Product: Buffy: Witch/Never Kill a Boy on the First Date [VHS] (1997)
Rating: 4.0
Amy una bueno bruja o una podrido bruja? Hacer no orar Owen!
I just watched the permanent return of Amy Madison from rat status during the sixth season of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and wanted to look back at our first meeting with the young witch of Sunnydale High School. This tape is the second of the three that make up the first season collection of "BtVS," and it was the weakest tape in the set because it includes a pair of episodes that are only tangentially important to the developing Buffy mythos.When we first meet Amy in "The Witch" 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 acknowledges the original feature film as background for the series by having Buffy show up in a cheerleading costume. 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 squad. 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. Of course, now that we have all but the final season of "BtVS" available on DVD there is no real reason to pick this up because if you want to enjoy these episodes in Spanish you can do that with the DVD set, which is one of the most reasonably priced complete seasons of a television series available.