Sunnydale
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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.
Fictional Environs
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, two high schools, and one modest main street. Even so, it had twelve gothic cemeteries. However, in later seasons it was revealed that Sunnydale sported a campus of the University of California system, an airport, 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 adjacent to several acres of woods, and has an ocean harbor as well as tall cliffs overlooking the sea. There is a nearby beach, and the desert is a short drive away. In the final episode Sunnydale is shown as being in the middle of the desert; however, this may be a continuity error, since Sunnydale was shown to be adjacent or near to the sea in several episodes.
Fictional Location
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 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.
- 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. Moreover, many of the long-range outside shots of the town are actually shots of Santa Barbara.
While the town of Sunnydale seems to correspond most closely to Santa Barbara, the fictional University of California, Sunnydale has some affinities with the University of California, Santa Cruz. In several episodes of the fourth season, when Buffy is attending university at UC Sunnydale, college dormitories called Kresge and Stevenson are named. Both Kresge and Stevenson are the names of colleges on the campus of UC Santa Cruz. However, in Season Five of Angel, Eve refers to UC Santa Cruz as her alma mater, and clearly is not referring to UC Sunnydale itself. The UC Sunnydale scenes were filmed at the University of California, Los Angeles, at a private business park, and in a closed sound stage designed to match the UCLA architecture.
Fictional History
The fictional high school which was originally the centerpiece of the series is located on a "Hellmouth," a portal between our world and the darker demon dimensions, which serves as a nexus and attracting point for all manner of evil creatures and happenings. 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 town's only club, The Bronze, where Daniel ("Oz") Osbourne 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, to drink lattes and cappuccinos, and she and Angel attended a movie at the Sun Cinema.
Buffy's mother, Joyce, owned 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, operated an enchanted costume shop, called "Ethan's", in Sunnydale 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 UC Sunnydale. The rogue Slayer, Faith, lived in the Sunnydale Motel until the mayor rented her an apartment in a more upscale section of the city.
As college students, Buffy, Willow, and her other friends discovered that the U.S. government was operating a secret military complex, The Initiative, that it had installed 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.
The finale of Buffy, 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.es:Sunnydale