Unfettered Brilliance: "Into every generation a Slayer is born . . ."

Thursday, January 6, 2011

"Into every generation a Slayer is born . . ."

. . . you know the rest. "One girl in all the world, a Chosen One. One born with the strength and skill to fight the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers.” Thus began the saga of Buffy Summers, who pretty much began my own journey into the in-depth investigation of the ways in which popular culture matters in the wider world. (A lot of that fire was really lit by Firefly, but Buffy can be said to have built the bonfire.)

It's an amazing show. Really. You must, of course, get past the deliberately silly-sounding title but once you do - ohhhh, your rewards will be vast and your interest will be compounded!

It's a show worthy of a rewatch, and the lovely and talented (albeit perkily Canadian) Nikki Stafford has begun the Great Buffy Rewatch of 2011. Gather around, children. It promises to be an epic tale, full of true love and high adventure. (OK, so I'm ripping off The Princess Bride with that line. Whatever advances the story.) She lined up a most impressive cast of rogues and sharp dealers to chime in with their thoughts and the plan is to post a new installment on Tuesday, which was always "Buffy night" when the show was airing. Each installment will usually cover three episodes (the writer might choose to focus on one of the three more than others - dealer's choice rules), although a couple will be "stand-alones."

I'll keep you posted.

Also, I'll be using this blog to comment on my soon-to-begin film course this semester. Yes, Gentle Readers, several years of hard work and much conferencing has borne fruit. (Hopefully not figs. I don't like those much. Especially the leaves.) I'm teaching an introductory film course this semester which focuses on science fiction films and I intend to use this blog to comment and (hopefully) get some comments in return. Please feel free to leave comments, but be warned that this is a moderated board. I don't censor, but I do refuse to post obvious links to selling sites or scams. It's my blog; I get to set the rules.

So come for the Slayer, stay for the rayguns!

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Unfettered Brilliance by K. Dale Koontz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Points of Interest

Lurker's Guide - Excellent fan-run resource guide for Babylon 5

Breaking Bad - The official AMC site for news and recaps about the best show on television

Mockingbird's Nest - What I do outside of my day job

Ensley Guffey's Blog - Musings and links worth noticing

Nik At Night's Blog - Most things TV, including the 2011 Rewatch

TV Tropes - What you've seen, over and over and why it matters

Slayage - Whedon given the scholarly treatment

Whedonesque - Clearinghouse of all things Whedon

BuffyWorld - Shooting scripts, screenshots, and more

Who?

K. Dale Koontz may have watched too much television as a child. She learned to count via Sesame Street and first learned that genres could cross-pollinate through M*A*S*H. When she discovered Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the die was cast. In 2008, McFarland published her book Faith and Choice in the Work of Joss Whedon which focused on themes such as redemption, choice, and consequences in Whedon's work up to that point. (She's fairly sure Volume 2 could be written to include Dr. Horrible, Dollhouse, and The Avengers.) She is a founding member of the Whedon Studies Association (a great group of people, but don't mention Twilight. Just sayin'). She has presented original work on the Rossum Corporation in Dollhouse, Kitty Pryde, and Japanese anime. In 2014, she and co-author Ensley F. Guffey worked with ECW Press to publish the critically-acclaimed Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad. Her most recent project was to team again with Ensley and ECW to publish A Dream Given Form, which is the only guide to all the canonical works in the Babylon 5 universe. That book is currently available for preorder and will be released in September of 2017. Dale is available for speaking engagements and only occasionally uses puppets in her presentations.

What?

I have long been interested in storytelling - how we do it, why we do it, and what happens when we mix things up. This interest might be the result of being born and raised in the American South, a region that has long celebrated the involved story over the quick answer. Television - the good stuff, anyway - does this brilliantly. Far from being film's red-headed tacky cousin, good TV lets characters and relationships build slowly and often mixes up genres, so horror is next door to humor and fantasy rubs shoulders with procedurals. This blog focuses on both the "good stuff" being broadcast that catches my fancy (with a special emphasis on Babylon 5, since that's the book that's in the process of being written right now) as well as film. The films are usually new releases being watched for TV19's weekly Meet Me at the Movies, although I reserve the right to veer off into classics and under-appreciated gems as well. Older posts cover what my introduction to film class was up to - currently, I'm not teaching that course, but who knows what the future may hold.

Notable Whedon Work