When She Was Still Spordelia

In the third season of Buffy, Sarah Michelle Gellar has this one scene in which she recalls her life before her character’s vampire-staking days: “Before I was the Slayer I was… well, I don’t want to say shallow but… Let’s say a certain person who shall remain nameless — we'll just call her Spordelia — looked like a classical philosopher next to me.” That’s a description to keep in mind when you watch the 1989 pilot for Girl Talk, which basically plays like a slumber party filmed before a studio audience, sponsored by Tiger Beat, fueled by Fun Dip and held in D.J. Tanner’s bedroom. Girl Talk co-stars Soleil Moon Fry and a girl named inexplicably named Russell.

It’s bizarre to watch baby-voiced SMG prattle on and on about cute boys, especially given the pop culture pedestal we now place Buffy on, and I can’t help but be reminded of a similarly bizarre clip of a 1991-era Jenny Lewis talk about hanging out with her friends in Westwood and then participate in a montage where she tries on a series of increasingly funny hats. (Yes, you should hit that link and watch it.)

Here, maybe you should watch Girl Talk now:

A short viewing guide:

0:03 — The theme song only lasts ninety-some seconds, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it plays nine hours. It also runs through your head with the violence of a ricocheting bullet. Sample lyrics: “School! That’s cool! / It’s the place to be! / All your friends are there / And the talk is free!”

1:31 — The announcer makes the mistake of introducing SMG as Sarah Gellar. I assume he was never heard from again.

1:43 — Please note that poor Russell (left) is dressed like a preteen version of Dorothy Zbornak.

4:30 — In case you didn’t realize that Soleil Moon Frye was THE. SHIT. at the time this episode was filmed, no worries: Russell and Sarah get to introduce her as the extra special, much more famous host of the show.

4:42 — The wisdom of Punky Brewster: “I think my favorite part of school is talking to my friends… especially the boys.” Hooray for education!

6:24 — Again, school is great because that’s where you get to talk to your friends about clothes, music and boys.

7:23 — So one of the things written into the show is that the girls all have crushes on a guy named Neil Tardio, who in real life is a director and the first husband of Tea Leoni. I hope his mention in this episode is how Neal and Tea fell in love. I would also like to think that her legal name was Tea Tardio for a period. Also also? The mention of that oh-so-sexy name Tardio prompts Russell to make this face:

7:34 — Then this happens:

But then you find out that the heartthrob they have visit the show for the first episode isn’t Kirk Cameron or Corey Haim or Chad Allen or any of the others you’d have reason to feel weird about today. No, it’s one you probably don’t have feelings about: Brian Robbins from Head of the Class. He causes much girl-screaming, I’ll give him that. Also, upon his entrance to the stage, SMG stage-faints and remains unconscious for the remainder of the interview.

10:12 — Robbins on shooting two episodes of Head of the Class in Russia: “The people were really interesting, kind of a little depressing. I think they should forget about things like glasnost and perestroika and all that and just paint the place. I mean, a nice shade of blue or something like that.”

13:50 — I have no idea who Safire is, but I’d like to think it’s the woman who wrote Precious, during her peppier teen years.

15:35 — The show also features comedy skits, like this one where Russell and Sarah play lab partners. Sarah is studious and quiet, while Russell blathers on stupidly. In the end, Russell is praised for being wonderful, while Sarah is condemned for attempting science. Hooray for education! The weirdest bit of dialogue: the bizarre brag of “Remember the guy who played the father on The Brady Bunch? Well, his real-life daughter used to go here!” Though for the record, Robert Reed did actually have a daughter. How stoked she must have been to have been included in Girl Talk.

17:20 — After having promised a performance by New Kids on the Block the whole episode, you find out that it’s only Jordan and Jonathan, appearing via a pre-taped interview. Here is how the Girl Talk hosts do “looking interested” when the gay one talks:

21:07 — Jonathan Knight’s advice to kids today about peer pressure: “I would say just be yourself. When people offer you drugs, if you don’t want them, just say no. And the final outcome will be that they’ll just pay more respect to you because you’re being yourself. They’ll respect you for that.”

21:40 — And finally this:

All in all, it’s still better than watching proto-Kathryn Merteuil on Swans Crossing.

Can You Fucking Clean Up the Bathroom When You’re Done?

Speaking of the Scream movies, how horrifying and bizarre are Rolling Stone’s photos of the female cast of Scream 2? Horrifying because of the blood spatter, bizarre by virtue of the lack of fucking half the female cast of Scream 2 and also because it’s proof that Heather Graham, Neve Campbell, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jada Pinkett and Tori Spelling once had to hang out.

Holy shit, 1997 was a long time ago. Also: Why does Neve Campbell have the absolute worst outfit of the group? Was someone not informed that she was the star? Or did she just want to look twelve?

Also? There is a bloodless version. They opted to go with the other one. Weird.

No Dignity in Death for Cici Cooper

Scream 2 was on TV recently and I watched a few minutes of it. It was specifically the scene with Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character, sorority sister Cici Cooper, who learns that staying home to be the designated driver can still result in death. The killer ends up tossing her off the third floor of the Omega Beta Zeta house. See ya, Cici. Hope nobody needed a ride home.

Watching the scene through this time was the first since it was pointed out to me that there’s a pretty glaring blooper in it. Just as the killer tosses Cici off the balcony, a crewmember’s head pops up in the lower right corner, even though the scene is set at least three floors up.


Well, it’s either a blooper or a weird plot point — this guy literally hanging out underneath a sorority house balcony, doing little to save the poor girl who’s being murdered. But as far as bloopers go, this seems like a pretty huge one. Admittedly, I never noticed it until it was pointed out, but don’t movie studios pay people big bucks to spot these kind of things? Especially in a good movie produced by a major studio?

You may quibble with my classification of Scream 2 as “good,” but I’ll argue it out. From the little I saw, I surprised how the film — now thirteen years old — doesn’t look dated. And though it’s not as uniformly well-acted as the first movie, it actually has some nice performances and a awesomely oddball cast that includes a whole lot of people you’d never expect to have been in a movie together — Laurie Metcalf, Liev Schreiber, Joshua Jackson, Timothy Olyphant, Portia de Rossi, Tori Spelling, Rebecca Gayheart, Luke Wilson, David Warner and Heather Graham among them.

Bonus trivia: The girl who Cici is talking to on the phone when she starts getting calls from the killer is Selma Blair in an uncredited role, about two years before she starred with Gellar in Cruel Intentions and became famous. And the girl who provides the jump scene when she bumps into Cici on her way out of the house? It’s that inexplicably Hispanic Griswold daughter from National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation.

The Plumber, the Slayer and the Dominatrix

Funny thing about the newest Mario game, Super Mario Galaxy, which was released November 12. It doesn’t abbreviate so well for me. Just use the initials and you get “SMG,” a three-letter string that Buffy fans like myself have come to associate strictly with actress Sarah Michelle Gellar. Shorted the more familiar first two words and you get “SM Galaxy,” which is exactly one ampersand away from sounding like a sex dungeon, or at least a store where one could buy items to stock his or her sex dungeon.

I foresee myself writing this one out a lot.