Interpretations:Buffy: Season 8

Interpretation from a Buffy Fanboy Perspective
Buffy Season 8 is actually the punchline of the piece. It opens with a blatant and brilliant tribute to the Chucky series of motion pictures, using the Cabbage Patch Kids as a humorous and perhaps obscure antithesis to what Chucky himself represented in the films. It should be pointed out that's Mark Hamill doing the voice of Chucky and not Brad Dourif but only serious vocal talent afficianadoes could tell the difference. Hamill was also the voice of Joker many times for the animated Batman series, and is a largely unsung talent, despite his early popularity with the Luke Skywalker role.

What better creatures to finally put an end to Chucky's rampage than the Cabbage Patch Kids? This is of course a completely redundant, superfluous, trendy, morbid, sadistic, absurd, and hilariously stupid end to a mutually redundant, superfluous, trendy, morbid, sadistic, absurd, and stupid film series, and then to top it off the creators of Robot Chicken follow through with what would happen if the Cabbage Patch Kids were in fact just as insane and sadistic and morbid as Chucky, which many parents have suspected anyway.

The punchline however would only truly make sense to people who watched the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. To further put it in perspective, one would have to have at least a trifle knowledge of the behind the scenes drama of that particular television series. Seth Green was a major supporting player in the second and third seasons of Buffy, and Sarah Michelle Gellar was its star. The two have remained friends throughout, but for reasons that had led to much speculation and uncertainty among the diehard Buffy fan community, Seth Green's character Oz the werewolf, was unsurreptitiously written out of the series. The general assumption was that Green wanted to be released from the series so he could persue his movie career. This led to his work on Austin Powers, Greg the Bunny and now Robot Chicken.

Gellar remained with the series throughout its seven year career, and after the sixth season both she and Buffy's creator, Joss Whedon announced a mutual agreement to make Season Seven the last Buffy season. Many critics and fans alike have in fact criticized the last two years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in terms of its writing, complaining that some aspects of it seemed redundant, superfluous, trendy, morbid, sadistic, absurd, and stupid.

So when a Buffy fan hears the voice of Sarah Michelle Gellar, after seeing Chucky get eaten by Cabbage Patch Kids, tell a friend that this is how Buffy Season Eight would have started had she not put a stop to Joss Whedon's mad rampage of redundant, superfluous, trendy, morbid, sadistic, absurd, and stupid storytelling, there's all kindsa layers of emotion there. This is not unlike the Saturday Night Live sketch when William Shatner told his adoring geeky fans to get a life, only the butt of the joke here is Joss Whedon, and perhaps indirectly, diehard fans of Buffy who actually wanted a season eight and have since theorized repeatedly in various forms of fan fiction what season eight of Buffy might have been like.

In the context of this sketch, and Gellar's willingness to participate in its production, Gellar's informal and unofficial response to those fans is essentially, "Believe me. You wouldn't have wanted a season eight. I saved you suckers from a fate worse than death. You should thank me and buy me a coke some time. But don't, cuz you're all adoring geeky fans who need to get a life and you smell funny too so stop looking at me." ...but I'm not bitter.

ZachsMind 09:59, 16 January 2007 (EST)