I know Buffy The Vampire Slayer has been off the air for about a year, but I just got around to watching it for the first time. Now I'm completely hooked. What a great show! I've been feverishly renting the whole series (7 seasons, I think) through Netflix.

Any other Buffy fans out there, or did I just make an embarrassing confession?

Nope, watched once or twice, partly, while surfing.

Not a 'Buffy' fan, but I could watch Sarah Michelle Gellar all day !!!

yeah

You will require several years of therapy just for the shame and embarassment.

I'm laughing my ass off, SMan. I did the same thing. I used to be too embarassed to tell anyone, but my secret got out. I got hooked on the episode called Tabula Rasa where Willow casts a spell to make everyone forget who they are. I was a huge closet fan for about one year and then I caught up with all the past shows and watched the ending of the seventh season. Now I rarely watch. I used to hang around in Buffy forums to wait on spoilers of the next episodes. Yeah, it was bad. The fan base actually consists of more highly intelligent people than love-sick, goth, teenage girls. There are actually studies and conventions on the TV series. Some people take it very seriously. I saw it more as a skewed soap opera type addiction. Some people think there are several layers to the show and analyze everything. For example, some will argue that killing vampires is actually a metaphor for racism.

Check this out. Scholarly studies on Buffy...The Online International Journal of Buffy Studies


An exerpt from "'The Monsters Next Door': A Father-Son Dialogue about Buffy, Moral Panic, and Generational Differences."

by Henry Jenkins III and Henry G. Jenkins IV

"Writer Jane Espenson's powerful third season barbecuing of censorship politics, "Gingerbread" seems like a point by point laundry list of the major battles following Columbine: various well known civil cases, the Congressional hearings and national parental overreaction. Kids wind up dead and the concerned adult community chooses the entire Wiccan culture as a scapegoat for their aggressions -- burning books, searching lockers, shutting down the internet, locking their kids in their rooms and throwing away the key, the very same things I saw happening around me. But what amazes me is that the episode was in no way inspired by Columbine. "Gingerbread" was filmed over four months prior to the massacre. So how could she have so eloquently captured the voice of America's patronized youth?"

Interesting, no?

I read somewhere that some colleges offer courses in Comparative Buffy and I read on a message board also that a college in the UK offered Buffy as almost a collegiate minor or major. I'll look for a link tonight when I get home.

Many older people are obsessed with the show including my dad (probably not for intellectual reasons) and a few teachers and professors I've met. I remember my first sociology class my professor mentioned the show more than once.

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse...

Are these the intellectual discussions, that Biggins was referring to in another topic, that take place on a college campus?

<just kidding, Biggins!>

If you really want to analyze and pick apart the show, SMan, dig into some old archived posts here.

Because of your post, I got a nostalgic pang or two and had to go back and re-visit for a few minutes.

This made me laugh...

"So you're saying the show is a bold, avant-garde experiment in cinematic transgression: an uncompromising challenge to our position as mere consumers of narrative, de-centering its audience, refusing to interpellate us as stable subjects by removing the possibility of banal identification through the pacifying mechanism of sympathy, radically questioning our preconceptions about entertainment by refusing to entertain us, annoying us into a reconsideration and reconfiguration of our desire through an extended and repetitive confrontation with discomfiture?"

-from a poster on Buffyguide.com

They don't always write like that. They do it out of fun to get a laugh out of each other...in case you couldn't tell.

Ok, I'm done. My inner geek is now bound, gagged and stuffed to most remote regions of my mind again.

Since Buffy's long gone now, the newest intellectual topics are "The OC" and "William Hung 101." I plan to take both non-credit courses as soon as I return from France.

I'm getting out of this discussion. I've already ingested too many spoilers by looking at links like Heather provided. It's so hard to resist spoilers.

Now, excuse me, I think I just saw the mailman delivery the last few Buffy DVDs of season 2.

The sad thing is, I don't know if he's kidding or not!

I'm gonna start my own NIP/TUCK non-credit course...

After 4 months, about 150 episodes, and the loss of respect of several of my friends, I have now officially seen all the episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. My quest is over. Let the ridiculing commence.

On the contrary, I have a newfound respect. Any man who would not only watch them all, but admit it to his friends and the members of this board must be pretty secure in his manliness.

I guess SMan stands for SlayerMan.