From January 2007:
These days, people are excited over who's going to the Super Bowl (wild guess: San Diego and New Orleans), the return of Jack Bauer in a kamikaze mission that won't work unless you want a four-hour season, and the return of American Idol if hearing the worst singing ever for two weeks is amusing.
Since last night, though, I've been thinking about the Bronze. No, not the fictional hangout for Buffy and her Scooby Gang, but the internet hangout for her fans. I first discovered the Bronze in May of 1997 when I hopped on the internet from Humboldt State University. Back then, I had heard about the show, but never watched it because the WB could not be seen north of Sacramento. However, thanks to the MST 3000 method of "circulating the tapes", I got to see the show through tapes from Canada. Once I got a steady source of Buffy by moving to Yuba City in 1998, I became a regular. Back then, I called myself an "associate Watcher". I switched to being an "Impaler General" after I started watching the show again that summer. I decided to stop in April of that year because I was covering local elections at the radio station I worked for--a BIG mistake in hindsight. After that, I was a regular, arguing why B/A is true love that can't be broken, making wild guesses on what may happen next, that sort of thing.
I don't think it's too far-fetched to say that the Bronze was the forerunner for other fan posting boards, including the biggest one of all, Television Without Pity. It's impossible to find old pages from the original Bronze, or the UPN Bronze (which is nowhere like the original. There's no "Buffy.com" either. The closest thing I have to the Bronze is this memorial page I made that looks like a typical page, but just that. For most of us, we still have the memories.
I only mention this because two new projects are coming that will make people look back at the days of the WB Bronze with fondness. Allyson Beatrice, a regular at Whedonesque, had a book called Will the Vampire People Please Leave the Lobby? Now, this is not what a very polite Slayer says when asking a bunch of vampires to leave the Arclight Cinema after watching, say, Pan's Labyrinth. Actually, this is a book of her experiences as a major supporter of all things Whedon, from Buffy and Angel to Firefly. In one chapter, she tried to save Firefly despite Fox's best efforts to bury it deep so that no one can find it...similar to how it presented the final four episodes of Arrested Development against the opening ceremonies of the 2006 Winter Olympics (!!!). You can get it at Buy.com and other websites. This link will tell you more, and responses from other fans.
The other project is a documentary called In Real Life: The Bronze Documentary Project. It takes a look back at the original Bronzers, and how their internet relationships continue to this day. The MySpace site can explain it better than I can.
Yes, it's been 10 years since she came to Sunnydale. But Buffy Summers touched us in ways that we can hardly imagine...showing that the U-S can have more than four networks, inspiring fans to talk about the show through the internet (and later any show at all), and going down in history as a modern mythical heroine.
So how come Fox Video isn't promoting its Buffy and Angel videos to mark the anniversary? Makes sense to me.
By the way, the stake is a replica of the stake the producers gave to guests who attended the 100th show wrap party in 2001. The glass stein is real.
Note: This blog was edited because some of the links in the original version no longer work.
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