RECAP
of the
Infamous Unaired Half-Hour Buffy PilotPage 3 of 4
By Jennifer Godwin (mail at jengod dot com)
P.S. Don't email in search of a copy of the pilot -- I shared my tape with a friend and I haven't seen it since!
Cut to a California-style courtyard, with a lawn, several palm trees and a handful of scurrying students. It's not a location I recognize from the canonical show. And there we see her, for the very first time, sitting on a bench, reading. The Wrong Willow. The Wrong Willow, of course, is what makes this the Infamous Unaired Pilot. Our beloved Alyson Hannigan is nowhere in sight and instead, in this bad wrong alternate universe called Berryman High, Willow is played by one Riff Regan. Did you ever see that show Sisters? It was about four sisters. Starred Sela Ward and Swoosie Kurtz, launched the career of Ashley Judd, featured George Clooney the season before he started ER, as a detective investigating the rape of Sela Ward's daughter -- is this ringing any bells? Well, Riff Regan's most famous role, other than that of The Wrong Willow in the Infamous Unaired Buffy Pilot, was as Young Georgie, the mousy younger version of the homebody sister played by Patricia Kalember. If you want to visualize her, Riff Regan has very pale skin, chipmunk cheeks, brown eyes, and curly brown hair cut to shoulder length, with the top pulled back into a half ponytail and a single tendril hanging down each side of her face. Anyway, she's not Aly, and it sucks.
Buffy freezes, and backs away. "That's not what I'm looking for." Her acting in this pilot is much more understated than in Welcome to the Hellmouth, and a lot closer to present day Buffy than to hyper-monkey First Season Valley Girl Buffy. "Are you sure?" "I'm way sure." "My mistake," says Giles, his tone sincerely apologetic and confused. "What was it that you wanted?" he asks tentatively, having put the Big Book of Vampires back beneath the desk, but Buffy's already out the door.
Cue melancholy montage matched with some kind of wacky jazz music. Orange-flavored Buffy is sad. Those durn vampires are everywhere. Buffy frowns her way through a class, probably aggravated by the wacky jazz, and after the bell rings, Wrong Willow approaches and offers to help her catch up. Buffy notes that history isn't her best subject. "I sort of lack a best subject." Does the history retardation bother anyone else? I mean, she's a Slayer. She comes from a multi-millenia-old tradition of vampire hunters, she kills centuries-old vampires, she hangs out with Giles all the time and she's never picked up the slightest interest in past events? It's non-sensical I tell you. Anyway, the Wrong Willow does her "I'm not worthy" routine, and it annoys, and Buffy and The Wrong Bad Very Wrong Willow talk as they walk, and exchange false compliments about each others' outfits. The camera moves in front of them and we discover for the first time that Riff Regan is short. Oh dear is she short. SMG is 5'2" on a good day, so Wrong Willow is maybe 4'11". Perhaps the first and most notable in long line of BtVS casting choices designed to disguise the fact that SMG is short. Aly used to be the same height, but grew a few inches. Seth Green is short to match Aly, and Veruca was midget to match with Oz. Buffy's various love interests, of course, are usually a foot or so taller than her, and she spends a lot of time looking up at them all doe-eyed and needy, but the Buffy's mismatched men is a whole other saga...
So, Meanwhile, back on the Infamous Unaired Pilot, the Wrong Willow is being humorlessly self-deprecating and Buffy's babbling on about Martha Stewart and Home Depot. Buffy also asks Wrong Willow about Giles, and she explains his provenance in the British Museum.
Cordelia interrupts and does her 'shoes are so important' routine which is Joss' primary way of illustrating DEEP AS A FRISBEE, and the Cordettes sheperd Buffy off, to go hang with the cool kids and their shoes. The Wrong Willow wrinkles her brow.
Locker room, two anonymous chatterbugs, bad dialogue with fake teen slang, Boy Toy falls out of a locker, he's dead, you've seen this all before.
Back in the quad at Torrance High, Xander returns the single picket of Buffy's really little fence, and gives her the rundown of the school cliques. Alicia Silverstone does the same routine in Clueless and this is much of the same, although without the hysterical and dead-on reference to the Persian Mafia of Beverly Hills. Berryman, it seems, lacks a significant Iranian immigrant population, but is populated with "housers -- genuine hard-core gangsters, except for the upper-class white guy stigma" and some kind of surfer inbreeds. Buffy pipes up that "things aren't that different on my side of the hill." In L.A, "the hill" refers the Santa Monica Mountains, which separate The Valley from the rest of the city. Buffy's comment suggests that in the original conception of the show Buffy didn't haul ass all the way up to Santa Barbara, but merely transferred within the L.A. school district, either to or from The [San Fernando] Valley.
Xander hands off the ID-the-clique work to Buffy. She nails the theater club and their expansive, melodramatic hand gestures, as well the film geeks, who find existential Freudian meaning in every movie, including the Muppets Take Manhattan, and the "dirty girls," who have have "views" on personal hygiene. Buffy wants to know what clique Xander is in. He says he's applied to a few, and been rejected by all, but he yet hasn't heard back from the "dirty girls." Wrong Willow lumbers up, and Xander volunteers that Buffy might be going to Bronze tonight. In the Berryman High alternate universe the gang's hangout will lack an article. It's Bronze. James Bronze.
Wrong Willow reports the extreme deadness of the guy in the locker. Cordelia waltzes up again and sneers "Don't you have an elsewhere to be?" Harmony alleges the deadness is the result of gang activity.
Buffy recognizes the giant bat signal in the sky, and says she's gotta book. She finds Principal Flutie outside the Women's Locker Room. "Bambi. Betty. Duuuh. Betty. Wilma?" Buffy reminds him of her name, and he apologizes for the tragedy. "I am so sorry about this, I know it's your first day. I just want to say... We almost never... We very seldom have dead kids stuffed in a locker. I have a strict policy about this. I know it's hard, certainly not the welcome I would have planned for you. I know you're upset, confused, you've probably got that thing like when you burp and you've got that vomiting taste in your mouth. I just want you to know that we're all here for you. If there's anything you need --" Can I look at the body?" Flutie gives her a funny look, but lets her check out Boy Toy's carcass. There aren't any police in sight, because this is the low-budget sample show, and sirens are expensive, so Buff waltzes in unaccompanied, finds the puncture wounds, and whines, "Oh, great."
Cut the library, as Buffy dashes through the door. Spotting Giles on the library's second floor balcony, she demands to know, "What's the sitch?" "I'm sorry?" says Giles. She explains about the dead guy in the locker, "It's the wierdest thing, he's got two little little holes in his neck, and all his blood's been drained." She climbs the spiral staircase, and asks, "Isn't that bizarre? Aren't you just going, oo-ooo?" Giles wants to know if Boy Toy will rise as a vampire, Buffy says he won't and Giles mutters that he was afraid of this. "Well I wasn't," says Buffy. "I was afraid that I was going to be behind in all my classes, that I wouldn't make any friends, that I would have last month's hair. I didn't think that there would be vampires on campus, and I don't care." Giles asks her why she's in the library then, if she doesn't care. "To tell you I don't care, which I have now told you." And, then, to prove she's supernatural to all those of you watching at home, she does a stunt jump off the balcony, backflipping onto the bannister of the staircase and then down to the floor. Because Slayers are too cool to walk down stairs.
Giles does the speech about the destiny and strength and skill, blah blah blah, Buffy scoffs, Giles is confused, and Buffy declares that she's moving on. Giles tells her there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in her philosophy, namely werewolves, zombies, ghouls, incubi, succubi and everything else "everything you've ever dreaded under your bed but told yourself couldn't be by the light of day." They do a Time-Life series free phone joke that falls flat, and Buffy insists again that she's retired. Giles explains his destiny is to be a Watcher and guide her. Referencing the movie, they briefly discuss the last guy that was sent to guide her, probably meaning Merrick, and note that he was killed. If you have not seen the movie, Buffy was played by Kristy Swanson and her watcher was played by Donald Sutherland. In Becoming, at the end of the show's second season, Buffy was called by Richard Riehle, this guy with a walrus mustache who wasn't Donald Sutherland.
Giles purports to know all about it, but Buffy says, "You don't know what it's like. I was happy. I was Cindy Lou Who coasting through my life when vampires, which are only supposed to be in cheesy movies, start killing people. People I know. And I find out I'm the Slayer, the only one in the world, and I gotta stop 'em. And I do. I train, I hunt, it becomes my whole life. I can do things no other kid can do. And actually, that's fairly lush, I'm kinda into that. So, I kill the vampires. Yay, me. And when it's all over, what's left? My grades are the suck, my social life has achieved leper stage, and I get thrown out of school for causing trouble. Not exactly a medal and a book deal, if you know what I mean." And then, laying out the central conflict in her life for the next three and a half years, she says she just wants to be like everybody else -- like anybody else. But, as Giles points out, she's not. Buffy kinda just wants to be a big conformist sheep, huh? Buffy grabs her fake transparent tortoiseshell purse and walks out in a huff. SMG's ass does look cute in that orange miniskirt.
"O-kaaay," says Xander, doing his cute eyebrow wiggle. He's been hiding in the stacks the entire time, unnoticed, and because he's overheard the whole Exposition Scene, he's now caught up the show's essential mythology.
Away! To the Bronze! The font on the sign is different that the one in the show. Just in case lettering is important to you. But it's still in a warehouse. And still only open at night. We also get a look at a "Dingoes Ate My Baby" poster which features three cute li'l cocker spaniel puppies and some showtimes.
Last updated: 22 November 2005.
Created: 15 August 2000.
Recap copyright © 2000-2005 Jennifer Godwin.
Unaired pilot copyright © 1996 Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, 20th Century Fox Television, the WB Network, Kuzui, et al.
Questions? mail at jengod dot com
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