25 Years Later, Buffy's Riskiest Episode Is Still a Brilliant Masterpiece That Changed the Show Forever

“Once More, With Feeling” isn't just a great musical (although it is) or a great episode of Buffy (it's also that). The brilliance of this 50-minute spectacle is how it combines the two, using a demon's curse that forces everyone in the town of Sunnydale to sing and dance as if they were in a Broadway play to push the show's overarching plot forward in numerous ways.

The best example of this may be the relationship between Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Spike (James Marsters). The two had already been engaging in a toxic will-they-won't-they relationship for one season, and Spike takes the opportunity to get some big emotions off his chest while channeling Billy Idol in one of the musical’s best songs. At the end of the episode, when the curse is lifted but the revealed emotions still remain, Buffy and Spike share their first real kiss. Spoiler alert: their relationship does not go well.

But we're not here to relitigate "Spuffy." We're here to celebrate "Once More, With Feeling." To do so, I called up Marsters to recount the tale behind Buffy's iconic musical, from the terrifying moment he first found out about it to the episode's legacy 25 years later. Below, Polygon presents the behind-the-scenes story of "Once More, With Feeling" in the words of its breakout star.

Getting started

You might think Joss Whedon would gather his cast to tell them they were about to make a musical. According to Marsters, he shared the news in a more abrupt way.

James Marsters: Instead of delivering the new script for the next episode, we were given a cassette tape with Joss singing the songs of the show and plunking them out on the piano. And whereas Joss is an enormously gifted writer and director and producer, as a singer he wasn't quite up to the material. As a piano player, he's fine, but it didn't sound like it was gonna work. It just sounded cheesy. I'm a punk rocker, and I was like, “What the F is this?”

I remember ripping the cassette tape out of the deck in my trailer and walking out into the bright sunshine and squinting and holding up this cassette tape, and everybody else was doing the same thing, opening their doors and just going, “What the fuck? Did you just listen to this? What's going on here?” It just set off this deep panic as we discovered that we were going to be asked to suddenly do a musical.

While a few of the cast members, including Marsters and Anthony Head (Giles) had professional singing experience, most did not.

Tony Head and I were both comfortable singing in public. I'd been singing in bars since I was 13. I was in a band, which I'm still in now, called Ghost of the Robot. Tony played Frank-N-Furter on the West End in Rocky Horror Picture Show. But the rest of the cast had a really good point, which is like, “I'm not a singer. You hired me to be a one-camera dramatic slash comedic actor, and that's what I do. And now you're gonna have me go out in front of tens of millions of people, maybe across the world, maybe a hundred million people, and do something that I'm not a professional at. You're gonna ruin my career.” That's actually not a bad point to make. I think Sarah asked to juggle chainsaws rather than have to sing — like that would be safer for her career.

So there's all this gnashing of teeth. And at some point, I think we all realized there was no way we were getting out of this. It was gonna happen no matter what we felt about it, which is a good thing. You don't wanna be asking actors all the time, “Are you comfortable doing this?” You don't want a TV show where the actors are in control. You want the producers and the writers to be in control if you want a good show.

Once the cast accepted their fate, they got to work and even brought in personal trainers to develop the skills they needed. However, it still took seeing an early cut of one sequence from the musical to win most of them over.

The reason why I'm so proud of us as a company, and why it is one of my favorite episodes, is that even though we were sure that we were going to go down in flames and all of our careers were over, even though we were sure that this show was going to get canceled very quickly after we tried this, we decided to go down swinging. We decided to try our best anyway, in the face of certain doom. People started hiring their own vocal coaches and their own dance instructors on their own dime. All these people were showing up to set. People were rehearsing and preparing in the middle of filming the previous episodes.

They knew we were freaking out. So the first thing they filmed was the Xander-Anya sequence, the dance and the song. They did a rough cut of that and showed it to us. And it was wonderful. It was amazing. We realized this thing actually was gonna be really good.

Spike's song

Marsters initially struggled to find a way to perform his big song, "Rest in Peace," but ultimately figured it out by taking some inspiration from an unlikely rock and roll icon. He also praises the song for expressing Spike's emotions at that point in the series in a way the character never would have been able to through normal written dialogue.

I didn't really know how to sing that song. So I started playing it on guitar, and I hit something in the way I was voicing the chords. It started working for me and I found my way in. I brought my guitar up to the production offices and I was like, “I found it! This is how we gotta do it,” and I started playing. The producers go, “That's amazing, James. That would be like if Nirvana did the song.” I was like, “Exactly!” And they said, “No, this is not Nirvana. This is like a Broadway rock song. So it's got to fit in. It is different from the other songs, but it's got to fit in that show.” And I was like, “F you guys. I'm gonna sing it that way anyway. Even if you're not gonna do the instrumentation, I'm gonna keep what I found.”

There's a lot of frustration pent up in Spike. Buffy has been kind of like, “Come here, get away from me. Come here, get away from me.” I have experienced that as a man, and I'm sure women experience the same thing. So I was like: Thank God I get to express it. How wonderful would it be to just break out in a song and say, "Babe, either take me or don't. You're just torturing me right now."

That's one of the many things that was genius about the idea. I heard long ago that for the best musicals, there comes a point in the dramatic story where the character wants to express something that words won't express. They need another tool to get there so they can tell the person what's really up. And song and dance are the only way to do it.

There's this lift in the story, in the character, in the emotion that happens when you break out into song. Joss knew that and he used that to get his characters to say things that they normally never would tell each other — secrets that people keep hidden from each other — and the chaos that can happen if that stuff is let out all in one day.

The legacy of "Once, More With Feeling"

So why does this one episode hold up so well? For Marsters, it's not just because the songs are great and the plot is exciting, it's because it speaks to the inspiring theme at the heart of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The musical episode is most people's favorite episode of the show, and I think that's because it is frankly one of the best episodes of television that I'm aware of. It risked more. There was more work put into it. There was more creativity put into that episode than almost any other episode that I have ever seen. And I think the risk is really part of it.

The theme of Buffy is: Don't give up. It's hard to be a human being. It hurts to be here. The world is very imperfect, but don't give up on yourself. Don't give up on the world. Find something to fight for. What you decide to fight for is up to you. It might be taking care of your mom. It might be marching in the streets. But find the thing that's important to you and do it and don't give up on it. For one episode, we spoiled Hollywood actors lived up to the theme of the show. And then, luckily and wonderfully, it didn't suck.