The Curse of Buffy!

This last weekend was Alyson Hannigan's 33rd birthday. It's hard to imagine our little Willow in her 30s, but then again it was hard to imagine her in any other role than that of the wonderful wiccan on Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

And a succession of awful gross-out comedies and a lacklustre sitcom rather suggest that she start knocking on Joss Whedon's door and asking him to bring back a live-action Buffyverse show.

But let's be honest - of all the young main members of the Buffy cast ("the Scooby gang") - none have really been able to stand on their own two feet since the end of the show.

Sarah Michelle Gellar has totally failed to shake off her most famous persona by taking one horror role after another (along with a very ironic role in two Scooby Doo movies), while Nicholas 'Xander' Brendon has popped up in a few failed sitcoms and James 'Spike' Marsters is trying to make a go of his rock career (pumped up by regular interviews in the official Buffy magazine).

Even Joss himself - once the golden child/saviour of popular, genre TV - had Firefly pulled out from under him, made a cult film (Serenity) that wasn't quite the blockbuster hit its fans made it out to be (I loved it by the way, but the money didn't exactly come rolling in) and has just lost his role as the scriptwriter for the forthcoming Wonder Woman film.

The Angel crowd seem to have fared slightly better because, conversely, their spin-off show was less well known and so they aren't so typecast in the public's eyes: David 'Angel' Boreanaz has gone on to Bones, which seems to be doing very well on Sky One, and Alexis 'Wesley' Denisof became the envy of all fandom when he married Alyson Hannigan on October 11, 2003!