Sunnydale
Sunnydale, California is the fictional
suburban setting for the popular television drama
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Series creator
Joss Whedon conceived the town as a representation of the typical, anonymous, generic suburban city, as well as a narrative parody of the all-too-serene towns typical in traditional horror movies.
Sunnydale's size and surroundings are implausible, as it was designed largely for comic effect and narrative convenience. Moreover, the size of the town changed as the series progressed. During the first three seasons, Sunnydale was depicted as a small
California town: population of 38,500,
[The "Welcome to Sunnydale" sign says 38,500 in several early episodes, including School Hard (2.03) and Lovers Walk (3.08).] very few
high schools,
[In Some Assembly Required (2.02), the three dead cheerleaders attended Fondren High, which is "across town" from Sunnydale High. In Reptile Boy (2.05), Kent Preparatory School is mentioned. Yet in most episodes "the high school" always means Sunnydale High.] forty-three churches,
[Giles is surprised at this figure in What's My Line II (2.10).] a small private college,
[Crestwood College is featured in Reptile Boy (2.05) but never mentioned again.] and one modest main street. Even so, it had twelve
gothic cemeteries.
[According to Giles in Revelations (3.07).] These cemeteries are so heavily used that services are sometimes held at night.
[('Once More With Feeling').]However, in later seasons it was revealed that Sunnydale sported a campus of the
University of California system, and enough witches to keep a magic supply shop profitable.
Sunnydale possesses many common horror-movie characteristics, such as an abundance of dark alleyways, abandoned mansions and factories, and an inexplicable divide between its demon-fighting, supernaturally aware teens and the sinister or clueless, perpetually in-denial adults.
Sunnydale is somewhat isolated, and is not adjacent to other urban or suburban areas
[When Sunnydale is stricken by a town-wide epidemic no other towns seem to be nearby.]. It has a train station,
[Buffy finds dead bodies in the train in Crush (5.14).] a bus station,
[The bus station is shown in What's My Line I (2.09) and Showtime (7.11).] and a small airport.
[Kendra arrives by plane in What's My Line I (2.09), and the airport itself is shown in Who Are You (4.16) as well as Bargaining I (6.01). The airport shown in this episode is actually Burbank Airport with "Sunnydale" photoshopped over the word Burbank. In Tabula Rasa (6.08) Giles' ticket shows an itinerary from Sunnydale Airport to Los Angeles International Airport and then to London Heathrow Airport. ]Sunnydale is adjacent to several acres of woods,
[The woods are named "Miller's Woods" (Homecoming, 3.5). In Bargaining II (6.02) and Villains (6.20) the woods are large enough to get lost in.] and has an ocean port
[The port is seen in Surprise (2.13) and Consequences (3.15).] as well as tall cliffs overlooking the sea.
[ The ocean cliffs are the location of Willow's terrible spell, on "Kingman's Bluff" (Grave, 6.22). ] There is a nearby beach,
[It is not clear how close this beach is to Sunnydale. It is seen in Go Fish (2.20) and Buffy vs. Dracula (5.01).] and the desert is a short drive away.
[ Giles drove Buffy to the desert in Intervention (5.18), and drove with the Potentials to the desert in The Killer in Me (7.13) ] In the final episode Sunnydale is shown as being in the middle of the desert;
[At the end of Chosen (7.22) the town has sunk into a large pit, and the pit is completely surrounded by desert.] however, this can be explained as a consequence of the forces unleashed in the town's destruction, which laid waste to everything around.
By the final season, the population had fallen to 32,900.
[The "Welcome to Sunnydale" sign says 32,900 in Conversations with Dead People (7.07).]Sunnydale is "located" on the California coast, two hours northwest of Los Angeles. This has been indicated as follows:
* In the first episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy has just moved from Los Angeles to Sunnydale, and she complains that she is now "two hours from Neiman Marcus". She must be referring to the
Neiman Marcus store in
Beverly Hills.
* The characters often drive to
Los Angeles and to
Oxnard, but never refer to the
San Francisco Bay Area, indicating that they are much closer to the former than to the latter.
* Buffy has talked about her father living "close" in
San Diego, a city near the US-Mexican border, and how she and her sister went to
Sea World with him there.
* In an episode of the fourth season, the characters are attacked by the spirits of Native Americans described as
Chumash, a tribe local to Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
* In the final episode of
Angel Season Four,
Lilah refers to Sunnydale as being "up the coast" from Los Angeles. In California, "up the coast" always means north or northwest along the Pacific Coast.
If Sunnydale is to be identified with an actual college town in this region,
Santa Barbara (or perhaps
San Luis Obispo) would be the logical choice.
In Season Three, the mayor's office is shown with a giant map of "Sunnydale County"; this map is an actual map of
Santa Barbara County with a new name pasted over it. In other episodes, actual street maps of Santa Barbara are used to represent the town.
Many of the long-range outside shots of the town are actually shots of Santa Barbara. These are especially clear in the widescreen versions of seasons four to seven; some of the Spanish-style buildings are obviously in the heart of downtown Santa Barbara to anyone familiar with the city.
However, there are a few indications that associate Sunnydale with other California locations:
* Most of the
University of California, Sunnydale scenes were filmed at the
University of California, Los Angeles, and in a closed sound stage designed to match the UCLA architecture. Some of the later scenes were filmed at a private business park.
* UC Sunnydale also has a connection to the
University of California, Santa Cruz. In several episodes of the fourth season, UC Sunnydale dormitories named Kresge and Stevenson are mentioned. Kresge and Stevenson are names of colleges on the campus of UC Santa Cruz. Note, however, that in Season Five of
Angel,
Eve refers to UC Santa Cruz as her alma mater, so UC Santa Cruz is a distinct school in the Buffy universe.
* In the seventh season episode "
Help", the character
Cassie Newton authors a website.
Rebecca Rand Kirshner created an
actual website for this character, and registered it to Cassie Newton at a fake address. The
ZIP Code she used was 94086, which is an actual ZIP Code in the city of
Sunnyvale in California's
Silicon Valley.
Richard Wilkins arrived in
California in the
1800s, looking for gold. It is shown in
Tales of the Slayers that he founded Sunnydale in a demon infested valley after the
Navajo slayer died there. He made a pact with the demons to found a town atop the
Hellmouth for "demons to feed on" on the promise of immortality and a future
Ascension to a demonic demi-god ("
Enemies"). Wilkins became Mayor, and later pretended to be his own son, and grandson (also mayors) to disguise his immortality.
Sunnydale's local newspaper was called the Sunnydale Press. It can be seen in "
Never Kill a Boy on the First Date", "
Reptile Boy", "
Becoming, Part One", "
Bad Girls", "
Consequences", "
Graduation Day, Part One", "
Hush" and "
Once More, With Feeling".
The fictional high school which was the focus of the first three seasons is built atop a
Hellmouth, a portal between our world and the darker demon dimensions, whose emanations attract all manner of evil creatures and precipitate weird events generally; it's a good place for
witchcraft and
mad science. The Hellmouth serves both as a narrative conceit and one of the central metaphors of the show, which specializes in drawing supernatural elements as analogies for the difficulties of adolescence.
Besides
Sunnydale High School, which was blown up during a fight between the students and the town's mayor after his "ascension" to pure demon form and was later rebuilt in a more modernistic design, teens congregated at
The Bronze, a club where
Daniel 'Oz' Osborne and the other members of the rock band
Dingoes Ate My Baby used to play.
Buffy Summers and
Willow Rosenberg occasionally repaired to the Espresso Pump, a local coffee shop with a retro
gas station motif, to drink lattes and cappuccinos, and she and
Angel attended a movie at the Sun Cinema.
Buffy's mother,
Joyce, worked in an art gallery in Sunnydale, and Buffy's
Watcher,
Rupert Giles, was the Sunnydale High School librarian until the building burned down, after which he bought The Magic Box, which offered lotions, potions, and other supplies to witches, sorcerers, and other practitioners of the mystical arts. An old acquaintance of Giles, the warlock
Ethan Rayne, briefly operated an enchanted costume shop ("Ethan's") until he was run out of town by Giles.
Angel lived in a deserted mansion, which he shared for a time with
Spike and
Drusilla, after the three moved there from the abandoned factory in which they'd lived previously. For a time, Buffy and Willow attended the Sunnydale campus of the
University of California. The rogue Slayer,
Faith Lehane, lived in the Downtowner Motel
[The sign reads "Downtowner Motel/Apt." in The Zeppo (3.12) and others.] until the mayor rented her an apartment in a more upscale section of the town.
As college students, Buffy, Willow, and her other friends discovered that the U.S. government was operating a secret military complex,
The Initiative, in a cavern beneath the UC Sunnydale campus.
After dropping out, Buffy worked at a fast-food restaurant, the Doublemeat Palace, before landing a job as a youth counselor at the new Sunnydale High School, which her sister
Dawn attended. Buffy's friend
Xander Harris worked at a number of jobs in Sunnydale before becoming a construction foreman, helping to build the new Sunnydale High School, and
Cordelia Chase worked at a local boutique for a short time before relocating to
Los Angeles following graduation.
Buffy's final episode, "
Chosen", sees Sunnydale destroyed in a successful attempt to stop
The First Evil from opening the Hellmouth. A sign on the city limits gives Sunnydale the same population as it had in early seasons.
In
fiction fandom,
Sunnydale Syndrome is a name given to the semi-common tendency of mundane characters to fail to notice, or to reject as unreal or impossible, the unusual activities taking place under their noses, even when blindingly obvious.
Origin
The name is taken from the fictional town of
Sunnydale, California, the setting of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The town was intentionally designed to parody the phenomenon, and its general population is cheerfully oblivious to the ongoing conflict between the forces of good and evil. (There are a few cases where some residents of the town hint that they know that
something, at least, is going on. In
one episode a football player gushes, "This is our year . . . . if we can focus, keep discipline and not have quite as many mysterious deaths, Sunnydale is gonna
rule." When the character
Oz learns of the existence of vampires, he remarks, "Actually, this explains a lot.")
Other examples
Sometimes the Syndrome is simply an accepted convention that has no explanation in the storyworld. Other times, it may be actually be a story element, as in the
1988-
1990 television series
War of the Worlds, where a recurring question for the main characters was why only a tiny fraction of those who lived through the alien invasion that occurred in
1953 actually remembered it at all. (While the first season played with a "
selective-amnesia" theory, no solid explanation was ever given, as it was one of many plot threads dropped between the first and second seasons of the series.) In
Terry Pratchett's
Discworld, a similar phenomenon is the
canonical explanation for most people never noticing the presence of supernatural entities, like
Death: people just "won't allow themselves to see it."
The
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy introduces the "
Somebody Else's Problem field", a very inexpensive form of effective
invisibility that convinces onlookers that the item to which it is applied has nothing to do with them, so they should ignore it.
Arthur Dent and
Ford Prefect are the only ones who can see Slartibartfast's space ship in
Life, the Universe and Everything because they have seen one before so unfortunately for them it is their problem.
Though this mainly manifests in western entertainment,
anime and
manga have a similar
cliché, usually restricted to one character or a small group. Good examples occur in
Ranma ½:
Kasumi Tendo, a pragmatic and upbeat woman, consistently sees life-or-death battles as 'Ranma playing with his friends'; and
Tatewaki Kuno refuses to believe the male and female versions of Ranma are the same, even after Ranma has transformed whilst Kuno was hugging his female self.
An arguable parody of the phenomenon appears in
The Simpsons where
Mr. Burns, despite repeated close interaction with his employee,
Homer Simpson, never recalls Homer in subsequent episodes.
Mr. Burns: Who's that man?
Smithers: Homer Simpson, sir.
Mr. Burns: Simpson, eh? New man?
Smithers: He
thwarted your campaign for governor, you
ran over his son, he
saved the plant from meltdown, his wife
painted you in the nude...
Mr. Burns: Doesn't ring a bell.
