Uncle John’s Fast-Acting Long-Lasting Bathroom Reader

by Michael Brunsfeld

  • To make it even more ironic, Whedon named his heroine the cutsiest, anti-action hero name he could imagine: Buffy Summers.

  • The plot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a high-school cheerleader dates boys, attends class…and fights vampires, demons, and werewolves. And at the end, Buffy ends up not a hero, but an outcast when she burns down her school gym because it’s full of vampires.

  A LOT AT STAKE

  Twentieth Century Fox bought Whedon’s script, but it perplexed them. It wasn’t a straight horror or action movie and it wasn’t a straight comedy, either. It was about seemingly ditzy teenagers, but they talked like sophisticates from a 1940s Spencer Tracy / Katharine Hepburn movie. It also had an unhappy ending and an unlikely hero. Result: they made Whedon rewrite Buffy as a light comedy with cartoonish violence, no edge, and a weak, ditzy heroine. In other words, it became exactly the kind of movie Whedon was trying to parody. Fox’s changes didn’t work. Released in the summer of 1992, Buffy the Vampire Slayer bombed.

  A standard Oreo is 29% cream, 71% cookie.

  BIG SCREEN, LITTLE SCREEN

  Whedon was bitter that Hollywood had ruined his creation. He stopped trying to pitch ideas to the studios and became a screen-writer-for-hire, doing script-doctor work throughout the 1990s.

  Meanwhile, Buffy was selling well on home video and Fox wanted to capitalize on its success. Fox executive Gail Berman remembered reading Whedon’s original script in 1992 and asked Whedon if he’d be interested in resurrecting Buffy for a TV show. He was, but on one condition: he would be head writer and executive producer, ensuring the series wouldn’t again stray from his original darkly comic, feminist angle. Berman agreed and a new series—a sequel to the film—was begun. Buffy (now played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) attends high school in Sunnydale, California, which sits on a “hellmouth,” a gateway to the world of demons and vampires.

  Eleven episodes were filmed in 1996. The only problem: the show didn’t fit any category, so no network wanted to air it. After months of lobbying both broadcast and cable networks, the young WB Network agreed to air Buffy as a mid-season replacement. It premiered in March 1997 to 3.3 million viewers—the WB’s biggest audience ever at that time. Buffy became the WB’s first big hit and actually kept the struggling network afloat.

  THE FORMULA: NO FORMULA

  While the original movie was so fluffy that teenagers rejected it, the series followed Whedon’s vision and became one of the most influential and talked-about shows on TV. Young viewers liked it because it was hip and never condescending. Viewers of all ages appreciated its originality: no other show at the time combined comedy, horror, melodrama, romance, and action as well as philosophy, feminism, and mythology. Even critics liked it. Joe Queenan of TV Guide wrote: “Buffy is far from being the stuff of fantasy or mere satire, it is the most realistic portrayal of contemporary teenage life on television today.”

  Out of garlic? According to legend, constant bell ringing will drive away vampires too.

  After Buffy’s success, dozens of teen-oriented shows hit the airwaves in the late 1990s and early 2000s, all heavy on dialogue and wit, and many with a similar supernatural element. Buffy also showed that a woman could be the center of an action-oriented series. Among the shows that owe a debt: Alias, Dawson’s Creek, Felicity, The O.C., Tru Calling, Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Roswell, Joan of Arcadia, Point Pleasant, Popular, Veronica Mars, Smallville, Gilmore Girls, and Charmed.

  THE DEAD SHALL WALK AGAIN

  Because Buffy was on a very small network, it couldn’t draw huge audiences like American Idol or CSI. (It never finished higher than 62nd in the ratings.) And because of that, the WB canceled Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2001. Though it had saved the network in its infancy, the show was unceremoniously dropped—not even allowed a final episode to wrap up four years of stories. Fortunately, another small network, UPN, immediately picked it up and ran it for two more years. The modest but loyal audience followed. They’ve made Buffy a pop cultural phenomenon: there are countless Buffy books, comics, and Web sites. There’s even talk of another big-screen version, featuring the TV series’ cast.

  Joss Whedon got the last laugh. While Fox tinkered with his movie script and failed, he got to do Buffy the way he wanted and it was a huge success. And because Buffy worked so well, Whedon now gets creative control on everything he does, which was what he wanted all along.

  BUFFY BITS

  • In the 1998 season Buffy, ironically, fell in love with a vampire. That character, named Angel (played by David Boreanaz), was so popular he got his own show, Angel. It aired from 1999 to 2004.

  • Among the actors who launched their careers on Buffy: Sarah Michelle Gellar (Scooby-Doo), Seth Green (Austin Powers), and Alyson Hannigan (American Pie).

  • In the episode “Hush,” demons that can only be killed by a human scream steal the voices of everyone in Sunnydale, leaving them free to run wild. More than half the episode is dialogue-free. Whedon received Buffy’s only major Emmy nomination for this nearly wordless episode—in the writing category.

  But too cold for swimming: There are more than three million lakes in Alaska.

  AUDIO TREASURES

  Musical taste is very subjective. But how many times have you found yourself in a music store, staring at thousands of CDs by artists you’ve never heard of, wondering which ones are worth listening to? It happens to us all the time—so we decided to offer a few recommendations. They’re not necessarily weird or obscure…just good.

  STEVIE WONDER Innervisions (1973) Soul

  Review: “When Wonder discovered that he was stretching the limits of what pop could include, the most visionary of his albums was undoubtedly Innervisions, an interconnected suite of songs—many of them segue right into each other—but it’s not of the self-indulgent variety implied in the hazy album title.” (The Best Rock N’ Roll Records of All Time)

  ELLA FITZGERALD & LOUIS ARMSTRONG Ella and Louis (1957) Jazz/Pop

  Review: “An inspired collaboration. Both stars were riding high at this stage in their careers. Equally inspired was the choice of material, with the gruffness of Armstrong’s voice blending like magic with Fitzgerald’s stunningly silky delivery. Gentle and sincere.” (All-Time Top 1,000 Albums)

  VOICES ON THE VERGE Live in Philadelphia (2001) Folk/Pop Review: “Take four up-and-coming female singer/songwriters, put them in a room with some acoustic guitars, and turn on the tape recorder. The disc is not merely a round robin—the women sing and play on each other’s songs, expanding one another’s styles. It showcases the best of what these women have to offer and lets their hidden talents emerge.” (Rolling Stone)

  STONE ROSES Stone Roses (1989) Rock Review: “As close to perfection as pop gets. The songs are wonder-rockets, a mixture of styles segueing beautifully thanks to production so flawless it’s as if the producer was playing a violin. It weaves an atmospheric spell without ever sounding nostalgic.” (Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide)

  The Grand Canyon gets more snowfall annually than Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  SWAN SILVERTONES Love Lifted Me (1956) Gospel Review: “Some of the best hard-gospel harmonizing from the mid’50s, most notably ‘How I Got Over’ and ‘My Rock’—the group’s toughest sides, with firm conviction from lead soloists Solomon Womack, Claude Jeter, and Paul Owens.” (All Music Guide)

  ROLLING STONES Let It Bleed (1969) Rock Review: “The record kicks off with the terrifying ‘Gimme Shelter,’ the song that came to symbolize the death of the utopian spirit of the ’60s. But the entire album, although a motley compound of country, blues, and gospel fire, rattles and burns with apocalyptic cohesion.” (Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums of All Time)

  PIXIES Doolittle (1989) Alternative Rock

  Review: “The band’s surf-doom bubblegum never sounded so playful. The swift success was built on two gigantic singles: the puzzling but catchy ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven,’ and jaunty pop hit ‘Here Comes Your Man.’ But everything about Doolittle struck wit
h a speedy punch and finds its groove in pockets of mysterious wildness.” (Spin’s 100 Greatest Albums 1985–2005)

  YOUSSOU N’DOUR Eyes Open (1992) World Music Review: “N’Dour is a Senegalese singer-songwriter with an amazing voice, but a successful marriage of First and Third World music is a tricky balancing act. Confident and pointedly cosmopolitan, Eyes Open is an epic-size record that lays claim to a universe of pop while never dropping its West African accent.” (Rolling Stone)

  PATTY GRIFFIN Living with Ghosts (1996) Folk Review: “Less a folk album than a rock recording without the rhythmic clutter. Think Melissa Etheridge with much better songs.” (Musichound Folk: The Essential Album Guide)

  MANU CHAO Clandestino (1998) Latin Review: “An enchanting trip through Latin rock, reliant on a potpourri of musical styles. The best songs benefit from Chao’s freewheeling delivery which incorporates balladry, chorus vocals, rapping, and spoken-word passages. There are so many great ideas here that it’s difficult to digest in one listen.” (All Music Guide)

  A can-do kind of guy: Harry Houdini could open cans with his teeth.

  SECRET SUBWAY

  Contrary to what the history books say, the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) built in 1904 was not New York’s first subway. More than 30 years before, someone built one in secret.

  UNDERGROUND MAN

  Alfred Ely Beach (1826–1896) was a patent lawyer, inventor, and the publisher of Scientific American magazine. From his office window in New York City, he could observe pedestrians, horse-drawn carriages, and wagons navigate the congested streets below. He dreamed of building a luxury transportation system that would travel beneath the streets of Manhattan. But Beach feared interference from City Hall, which was run by the infamously corrupt politician, “Boss” Tweed. Rather than ask permission beforehand, Beach devised a scheme.

  In February 1868 he applied for a permit to build an underground “pneumatic dispatch” system, a letter-mailing tube similar to what drive-through banks use to whisk deposits from cars to the teller. He chose a location in an area of Lower Manhattan that was generally deserted in the evenings. Then he made a secret deal with the owner of Devlin’s Clothing Store at the corner of Murray Street and Broadway to let him use the store cellar as his base of operations.

  THE BIG DIG

  Every night, Beach, his 21-year-old son Fred, and a team of workmen would meet in the merchant’s cellar to dig. Equipped with picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and a hydraulic boring device that Beach had designed and built himself, they painstakingly hollowed out a tunnel nine feet in diameter and a block long. Secrecy was of the utmost importance: if the political bosses got wind of the operation, the whole thing could be shut down. Rather than risk it, the unwanted rock and dirt were bagged and whisked away in special wagons with muffled wheels, so as not to make any sound. Even the lines of track, ties, and railcars were slipped in piece by piece through the store basement under the cloak of darkness, and assembled underground.

  Wire they doing it? Scottish farmers frequently put braces on the teeth of their sheep.

  It took 58 days to dig the 300-foot-long tunnel to the corner of Warren Street and Broadway. Once the track was laid, the passenger car in place, and the lobby built, Beach installed the piece of equipment that would power his underground railroad. The Roots Patent Force Blast Blower, or “Western Tornado,” as the workers called it, was a steam-driven, 100-horsepower wind machine that would blow the train car to one end of the line and suck it back to the other. In test run after test run, the gale force whisked the car quietly along the track at a brisk speed of 10 mph. The air that pushed and pulled the car was vented to the street above, blowing hats off unsuspecting pedestrians’ heads.

  BEACH PARTY

  Finally the day came for Beach to unveil his magnificent creation. On February 26, 1870, he threw a lavish party and invited all of Manhattan’s elite to attend. Those who rode the 22-seat passenger car with its upholstered seats and glass-globed lamps marveled at its luxury. Party guests waited their turn in the elegantly appointed lobby, lounging on velvet settees surrounded by lovely frescoes, a water fountain, and an aquarium filled with goldfish. They listened to music played on a grand piano as they waited to take the nearly silent ride on Beach’s pneumatic subway. The next day the New York Herald’s headline proclaimed, “Fashionable Reception Held in the Bowels of the Earth!”

  Now that his secret was out, Beach felt certain that the public would support a clean, elegant, and comfortable transportation system that ran all the way to Central Park. Of course, the state legislature would want to support it, too. He envisioned it covering five miles and carrying 20,000 passengers a day.

  YOU CAN’T FIGHT CITY HALL

  Soon New Yorkers were lining up to take subway rides at 25 cents a trip. They were all for it, but Boss Tweed was against it. When the state legislature passed a bill approving the building of Beach’s subway system at the cost of $5 million in private funds, Tweed used his political clout to force Governor John Hoffman to veto the bill. Hoffman then pushed the legislature to give Tweed $80 million in public funds to build an elevated railway.

  Undaunted, Beach continued to rally the public’s support for a subway, and in 1873 (after Tweed was imprisoned for fraud), the air-blown subway was again considered. This time, Beach’s nemesis was millionaire financier and Manhattan landlord John Jacob Astor III. Astor worried that tunneling beneath the city streets would collapse many of the buildings he owned aboveground, and was especially concerned about the city’s tallest building at the time—Trinity Church with its 281-foot spire.

  The top 3 fast foods in America are pizza, chicken nuggets, and hot dogs.

  With Astor and other landlords against him, Beach finally gave up. He closed the pneumatic subway, locked the doors, and walked away. By the time he died in 1896, his elegant subway experiment had been all but forgotten.

  A LAST HURRAH

  Elevated trains began carrying passengers in New York City in 1870, and dominated the public transit service for three decades. The first subway—the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT)—opened in October 1904, carrying 150,000 passengers from City Hall to 145th Street on its first day of operation. Other lines soon followed.

  In 1912 workers installing the new “BMT” subway line accidentally broke through the wall of Beach’s lobby and discovered his secret subway. Chandeliers still hung from the ceiling, and the passenger car, although badly deteriorated, sat poised on the track. The workers took some photos and a plaque honoring Beach’s pioneering efforts to build a subway was erected. Then the workers pressed on with their own labors.

  What happened to Alfred Beach’s secret subway? It’s still there at the corner of Warren Street and Broadway, with the lights out and the doors locked, entombed underground.

  * * *

  NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

  • World’s first subway system: the Tube, built in London in 1863.

  • First subway system in the U.S.: Boston’s MTA, or “T,” in 1897.

  • First subway in Latin America: El Subte, Buenos Aires, in 1913.

  • Asia’s first subway: Ginza Line, built in Tokyo in 1927.

  The palace of the Sultan of Brunei has 257 toilets (but no Bathroom Readers).

  FABULOUS FLOP: THE DELOREAN, PART II

  Here’s the second part of our story about one of the most unusual—and unsuccessful—cars ever made. Part I is on page 163.

  READY…OR NOT

  By the start of 1981, the DeLorean Motor Company was up and running and about to manufacture its first cars. When John DeLorean agreed to build his manufacturing plant just outside Belfast in Northern Ireland, the British government put up $97 million in financing. The first of 500 test cars rolled off the assembly line on January 21, 1981, and by April the company began producing cars for sale. The first DeLorean shipments arrived in the United States in June.

  BAD CARS

  As predicted, DeLoreans were overpriced, overweight, and underpowered. T
he company knew this and had resigned itself to selling an under-performer. But what caught executives—and the first buyers—off-guard was how badly the first cars were constructed. Few if any of the plant workers in Northern Ireland had worked on an assembly line before; many had never even owned a car…and it showed. In one early shipment of 250 DeLoreans, 150 of them wouldn’t start; they had to be pushed off the freighter by hand.

  And that was just the beginning. Blinkers wouldn’t turn on, headlights wouldn’t turn off. Windows fell out of the gull-wing doors when drivers rolled them down. The “stainless” steel stained if you touched it or leaned against it wearing a pair of blue jeans. The roof leaked onto the floor mats, which bled permanent black ink onto shoes and clothing. The fuel gauges didn’t work, stranding motorists when they ran out of gas without warning. The door locks jammed too: at an auto show in Cleveland, a spectator was trapped inside a DeLorean for more than an hour until paramedics pried him out.

  The company moved quickly to address these quality-control issues by setting up quality assurance centers in California, Michigan, and New Jersey. Mechanics spent as many as 200 hours—and $2,000 of the company’s rapidly dwindling cash—on each car, taking it apart and putting it back together again before it could be shipped to a dealer and sold to the public. This helped fix the quality problem, but the damage to the car’s reputation had been done: early word of mouth was devastating.

  There is a 242-foot-high temple in Bangkok made entirely of broken dishes.

  BAD BUSINESS

  For all his experience at GM, DeLorean managed his senior executives terribly. He hired too many and paid them higher salaries than his company could afford, further draining its cash reserves. Then in the spring of 1981, he tried to restructure the corporation with a new stock offering that would have voided $22 million worth of executive stock options while increasing his own share to $120 million. The British government would have been shafted, too. It had poured nearly $150 million into DeLorean, but the restructuring would have dropped its stake to just $8.4 million.