By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of those shows I just keep returning to. It’s a kind of comfort food that can help make even the worst days more bearable. A side effect of constantly rewatching these classic episodes is that I get more than the fuzzy feeling of warm nostalgia. I also get a chance to discover weird little details we never noticed before. Case in point: during a flashback in the Buffy episode “Becoming, Part One” the title character’s old high school is actually Courthouse Square, a Universal backlot that has been featured in many productions such as Back To the Future.
Buffy And Courthouse Square
The Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show effectively incorporated the plot of the earlier movie by using Courthouse Square to portray Hemery High School. This is the same Los Angeles-based school that the Slayer attended in the original 1992 Buffy film, and in the show, it’s where the Watcher Merrick fills her in about vampires and her responsibility to stop them. Notably, this flashback reveals that Angel, the vampire with a soul, took one look at Buffy and decided he wanted “to be somebody’ who could help her with her supernatural struggles.
Here’s a confession that may lose me my geek cred: I’ve watched the two-part “Becoming” episode countless times, and during the flashback, I was too busy admiring the connections to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie to notice Courthouse Square. This time around, though, I found myself staring at the screen, unable to shake the feeling that I had seen this place before outside of this series. That’s when it hit me: I’m an ‘80s kid, and this particular set represented some of the biggest films from my childhood.
This Universal backlot was built way back in 1948 (before Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon was even born) and before it was called Courthouse Square. It was built for the movie An Act of Murder, but it used to be called Mockingbird Square because it featured heavily in the famous 1962 adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird. Starting in 1985, though, it got its new name thanks to the climactic scene in Back To the Future where young Marty McFly must ride a perfectly-timed lightning bolt into the future or be stuck in the past forever.
That’s right: the same set that was used for this Buffy flashback scene in “Becoming, Part One” was used to bring Hill Valley to life in Back to the Future, including that iconic fictional town’s courthouse. As for the famous clock tower, that was a removable addition, and it’s not uncommon at all for various directors to add scenery when they don’t want Courthouse Square to look like…well…just a courthouse.
For movie lovers, part of what made Back to the Future so special is that director Robert Zemeckis utilized the entire lot to bring Hill Valley to life, though much of it (including the same theater and even the same clock tower) can be seen in Joe Dante’s Gremlins, which came out the year before. And while Back to the Future and Gremlins are the most famous movies that this Buffy courthouse set has been featured in, eagle-eyed viewers can spot it in Batman and Robin, Bruce Almighty, and much more, including the flawed-but-fun recent horror film MaXXXine.
Admittedly, this Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode was already very satisfying, but clocking (so to speak) Courthouse Square takes it to the next level. Just like that, one of my favorite TV shows is connected to several of my favorite movies and directors. Fortunately, the set has even survived catching fire on multiple occasions, but nobody needed a real-life Slayer to walk through the fire to help them put out the flames and preserve this iconic bit of Hollywood history.
