Defining The 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer' Effect

It is my hope that this column will sit in the archives of our site, and at some point in the future, will have a reader stumble across it trying to find out where this term came from, and will then write a Wikipedia entry describing it, so that I never, ever have to explain it again.

Not that I don't like to explain it ... it's just not an easy thing to describe.

So, what am I talking about here, four paragraphs later? It's a little something I call the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer Effect," or "Buffy Syndrome" for short. It was something I came up with some time back to describe how viewers can take entirely the wrong mindset into a television show or movie based on nothing more than the name. I use the Joss Whedon series "Buffy" as an example because it describes how I allowed nothing more than a name to rob me of months and almost years of television viewing pleasure, simply because I had the wrong mindset.

Let me explain this without all the babbling. In 1992, when I was just a sophomore in high school, Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry starred in this little Twentieth Century Fox movie called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." For me, watching the previews was more than enough to convince me that this was a "wait for the video" type of movie, and even when I did put it in my VHS some months later, it killed me to watch it, and I didn't even need a star quarterback-turned-vampire to do it.

Apparently, I wasn't alone in my dislike for the film, because it grossed a grand total of $16 million at the box office, and was pretty much one of the many forgotten duds of 1992.

You could imagine my surprise when, five years later, The WB thought it would be a hoot to cash in on the "success" of the "Buffy" movie and bring us a television series. When I first read about "Buffy" in the trades, I started laughing, and I think I even commented to a friend or two about how desperate The WB must be if they dug into the movie vaults and that was the only thing they could find.

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