Thursday, August 30, 2007

WE AVERTED THE APOCALYPSE, POINTS FOR THAT: Given the generally positive response to the idea, let's begin with our first installment of "Blogging Buffy," which is to deal with "Welcome To The Hellmouth/The Harvest," the show's two part pilot. A few thoughts:
  • Given how post-modern a lot of Whedon's stuff has been, it's a little bizarre how much monologuing we get from characters. Rather than having the vampires just attack Buffy when she barges in, Buffy is allowed to deliver a monologue about her Slayerdom. It's a sharp contrast to his later, more taciturn, heroes. (Mal Reynolds can talk, but he's more likely to shoot first, ask questions later.) Admittedly, this is subverted when Buffy, a few moments later, gets knocked down by the vampire while monologuing, but still.
  • Maybe it's because Whedon didn't direct the pilot, but contrast the somewhat clunky fight scenes here with the glorious fight choreography in Serenity, and you see how much Whedon's grown.
  • It's an interesting contrast between this and the Firefly pilot, where (at least in the original two-hour pilot), we're dealing with more than half the characters, including our leads, who already know one another and have a web of relationships that we come into blind. Here, while some of the characters have relationships with one another, there's not a pre-linkage bringing all of them together.
  • I don't know if the music on the DVD's is the original, but a lot of the music reads way too "WB" for the show's own good. Similarly, the concept of "The Bronze" seems to be a network way of working in musical performances and pop musical a la Dawson's Creek.
  • While the makeup effects on the vampire actors are really good, the "transformation" effects and the intercutting are sloppy, at least by today's standards.
  • Wow, Alyson Hannigan is given a series of rather hideous outfits throughout the pilot.
  • The Cordelia material here makes Cordelia a not particularly interesting (much less likable) character, and interestingly anticipates Regina George in Mean Girls.
  • The Angel plotline is obviously spoiled for me, but I can see how effective the eventual reveal must have been when the time came.

Thoughts? Comments? Stuff I should look forward to? That's what the comments are for.

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