Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
After high school and on and off throughout my college years, I worked at Blockbuster Video and just a few weeks ago I got news that two of the stores where I spent the most time are being closed. It's like 10 years of my life – college took awhile – is vanishing. I no longer live in those cities and haven't seen those stores in forever but there was something comforting about them continuing on much like they had before and after me. I was surprised, but I was kind of depressed about knowing they were going away.
It's hard to believe I'm going to someday have to explain to people what it was like to go to a video store. For those of you have, you're familiar with the preview tapes that are played on the TV monitors in the store (it's like the previews at the movie theaters, for those of you under the age of, what, 10?). For the customer, even if you came to the store regularly you probably didn't see the same preview more than once. It was a completely different story for employees. There was no escape from them. You get one trailer, per month. If you work three-to-four six-hour shifts over the course of a week, you will hear the same movie advertisements approximately 18-24 times in a week. Those previews got permanently imprinted in our minds whether we wanted them to or not. We don't memorize them by choice. Those trailers are relentlessly embedded in our mindguts.
Before Buffy The Vampire Slayer became a TV cult favorite, it was a (probably dreadful) movie starring Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry. When Buffy came to video, which I should note was about 15 minutes after it was released in theaters, we got a tape that had a trailer for the movie. During a scene in which Buffy is at a high school dance, a clip of "Little Heaven" is played. For years, I had no idea that little sound clip was a Toad song.
I was far too cool to watch anything with Puke Perry. I was far too cool to watch a campy high school vampire movie. I never watched the movie and was not going to be caught dead buying the soundtrack to said movie. It wasn't until Toad released their rarities set In Light Syrup that I put all of this together.
The movie was released the summer of 1992. It showed up on videotape August 1993. Syrup was released in 1995. Two years later, within the first two or three seconds I could still immediately connect that song clip to the Buffy trailer.
It's a great song, and it should have been included on a proper record. It deserved a much kinder fate than Buffy– well, at least kinder than the Buffy movie. Dean Dinning and Todd Nichols' haunting, droning harmonies give the song a hypnotic ambiance. The song washes over you, slowly, like "riding waves of doubt." I don't know if it is because of the Buffy trailer, but I rarely listen to this song just once. When I listen to it, as I did today, it's on repeat.
"Little Heaven" is the antidote to the curse of Buffy.
