10 TV Shows That Were Right To Deviate From The Source Material

8. Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Officially acknowledged as source material rather than a first instalment of the far more famous, incredibly influential television show that followed it, the Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie occupies a peculiar space in €˜Buffyverse€™ canon. On the one hand, the series makes it pretty clear that Buffy Summers has moved to Sunnydale to start again after a disastrous time in Los Angeles. The implication is that the events of the film force the move - however, the movie doesn€™t showcase Buffy burning down the high school gym to kill the vampires trapped inside (although it should). Added to that, Slayer mythology laid out in the movie doesn€™t follow through to the TV show - the film makes it clear that each new Slayer is a reincarnation of the one that came before, hence why they all seem to look like Kristy Swanson. Similarly, the movie casts Donald Sutherland as Merrick, Buffy's mentor, who also seems destined to be reincarnated to watch over her through the generations. The (human) Watchers€™ Council are a welcome invention of the show, which ditches the silly reincarnation plot in favour of €˜the Slayer€™ being a supernatural mantle passed down from woman to woman. But the biggest changes would prove to be to the scope of the mythology. The Slayer's role in the original film seems to be purely to take down the evil vampire lord Lothos, instead of being a nemesis to everything supernaturally evil that appears in the world as told in the TV show. The series, of necessity, needs her to have more than one fish to fry, and even more than one nemesis: the relocation to Sunnydale, location of a portal to Hell, allowed for a wild and varied number of occult villains and monsters to pop up.