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Naviga,ng the Buffyverse A Bibliographic Guide to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Angel, 1992-‐2010
McFarland Pub., 2011.
• a complete bibliography of two of the best-‐known television works of Joss Whedon
• one of a new wave of Hollywood screenwriters, directors, and producers
• achieved “cult” status over 20-‐year career • known for working in many different media, and mashing up many varied genres
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He had a concept…to take the stereotypical horror movie trope of the helpless blonde vic,m…
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and turn it on its head
The director butchered the script, and lost control of the actors. The result was nothing close to Whedon’s
vision… (also, Donald Sutherland was a jerk)
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The failure lead Whedon to toss out the “Buffy” concept, and he went on to other script work…
including Alien Resurrec8on
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An historic error
• But Fox had made an incredible mistake • They lea out the TV rights from the original movie contract…
• leaving Whedon with the TV rights to the characters.
• This NEVER happens, but it opened a window of opportunity…
• so Whedon put together a new show based on his old script
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Buffy lasted seven spectacular seasons (and another five for the spinoff Angel)
• Most cri,cs rate it as amongst the ten best television shows of all ,me…although its audience seldom reached 5 million viewers
• It had season and series-‐long story arcs that cap,vated viewers, and produced maybe 4 episodes that were unique….
• “Hush” told an en,re story in silence, with no dialogue (and won an Emmy)
• “One More, with Feeling” was a musical, a story told in song • “Restless” was told in dreamscape, and is so packed with symbolism
that it’s kept hundreds of Jungians gainfully employed • “The Wish” and “Doppelgangland” created a complete alternate
universe for the series…
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Fans went nuts…and so did academics and cri,cs. Books and ar,cles on the Buffyverse poured out in a flood,
including books on…
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More music… (there are only 2 books in existence about TV music…
both about music in Buffy)
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My Project…
• By 2006, there were hundreds of ar,cles, a flood of books, fandom run riot…
• So, I decided to try to corral all this incredible output into a bibliography
• Which has never been done before for a TV show
• So I had to make it up as I went along…
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Four tasks
• Set the criteria for what I collected • Find the material
• Organize it • Describe it
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Criteria This was cri,cal. I decided to collect….
• both academic and non-‐academic materials • the “primary” or licensed materials i.e. the original “texts” such as episodes, DVDs, scripts
• the “secondary” or unlicensed materials, which includes everything derived from those texts
• in all formats: print, video, & electronic
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Find it
• This was fun…I used every trick I’d picked up as a librarian, and then some.
• Databases, Ebay, Amazon, publishers’ catalogs, blogs, weird and strange backwaters of the Web
• “Google alerts” were a great tool • Used our Summit interlibrary loan a lot! • I used Delicious to keep track of my sources • hmp://www.delicious.com/waikowhai/buffyverse
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Organize it
• I found 5700 items…
• How to impose some sort of order on this amazing mass of informa,on?
• I realized it was a problem of taxonomy, which is the “classifica,on of things or concepts, and the principles underlying such a classifica,on”
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This part was fun…
• I ended up construc,ng a taxonomy of format, i.e. everything arranged by its underlying physical characteris,c
• And I ended up with 24 categories: from the movie at #1, TV episodes at #2, to Wikipedia ar,cles at #24
• The biggest categories by number of cita,ons were comic books (850), followed by fan magazines (680), academic essays (580), and journal ar,cles (400)
• The biggest by size were academic essays • The ,niest category: one musical score • The weirdest category…
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Lastly, describe it all…
• Otherwise known as annota,on… • This was a bit tedious…once you’ve read 500 essays on Jungian individua,on and Brech,an techniques, it gets too much
• I cut my annota,ons down a lot, and confined them to the academic materials
• Even so, I ended up with 260,000 words.
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And Mr. Whedon…he’s done a few things since… like make the world’s first web-‐only miniseries
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He made Firefly (TV) and Serenity (movie), two genre-‐
bus,ng “space Westerns” with their own legions of fans
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And the TV series Dollhouse, guest-‐directed Glee and The Office, and wrote about 30 comic books
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