
Buffy and Angel are played at least three times each on my local cablesystem every day (as opposed to Law and order, which is I believe playing in at least one of it's forms every hour or every day, sometimes several episodes at once)...
I think you can see where I'm going with this: I started watching Buffy out of sheer boredom.
As I said above, generally speaking I can't get into a serialized show, unless I can watch it in series order, and thankfully TNT decided to do jsut that; so I pretty much watched Buffy through the fifth and part of the sixth season; but for some reason the 7th season hasn't played in local syndication here yet (It's been three years, that's usually enough time so maybe I just missed it). I also missed the last few episodes of the sixth season before they restarted from day one again.
I had pretty much always planned on buying the full Buffy and Angel series on DVD eventually (along with a bunch of others. I LOVE TV series on DVD; best thing to happen to TV EVER. I'm not even going to START watching 24 until it's been cancelled, then I'm going to watch it all at once); but I was surfing t'other day looking for one of the buffy video games to steal; and I decided to download season six and seven instead (I couldn't find the game).
Anyway; theres a few reasons why Buffy has thoroughly grown on me, including lines like these:
Dawn and Anya are talking, neither has a real costume but Anya is wearing a striped pants set with the "Farrah Flip" hair-do...
Dawn: So what are you s'posed to be?
Anya: An Angel
Dawn: Oh. Sooo shouldn't you have wings?
Anya: Oh no, this is a special kind of Angel called a "Charlie". We don't have wings; we just skate around with perfect hair, fighting crime.
And then a few lines later Anya is speaking to Tara, who is Willows lesbian lover...
Anya: So how about you, ever played "shiver me timbers"
Tara: Umm, I'm not really much for the timber
Little lines like that just make me crack up. Anya has some of the best lines of the show, with the troika (Warren, Andrew, and Johnathan - the super geeky supervillian trio A.K.A the three stooges) coming in a close second.
I mean the dance of capitalist superiority alone is just...
A few minutes later in the same episode Giles watches Xander and Anya getting into a more than appropriately intense public display of affection, when he takes his glasses off and starts cleaning them
Buffy: Hey wait a second, is that why you're always cleaning your glasses? So you don't have to see what they're doing?
Giles (sotto voce): Tell no-one
And this is all in the first 10 minutes of one single episode.
Then, I watched the Buffy musical episode "Once more with feeling" and DAMN... I mean it just floored me. No I'm serious. It was one of the best pieces of storytelling I've ever seen in my life; easily equal to any hollywood or broadway musical. Hell even the music was good (which is not the case with all musicals).
Oh, and I'm speaking from the point of view of someone who loves musicals, and pop-opera like Gilbert and Sullivan. "The Music Man" is one of my favorite pieces of entertainment of all time (and Robert Preston never got 1/10th the recognition he deserved BTW); and I have been known to pop out with a random line from "The Mikado", Pinnafore, or Penzance (because I AM the very model of a modern major general).
I can't wait for Serenity to come out.
