Product: Buffy the Vampire Slayer - The Witch - Never Kill A Boy On The First Date [VHS] (1997)
Rating: 4.0
Is Amy a good witch or a bad witch? Don't ask poor Owen.
This second tape from the first season collection of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" includes a pair of episodes that are only tangentially important to the Buffy mythos. In "The Witch" we meet Amy Madison, who is currently known to Buffy viewers as Willow's pet white rat. However, at this point she is just another girl trying out for the Sunnydale High Cheerleading squad along with Buffy and Cordelia. This is one of those early episodes that does acknowledge the original feature film as background for the series. Of course this is Sunnydale, so we are not surprised when one of the girls spontaneously bursts into flames during the tryouts. Eventually our attention is drawn to Amy, who is pretty uncoordinated but whose mother really, really, REALLY wants her to be on the sqaud. Every time something bad happens to another one of the girls, Buffy and Amy move up the ladder of cheerleading success. "The Witch" is--surprise, surprise--the episode that introduces the occult into the Buffy universe, which has major implications for Willow down the road. Written by Dana Reston, it is clearly the stronger of the two episodes on this particular tape."Never Kill A Boy On The First Date" does have a marvelous moment where Buffy goes after the bad guy screaming, "You killed my date!" Remember the sub-text for Buffy is that High School is Hell for children, so here we have Buffy trying to at least pretend she is a normal student and actually go out on a normal date. Just wait until Owen finds out what "normal" means in the wonderful and wacky world of Buffy. The Master's attempt to use the Anointed One" to kill the Slayer is the major sub-plot in this episode, which is far and away the weakest of the six included in this boxed set. The amazingmrkimble is right: "Prophecy Girl" should have been included in this set." The bottom line is that if you want this tape you should pick up the entire gift set.