Buffy The Vampire Slayer Hides Reference To Raunchy Comedy
One of the things that makes Buffy the Vampire Slayer such an enduring series is that it expertly blends comedy and action. Most of the comedy comes from the title character’s various quips as she turns Sunnydale’s vampires into dust, one set of fangs at a time. Every now and then, though, Buffy secretly referenced other comedies, including sneaking an homage to the raunchy comedy Animal House into the second episode of the series.
Master Neidermeyer
Normally, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Animal House are two franchises fans would never associate with one another. After all, the former is about a plucky girl of destiny who must constantly fight the undead. The latter is the archetypal boys-will-be-boys comedy of years past, presenting college as a nonstop party in which the slobs knew how to have fun and the snobs knew how to be authoritarian jerks.
Believe it or not, one of the film’s main snobs is what gives Buffy its connection to Animal House. Chances are that you didn’t recognize him under all that makeup, but the Master is played by Mark Metcalf. Aside from playing Buffy’s first Big Bad, Metcalf is best known for playing Doug Neidermeyer in Animal House, a film that also starred the late, great Donald Sutherland.
A Villainous Role In Both Titles
If you’re a Buffy fan who hasn’t recently watched (or–gasp!–never watched) Animal House, you may need a primer on who Doug Neidermeyer is. He’s an ROTC leader and the central villain of the film, and his primary goal in life is to get the Deltas (Delta Tau Chi) expelled from the fictional Faber College. Neidermeyer has a reputation for being hard on the young men he trains, and during one memorable scene, he has some special words of encouragement for his troops: “you’re all worthless and weak!”
The Line That Connects It All
Believe it or not, a version of that line comes back in the second Buffy episode, effectively letting Mark Metcalf reference his memorable onscreen bully. In a fun bit of parallelism, “The Harvest” shows The Master addressing his vampire cronies with the same disdain that Neidermeyer addressed his troops in the film. The Master tells them “you are all weak” as a callback to the role that made him (relatively) famous.
Still, No Toga Party
While this Buffy line makes for cute trivia, it is interesting to note that the show never really riffs on Animal House any harder, even when the Scooby Gang graduates high school and starts attending college. Sure, Buffy got into all sorts of toe-curling adventures with Riley, and she even had a bizarre adventure featuring binge drinking. While these occasional doses of intimacy and suds are a faint echo of Animal House, we never get any more explicit callbacks to this classic John Landis film.
Should Have Been Resurrected
If you squint hard enough, though, you can see some parallelism in how Mark Metcalf’s characters died in both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Animal House. In the earlier comedy, we discover that Neidermeyer is shot by his own troops in Vietnam; in Buffy, the Master puts all his faith in an ancient prophecy and gets killed by the Slayer. Each character died clinging to strict beliefs and each inexplicably came back … Neidermeyer returned in a couple of Twisted Sister music videos and the Master appeared in numerous flashbacks and as a form taken by the First Evil.
Honestly, though, it would have been nice if the Master could have been resurrected for Buffy’s college days. Then, he could hit her with the same question he asked in Animal House: “how’s it feel to be an independent, Summers?”
