Being a massive Buffy fan, I can't say - from the opposite perspective - that I saw anything particularly "Buffy" about it either.Zoot wrote:Well, having never watched Buffy, I didn't know who the heck he was anyway, but thought that he was appropriately vie and nasty.HGFB wrote:If the episode didn't have Anthony Head in it nobody at all would be making Buffy comments.
Other than, of course, Anthony Head.
But, even there, Anthony Head in Buffy is a good guy, Buffy's watcher, a book nerd librarian, geeky, shy, always thoughtful...
None of this is describing his character in the Doctor Who episode, is it?
The fact that the aliens were bat-like?
Well, someone wasn't paying when watching Buffy. Buffy vampires are slightly modified from the vampire legends (probably to keep the special effects budget down, as well as to avoid plot hole like "why didn't they vampire just turn into a bat and fly away when Buffy tried to slay him?" which you can avoid in a one-off movie but a long-running series has to make sure that the basic premise is sound. If they could always fly away then this would make can't-fly Buffy a rather shite opponent. She pulls out a stake? Turn into a bat and fuck off. It had to be changed for the TV series or it wouldn't have worked. Similarly, Buffy vampires can retract their fangs and look human. Another modification to the vampire legends, in order to allow some more interesting storylines and save shitloads of money on make-up effects that all the vampires "relax" in "human mode" that you don't need to have face make-up all the time).
Mickey as Xander as the "tin dog"? Oh, come on, as if Buffy and Doctor Who are the only series with a "tin dog" regular character.
Plus, Xander isn't really a "tin dog" in Buffy. He's always involved and joins in with most of the battles and is an integral part of the "Scooby Gang" (Joss Whedon openly admits his influences - such as the geeky joke when Willow went evil that "she's gone all Dark Phoenix" (if you don't know the reference then you will get it once you see X-Men III) - or calling them the "Scooby Gang" but why isn't anyone pointing accusative fingers at Mr.Whedon for the odd bit of plagarism?).
The play with Xander is exactly that he is always involved, despite being a normal powerless and pathetic human being, surrounded by vampire slayers and powerful wicca and vengence demons. There's also a clear play - make clear as crystal throughout Buffy - on messing around with gender stereotypes. So all the powerful characters with magic powers are female, while Xander and Giles are boring powerless humans.
From start to finish, Buffy was a blatant and unashamed exercise in gynephilia (polar opposite of misogyny), as the final episode rammed home with a sledgehammer.
Xander was not "the tin dog" but rather the character that this was played off - boring normal human male, does a boring normal job - to emphasise the extraordinary nature of the female characters ("juxtaposed contrast") and to also do the whole "de-masculinised male" thing (though Oz played that part too when Willow turned all lesbiana on him. Though I never liked the overly feminine lesbian relationship there - I mean, I like overly feminine and lesbians personally but not in the series's context - because it seemed too "lipstick lesbian" to avoid offending the audience with lesbianism and the series had otherwise avoided stereotypes like the plague: In fact, the series made a sport out of mocking and turning stereotypes on its head).
I don't see any obvious plagarism from Buffy here.
It's probably just a subconscious "force fitting" thing because, like me, you always automatically call Anthony Head "Giles" every time you see him on the TV (even though, fair play to him, there's actually no similarity in the "Gold Blend man", Giles, the Prime Minister on Little Britain, that old bloke he played on some show I only watched half an episode of and can't remember its name and the alien in this episode. They are quite different characters and he plays them all convincingly. It's just a case of when you've seen someone play a character so long, you can't switch it off. I mean, Ross Kemp is always "Grant" whenever I see him on any of those never-ending stream of ITV series he did, which all seemed to be about soliders somehow).
Anyway, not enough black, dark lighting and "gothic look" to be Buffy.
