Wednesday, March 12, 2008 at 9:32 AM Jose just returned the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer after at least 18 months. We thought we'd lost it somehow. Jose incidentally just came back from his honeymoon with Honganh in South America. He says there were a lot of vampires in Brazil but when you get them into your hotel room some of them turn out to be werewolves. Never can tell with Brazilian vampires; I've had the same problem in Thailand.
Anyway, I popped the first disc in yesterday and was once again winded by how good Sarah Gellar looks. Or, rather, looked, since she is kind of haggardly and gross now. She had this chubby little face, nice hair, a slew of cool earrings, short skirts and a chunky enough ass to make that work. Plus ASH was with her a lot so that makes everything more sexual.
So I'm thinking. How did she get so plain so quickly? When the show first premiered in Australia in December 1997 I read an article that introduced Sarah Gellar to the readers and said she was born in 1970. All of the other articles that appeared in the ensuing months and years said 1977.
So she's lying about her age. That makes much more sense. Really hot at 27, looking mid 30s by the time the show ended. Otherwise she was really hot at 20 and looking mid 30s at 27. I hear that working on a television series in the US is really hard work. The hours are really long, sometimes 20 hours, 6 days a week. Maybe that's an exaggeration but I know this: when Sarah Gellar started Buffy she was fresh faced and healthy chubby. Within 3 years she was looking thin and tired. Perhaps lack of sleep and the inability to relax, have home cooked meals, etc made her lose the weight.
But whatever made her lose it, she certainly didn't look any better. She went from gorgeous to ordinary when she got thin. The only other thing, and it ties in to the other two points, is that time and effort wear everything down. In the first season Buffy had unrealistically stylish clothes, hair, jewellery and sunglasses every episode. By the time she was battling that coven of nerds or whatever around season 6 it was like they'd just shoved her onto the set after 20 minutes with wardrobe and makeup. It showed in the performance too, a more subtle thing that nevertheless had a profound effect on her attractivness.
Season 1, she's trying to capture people's attention. Her eyes sparkle, she's alive in every scene, she makes Buffy the fun snowball show that became so big and destructively cold in later years.
Season 7, it seems she's barely bothered to learn her lines. She's sick of the show, there's movies to make. It's hard to tell how good she is as an actress because she got so much worse every season of Buffy. Anyway, after jacking it (metaphysically) to the special features and getting almost depressed about the decade since the show first came on (oh the freshness, oh the exciting painful everything nothing!) I didn't actually watch any episodes. It's just too much.
The music, romance, excitement, and how quickly it all fades away. I guess it makes sense that shallow evaporates quickly. Girls shouldn't lie about their age, think it's awesome to be thin as a motherfucker, or work hard?
Hmm. postscript: i worry about committed Buffy fans. I have a feeling they are soft in the head. —MajandraFan | 
