O
Old Master
Guest
**from an article interviewing Joss in July**
Buffy: The Animated Series
by Ed Gross
Article appeared in SFX, July 2003
Joss Whedon tells Ed Gross about the show that never was... Cartoon Buffy!
Have you ever seen one of those guys out on the streets, hands held out, looking for a little bit of spare cash? Some of you might stop for a moment to give that person a helping hand, others may avoid eye contact and keep on walking. Well, imagine the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with his hands held out, only in his case there's a bag of money in each hand. Yet no-one makes eye contact and everyone keeps walking...
That's pretty much the response Joss Whedon has received with Buffy: The animated Series, the proposed television show that would take the characters from the recently-concluded live-action series and feature them back in high school during their freshman year. With scripts written by Whedon, other members of the Buffy writing staff and comic book scribe Jeph Loeb, who's currently working on Smallville, such a show would seem like a dead cert for success.
"It's Buffy Animated," Whedon says, still with some disbelief. "What more do I need to explain here? People are just, like, 'We're not doing that sort of thing, we have a different agenda,' and I'm wondering if I missed the memo where this wasn't a cash cow. Nobody seems to want it and it blows my mind."
There had been some talks of the Showtime cable network acquiring the show, but that fell through as well. "They were interested," he explains, "but they wouldn't do it without Sarah [Michelle Gellar] and Sarah wasn't involved. We had Jeph Loeb, Film Roman and scripts by the Buffy writers - so I give up trying to figure out what people want."
What Whedon wanted to do was use Buffy Animated to do the stories and jokes that the staff only shared in the writing room; things that were so silly, post-modern or free-associative that they could never have been done in the live action show. "That one step beyond," he muses. "Kind of like when [in the episode "Fear, Itself"] the fear demon turned out to be really tiny and Buffy stepped on it. That's about as far in the direction of that humour we ever went. But with the animated series, there was a chance, while being cool, scary and empowered, to be whimsical and have fun."
One of the earliest examples Whedon gives has to do with Xander imagining that he's gotten his driver's license for the first time. In Xander's imagination he would have had a jalopy with Buffy and Cordelia sitting in the car with him like trophies.
"The approach would have been very simple," Whedon explains. "A return to adolescence and year one, which would have been very freeing and a completely different kind of fun than the live action show."
Had the series gone into production, the idea was that the show would essentially stay locked in freshman year forever. Remember the early days, with "creatures of the week" and quirky bad guys?
"Eventually we would have introduced Oz and let Buffy and Angel at least snuggle, but it pretty much would have been year one forever and should be," Whedon notes. "It has a simple mandate: Willow love Xander, Xander love Buffy and Buffy have bantering and strangely attractive relationship with that annoying good vampire. It's funny, but we actually didn't find Angel that much in the early stories. The fact of the matter is, Angel is a cool character, but this is really about high school and so Angel is someone who would have been recurring, but not necessarily in every episode. Which was actually the case in the first season of the live show. There are some stories where he doesn't have a place."
Ironically, this approach would have flown right in the face of the serialisation of both Buffy and its spin-off, Angel, which has thrived on the evolution of its stories and its characters. Animation, Whedon emphasises, doesn't allow for the same sort of serialisation, as one would never know when the episodes were being shown. "One of the things we were warned about," reflects the creator, "is that episode 13 may air first, for example. You can't really control that. If you want to introduce a change, it's a big deal. When the characters graduated from high school, I got all choked up and said, 'But, wait, there are more stories. I have not told them all.' So that opportunity was a well to draw from forever."
The relationships, as he imagined it, could have been fluid within the context of the episodes themselves. One example would be Cordelia being friendly in one episode, and bitchy in the next. "One of the points of the show was that even though things may look like they're set in a certain way, some days your best friend is your worst enemy. There would have been plenty of opportunity, plus we could change reality whenever we wanted to."
One of the appeals of Buffy Animated was the chance to do the types of shows that the budget of the live action series would not allow him to do. "'Teenie Buffy' is the first script that Jane Espenson turned in," says Whedon. "Basically it's The Incredible Shrinking Buffy, which is something we could never have done. It's just delightful to think about.
"This would definitely not have been Scooby-Doo," Whedon says, finally. "I can't stress that enough." ~~