I'm just here to await the pro-Buffy flame war.
'Occult' text from Buffy The Vampire Slayer ep actually just story about new bus lane in Dublin
Conundrum. You're working on a burning trash pile of a '90s TV show and need some spooky, mysterious language to lorem ipsum into a book of supposedly occult nature. Which tongue has a suitable enough clusterfuck of vowels to make the prop look like it's about to summon Yog-Sothoth? The makers of Buffy The Vampire Slayer …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 13:05 GMT tony72
Re: pro-Buffy flame war.
Having only watched all seven seasons of Buffy three times over, I don't think I'm a sufficiently fanatical fan to step up and defend it either, but the mere fact of it having lasted for seven seasons is probably defence enough. Or the fact that we're still talking about it after all this time.
Sadly the word is this is another show who's legacy is going to be tarnished by the launch of a reboot. Is there anything they won't dig up and rehash?
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 17:30 GMT The Dogs Meevonks
Re: pro-Buffy flame war.
And a first for TV shows... now it seems every show has to have it's own 'musical episode'... and few of them ever manage to do it well, let alone as great as that one.
I watched it, I even bought it on DVD.. I even stumbled across an episode on TV the other day (not seen it in years)... But it's not aged as well as some shows... But is still better than most of the real dross on TV these days.
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 13:17 GMT sabroni
Re: if I had stopped watching after season 4
Personally I think season 7 is a return to form after 5 and 6 which had good episodes and great banter but felt like they were written by committee. "The body" is still probably one of the best treatments of what an actual family death feels like and that's 6 isn't it?
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 13:18 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Gachnar...
Indeed. Anyone who doesn't remember this episode has no right to write anything about BtVS.
An aside: My wife was watching NCIS reruns the other day, and "Kill Ari, Part 1" came on. That's the tortured, overworked, maudlin, ham-fisted one after Kate is killed, and the various other characters have imagined conversations with Dead Kate. It's like an ill-conceived film-school project. And I couldn't help but think of the Buffy episode "The Body", which deals with the death of a major character and does it so very, very much better.
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Friday 22nd February 2019 20:38 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Gachnar...
"And I couldn't help but think of the Buffy episode "The Body", which deals with the death of a major character and does it so very, very much better."
Back in the day, I watched a few episodes now and then, if it happened to be on at the time. I recently watched the whole series thanks to Tivo series links and yes, it's a was a teen adventure romp on the surface with some quite decent comedy, but thinking of the era it was broadcast in and the teen-aged target audience, they really tackled some quite difficult and adult issue in an entertaining but serious way. It was really quite ground breaking for the time.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 10:58 GMT Dave K
The most surprising part of this story is that it has taken this long for someone to point this out really. Buffy was a popular show and I'm surprised Gaelic speaking people haven't pointed this out sooner. Not that it's a huge thing. Of course the question here is whether this was an intentional "easter egg" or an oversight. I expect the former. If you put text into your show from a real-life language, someone fluent will translate it sooner or later, so best give them a laugh in the process!
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Thursday 21st February 2019 14:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
'Syndicaction' hate starts here...
Syndicated cuts really ruined a few key scenes in the UK broadcast of 'The Magicians', despite only ever being on very late.
There's a hilarious bit in the syndicated edition of 'Haven' where an effect of a person exploding is edited out, but the following week, in the 'Previously on Haven...' intro, they show the same scene uncut!
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 13:41 GMT Mage
Surprised Gaelic speaking people haven't pointed this out
Busy complaining about Irish Government systems that don't allow Irish spelling on names. Or the new postcode system that ignored Irish place names.
Q: How do you spell an Irish name (or surname)? A: However the owner tells you.
See Irish versions of Meave, Shelagh, Shaun, Neeve, Catherine, Mary, that are actually used in Ireland. Also Irish forms of O'Connor, Stevens etc.
Be seriously amazed.
We have better things to do than complain about American Films & TV shows, that just like UK often have stupid, ignorant, abusive stereotypes about Irish people.
Sky News Ireland put Dublin on their map near Waterford.
A Patrick's day t-shirt leaves out the 6 NI counties of Ireland. Where Patrick probably spent most of his ministry.
American websites doing four leaf "lucky clovers" for Patrick's Day. The point of the probably faked 17th C shamrock story is that it has THREE leaves, to represent the Trinity. Actually pre-Christian Ireland had triad godesses, had adopted the 3 in 1 neolithic triple spiral and such. Patrick certainly didn't need the Shamrock to illustrate the idea of the Trinity.
Most of what Americans think about Ireland and a lot of what Westminster thinks is is plain wrong.
We have bigger problems than TV shows. At least it's not an abusive reference to Ireland, so Irish speakers likely don't care.
I don't speak Irish myself, but I know people that do.
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 14:51 GMT ibmalone
Re: Surprised Gaelic speaking people haven't pointed this out
Q: How do you spell an Irish name (or surname)? A: However the owner tells you.
This is what most style guides suggest about any name (with a bit of variation on the subject of self-awarded titles).
To be fair to the rest of the English speaking world, the Irish monks settled on a way of using the Latin alphabet that is completely unlike any other.
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Thursday 21st February 2019 08:55 GMT Shadow Systems
At Dave K, re: give them a laugh.
I was friends with a young lady whom was in drama class during my sophomore year. She complained that she had to memorize "some shit in Latin" & I asked to see the script. She handed it over, I read the title of the Latin bit, & promptly started laughing my ass off. The script writer had translated Doctor Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat"... =-D
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 11:26 GMT Dave 126
Blade Runner
In Blade Runner the display in Deckard's spinner throws up some text. After https://typesetinthefuture.com/2016/06/19/bladerunner/ appealled to the wider internet, two gentlemen found the real life 1980 advertisment this 5ext was lifted from: Matrix Color Graphic Camera System.
Around the edges of the photographs Decker are words like Helcln Vetica... Which were bits of Helvetica from the edge of a Letraset transfer sheet.
The above link is well recommended. Look at the site's entry for Scott's Alien for a whole system of icons with rounded corners.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 13:55 GMT Prst. V.Jeltz
Re: Blade Runner
haha somehow , i cant stop reading a scene by scene analysis of Bladerunner focusing 90% on the typeface of any text that pops up!
Coincidentally , the page has just revealed to me that Deckards apartment is modelled on a real house in LA that was also used as the abandoned mansion where Angel, Spike, and Drusilla hang out in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode I Only Have Eyes For You…
spooky!
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 20:18 GMT NorthIowan
Re: Blade Runner
"Coincidentally , the page has just revealed to me that Deckards apartment is modelled on a real house in LA that was also used as the abandoned mansion where Angel, Spike, and Drusilla hang out in Buffy the Vampire Slayer "
If I remember right, in the Star Trek Arena episode, the Cestus outpost was also used in a Wild Wild West episode. Don't remember WWW good enough, but I remember being surprised to recognize the outpost that Jim West was trying to break into or out of on a rerun a few months back.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 14:55 GMT elgarak1
Re: Blade Runner
There's also the story of the original Star Trek. For the episode "The Tholian Web", they needed a model of the Enterprise's damaged sister ship Defiant. So they went to the shops and bought a plastic model kit of the Enterprise. Of course, it only had the numbers 1, 7, 0, and another 1 for the hull number, so the Defiant got the hull number "1071". I guess that started a whole slew of fan theories how Starfleet comes up with hull numbers, given that they only had 12 ships like the Enterprise (as said by Kirk somewhere.)
They could have given the Defiant the hull number "1710", and none of that would have happened. BTW, later model kits had all 10 digits to make any hull number, and 12 names for the 12 sister ships, and a list of associated hull numbers, and THAT generated another slew of fan theories.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 19:00 GMT Dave 126
Re: Blade Runner
> Coincidentally , the page has just revealed to me that Deckards apartment is modelled on a real house in LA
In Nolan's Westworld - which has some overlap with the themes of Bladerunner - Bernard's house is shown under construction... featuring the same tiles as Deckard's house. A cute nod, I thought.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 11:36 GMT Dave 126
Radio 4's Film Programme had an interesting article with a woman whose job it is to create graphical work for films, be it a pirate's treasure map, a CIA identity card, a cake box or whatever.
I can't find a link to that programme, but there's an article about her work on The Grand Budapest Hotel here:
https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/annie-atkins-grand-budapest-hotel
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 11:44 GMT Steve Button
Dross?
I only ever helf-watched a couple of episodes originally, but as it's Joss Whedon I was thinking of re-visiting it. (being as I loved Firefly, and really like Marvel Agents of Shield)
Would I be wasting my time?
Genuine question. I thought it might be something to enjoy watching with the kids.
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Friday 22nd February 2019 20:53 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Dross?
"Spoiler Alert! Later seasons are a bit more adult than earlier seasons, so you might want to check them out before you let your kids watch."
Which makes sense in the original broadcast timings as the audience "grew up" with the show over 7 years.
I liked the vignettes they used to start the shows with. One with Buffy and Willow walking through the cemetery discussing homework, vampire leaps out, Buffy nonchalantly stakes him in the heart as they barely break step and carry on with the conversation, both barely glancing up at the vampire. Cue title sequence.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 12:45 GMT Admiral Grace Hopper
Re: Dross?
Coincidentally I've just started a full re-watch. It's sharply written, well-acted and to my mind has stood the test of time, a statement I feel more comfortable making as the effects, prosthetics and so forth were hokey even at the time it was made.. The first couple of series are perfect for kids, the later ones are more mature and cover some fairly serious topics. I would recommend it.
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 07:08 GMT Stuart Moore
Re: Dross?
I have also recently started a re-watch, and I'd agree it holds up well - far fewer jokes that now make you cringe than many other shows of the time. The first season is ok but the second is noticeably better when they've had a chance to work out what works.
We also decided to get the box set of Angel (spin off from season 3, I think) and watch them in parallel with the overlaps... Less convinced by Angel so far but it's not bad. Somewhere online there's a suggested watching order so that you don't get continuity out of order.
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 13:25 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Dross?
I feel the writers of Angel weren't always sure what they wanted to do with the show, and the character arcs sometimes feel a little forced. And, of course, some episodes are stronger than others. But there's a lot of decent stuff in it, and sometimes it could be genuinely moving or really quite funny. ("Evil hand!")
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 13:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Dross?
Not dross. Re-watching it all with (17 year old) children, parents re-loving it and child realising it's better than most things on television these days.
The humour is quite persistent -- the moment in Agents of SHIELD that reminded me most of this was Coulson's "Yeah, we're going to have to kill the fishtank" line. (and maybe the very early on "Welcome to level 7. Sorry, that corner was really dark and I couldn't resist"
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 12:33 GMT SVV
In jokes on screen
This kind of thing is pretty commonplaces in TV, films and books. According to someone I used to know who worked at the BBC there were no end of baddies in TV series who "coincidentally" had the same surnames or appearance as unpopular managers who worked there. Another popular funny was to film scenes that showed locations where certain scurrilous behaviour had been widely rumoured to have occured.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 19:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: In jokes on screen
Not forgetting re purposed "props", I can still remember chuckling at seeing a RS Spares volt meter being used as the airlock control on one low budget BBC SciFi series; and looking at various giant spaceship props and trying to identify which Revell/Airfix kits they had used.
And whilst I am posting
"(unless you watch reruns on Syfy)."
[cough, every episode d/led via torrent cough].
Embarrassed?
Me?
No
I have every episode of The Gilmore Girls as well.
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 15:40 GMT Simon Harris
Re: In jokes on screen
I'm sure I remember one of the mid-80s (no special effects budget) Dr Who episodes with a special effect consisting of flashing stars covering one of the characters in the Tardis.
It appears they'd genlocked a BBC Micro's (identifiable by the style of the character set) video signal to the studio's video and overlaid some randomly positioned asterisks onto the picture.
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Thursday 21st February 2019 08:50 GMT W.S.Gosset
In-jokes on radio
BBC Radio rather than telly:
Spike Milligan kept trying to get various filth past the BBC censors/editors, with not a lot of success unless he went subtle.
My favourite success:
A very very plummy-voiced BBC Announcer character, name of Hugh Jampton.
"Hampton Wick" being rhyming slang for Dick.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 12:58 GMT STOP_FORTH
Buffy vs Sabrina - who'd win?
I was delivering a training course to a small group of (a dozen or so) coders about 15-20 years ago. During the break a lively discussion ensued between the Buffy and Sabrina adherents. They were about evenly split. Main bone of contention was which series had least unrealistic plots.
I suspect their allegiance was more related to their appreciation of the lead actresses than anything else.
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 16:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Buffy vs Sabrina - who'd win?
Sabrina ... I was disappointed that on the "Apprentice your fired" programs this year whenever they were discussing which of the remaining candidates might win and someone commented that Sabrinawas a bit young (one of this years candidates had that name and, as they frequently noted was a few years younger than most of the others) that Rhod Glibert didn't add "obviously - she's a teenage witch"
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 13:24 GMT Mage
Read the book?
I read one of the books and decided it wasn't worth watching. Same with series with doormat Bella, except I wasted part of my life reading all the books. Oh and I wasted time on some of the Charlene Harris Dead series too.
I read a lot of fantasy. Tolkien wasn't the only guy to invent languages, though it's not generally needed. All these modern (since late 1980s?) "vampire" trope books seem to glamorise abuse and vampires. What next? Loads of series about evil step parents that the abused kids actually like and fight social services to stay with? Ella, Briar, Snow and their friends at finishing school would be disgusted.
What baffles me is that so many of these "contemporary paranormal semi-gothic" or BSDM books in the last 20 years are written by women. So many of the girls seem to WANT to be in relationships with abusive men that probably aren't even human.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 13:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Tolkien wasn't the only guy to invent languages"
What put him apart was his deep knowledge of languages, including ancient ones - he didn't simply "invent" the languages, he created them with the proper substrates.
Anyway you're right about this fascination for characters that were once the personification of many evils...
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 16:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Read the book?
I read one of the books and decided it wasn't worth watching. [..] All these modern (since late 1980s?) "vampire" trope books seem to glamorise abuse and vampires.
I've never read the books, which (to my mind) are the pulp pushed out by the rights holders to make money, vs the TV show, which is where Joss Whedon built his Buffyverse. In t he TV show, Buffy is a strong girl/woman (7 seasons) who knows what she wants and its not a vampire abusing her. It's affirming, and the complete opposite of True Blood (Oh Eric, I'm just drawn to you! My goodness! blergh). Season 6, Spike (a vamp) falls for Buffy, but lacking a soul is incapable of the right level of emotion and almost rapes her. He's also a little nuts due to a chip in his head preventing him from hurting humans, but since Buffy is a reanimated corpse with a soul, she's not exactly human. In order to gain any amount of affection from her, Spike gets his soul back from a demon in Haiti and becomes more human so she'll accept him.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 13:48 GMT Tom 38
Re: "Once more with Feeling"
When SyFy started showing it again on their channels, they had a launch party at the Prince Charles theatre, and I bagged two tickets in the prize draw. Sing-a-long version of "Once more with feeling" and "Chosen", plus goody bags and an open bar. The missus, who is Bulgarian and has no concept of Buffy, was most amused by all us 30-40yr old geeks singing along (the open bar helped in that aspect).
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 13:46 GMT elgarak1
Anybody remember "Futurama"? They came up with two sets of 'alien' language (now available as downloadable fonts) with the intent of having some obsessed fans being occupied to crack that puzzle what's being written on screen for, well, a long time. But, as it's a simple replacement cypher, if was cracked THE SAME DAY IT WAS broadcast. (I thought it was a bit longer, but I checked.)
Star Trek TNG also had quite a bit of written info on screen that was somehow interesting trivia. Like a list of names composed of names identical to the production crew. A lot of that was supposed to be hidden, not legible when broadcast. But even before the show had been transferred to HD, people were pointing out things that the designers considered not legible (like door numbers or such that they neglected to repaint from one scene to the next, when the same set was re-used for a different location.)
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Thursday 21st February 2019 14:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Aurebesh
'Aurebesh' is the written language in Star Wars, which is basically A-Z plus a couple of extra phonetic runes. The numbers are easy to read, the letters less so. They're not used for much, but they're used for a lot more sight gags in the LEGO Star Wars animations (even though ordinary English crops up from time-to-time if the viewer is actually meant to understand something!).
Superman comics and TV use another runic cypher for Kryptonian, though background stuff in 'Krypton' I think was meant to be nonsense, maybe to give the impression that the underlying language isn't English. But in the comics it's obviously a 1:1 cypher for English, and they usually print a code key somewhere. The symbols are quite fiddly and some are hard to distinguish from others, but they are simply A-Z.
The classic Star Trek one is pipes on the engineering decks labelled GNDN - 'Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing'.
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Tuesday 19th February 2019 19:54 GMT Mage
Re: Bah!
Obviously not many people take Vampires, werewolves and witches as serious threats today, as there are few reports of stakes, silver bullets or burnings.
Though as someone in a book pointed out, those sort of killings done properly work on nearly anything. You can even kill a god with mistletoe if you do it properly,
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 09:52 GMT MarkB
Re: a suitable enough clusterfuck of vowels
"If you take out most of the vowels you just end up with Polish, don't you?"
When I used to take my children to visit their grandparents in South Wales, the wittiest of them suggested the toll booths on the Severn bridge were actually checkpoints to trap vowel smugglers.
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 13:46 GMT Simon Harris
Did the spells get worse over the years?
I'm sure in the earlier series of Buffy they made some pretence of creating spells that had to be incanted in some ancient language.
By series 6, it seemed at least some of Willow's spells had shrunk to single words of Latin (or something that sounded Latinish), quite possibly influenced by Harry Potter, whose films had started to appear by then.
Last night I saw a series 7 episode, where Willow's spell was in English, consisting of a poem that a greetings card would have been embarrassed to have inside it.
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 16:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Star Wars
Seem to recall that in the original Star Wars films they wanted the lanuages that "races" like the Eewoks etc to have languages that "sounded realistic" - and the approach they took was to use existing languages from obscure parts of the world ... with the result that when the film was shown in some part of South Africa all the locals discovered they spoke Eewok!
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Thursday 21st February 2019 19:30 GMT John Savard
Georgian
When it comes to real-world Latin alphabet languages, if you're not going with Latin itself, Irish Gaelic is a reasonable choice. Other options include Albanian, Turkish, Basque, and Maltese. But if one really wants a spooky-looking text without going to the effort of inventing a language and its script, nothing can beat Georgian.