Singing Through the Small Screen: “Once More with Feeling”
I’ve got a theory, it could be bunnies.
Singing Through the Small Screen is a series dedicated to musical episodes of non-musical TV shows.
When Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted on The WB in 1997, I avoided it like the plague. I’d seen the 1992 film of the same and was not impressed. Then I either saw or heard an ad for the show’s musical episode “Once More with Feeling.” Thanks to Xena: Warrior Princess, I now liked musicals, so obviously I had to see what this Buffy… one was all about. .
Instantly I was hooked. I had no idea what was going on, who the characters were, the relationship statuses, nothing, but it didn’t matter. Within that one hour of television, I learned everything I needed to know for the story to work and just enough to leave me wanting more. On top of that, the songs were actually really, truly, shockingly, good. And thanks to never ending, daily reruns on cable television and our handy dandy VCR, I was able to get caught up with Buffy’s world of vampires, demons, Scooby Gangs, and Slayers.
At this point, it is pretty safe to say that “Once More with Feeling” is considered to be the gold standard of the musical episode.
The story surrounds a musical demon who was summoned to town, bringing song and dance to everyone. The problem is that people are baring their souls to music, revealing some of their deepest and darkest secrets to the world, while others are so overtaken by the music that they dance until they burn up from the inside out. This is a theme (the music bringing out people’s deepest feelings and secrets) that we will see again in a future installment of Singing Through the Small Screen.
During the final “battle” Buffy reveals that when her friends brought her back from the dead, they pulled her out of heaven, sending shockwaves of guilt through the Scoobies. As the demon takes his leave, he gets in one last dig,
What a lot of fun
You guys have been real swell
And there’s not a one
Who can say this ended wellAll those secrets
You’ve been concealing
Say you’re happy now
Once more with feeling
Now I gotta run
See you all in hell!
I can’t properly express how much I love this episode. It turned me into a lifelong Buffy fan but even still, “Once More with Feeling” is my favorite episode in the entire series. Hell, it is probably my favorite musical (TV episode or otherwise) of all time.
I was like you with the series (though I did love the preceding movie). I only ended up getting hooked because our cable was out for a few weeks and we could only get the channel Buffy was on- that was somewhere during season 5. Later, I caught up (through a cable station running rerun marathons) just around the time the musical episode aired. When they started plugging it, I thought it was ridiculous. Then once I saw the episode I was floored! I immediately found somewhere to download the songs and played it on my discman obsessively for months! Best musical episode ever. I even wrote a paper on it during my MA for a postmodern lit and film class lol