Entertainment
The Forgotten Buffy Episode That Inspired The Best Superhero Show Ever Made
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show that very nearly got an animated spinoff. Sadly, that show never saw the light of day, and this cartoon project remains deader than the Master. However, that didn’t keep this seminal urban fantasy show from inspiring one of the greatest animated series in television history!
You see, one of Buffy’s biggest fans was Bruce Timm, who kickstarted the DC Animated Universe with Batman: The Animated Series. He went on to produce other beloved DCAU shows, including Justice League Unlimited. In a bit of geeky synchronicity, the JLU episode “This Little Piggy” was inspired by the Season 2 Buffy episode “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.”
Ratty, The Vampire Slayer
The Buffy episode in question has its characters gearing up for Valentine’s Day, and Xander gets his heart broken when a peer-pressured Cordelia breaks up with him. He then forces local witch Amy to cast a love spell on his ex, but it ends up backfiring, and everyone but Cordelia falls in love with the young man. Eventually, the spell is reversed, and Xander gets back together with Cordelia, but along the way, a jealous Amy transforms Buffy into a rat.
What does this rat transformation have to do with Justice League Unlimited? That show’s producer (animation legend Bruce Timm) was a big fan of Buffy, and he thought that “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” would feature a different ending. Specifically, he thought that Buffy would have to use her Slayer skills to fight off a cat (she does approach the kitty and unexpectedly scares him off) while she was still transformed into a rat!
Wonder Woman Or Wonder Bacon?
Obviously, that didn’t happen, but Timm still thought it was a cool concept. So cool, in fact, that he wrote something similar into his own show. In the Justice League Unlimited episode “This Little Piggy,” Circe transforms Wonder Woman into a pig, leaving Batman with the unenviable task of figuring out how to restore his kindasorta goddess girlfriend (it’s complicated) back to her divine self.
In the audio commentary for “This Little Piggy,” Bruce Tim revealed that this Wonder Woman plot point was based on how he thought the ratty Slayer would have to fight the cat. In the Justice League Unlimited episode, Wonder Woman is a bit like Buffy: she is transformed into an animal but otherwise retains her human intelligence. Unlike Buffy, though, Wonder Woman has to fight against humans who aren’t afraid to take her to the slaughterhouse.
Slay, Queens!
This is evident when one of the humans tries to kill her with a gun; when he fires what would have otherwise been a fatal blast, Wonder Woman deflects the shot with her bracers. It’s a crowd-pleasing moment, one that shows that the Amazon’s warrior spirit is more than skin deep. The scene also helps to illustrate what Timm was hoping to see in “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered:” a transformed hero taking on foes who are way above her weight class.
As a very different kind of cartoon pig might say, th-th-th-that’s all, folks! A forgotten episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended up inspiring one of the craziest episodes of Justice League Unlimited, transforming Wonder Woman into a pig just as Buffy was transformed into a rat. It’s a fun bit of franchise crossover that reminds us of a very important point: no matter what form they take, these two women know how to slay!