By C. Meyer

In Gingerbread, when the gang is looking at the computer in the library for articles on the “dead” children, the name of the writer of one of the newspaper articles is shown as C Meyer. This is probably a reference to the show’s set designer Carey Meyer.

Elizabeth’s birthday treat

Elizabeth Anne Allen, who played Amy Madison, told the BBC:

Mr. Nyman’s face

The following conversation between Amy and Willow was deleted from the episode Gingerbread:

Blake Swendson

Blake Swendson played Willow’s warlock friend Michael in Gingerbread. He played Joey in Boy Meets World and Elman in 3rd Rock From the Sun.

Jordan Baker

Jordan Baker played Sheila Rosenberg in Gingerbread. She was Charlie in Passions (Spike’s favourite soap) and has also appeared in Ally McBeal, NYPD Blue, The West Wing, 7th Heaven, Touched by an Angel, Chicago Hope, Frasier, Quantum Leap and L.A. Law. Jordan Baker worked with Alyson Hannigan in an episode of Picket Fences called “To Forgive Is Divine”.

Roger Morrissey

Roger Morrissey played the demon in Gingerbread and Tapparich in Living Conditions. He has also played Mr. Vompatatat in The Cat in the Hat and Grindl in Xena: Warrior Princess.

Shawn Pyfrom

Shawn Pyfrom, played the little boy (Hans) in the episode Gingerbread. He is now widely known as Andrew in Desperate Housewives. Shawn has also played a young Michael Landon in Michael Landon - The Father I Knew, and has been in Malcolm in the Middle, State of Grace, Family Guy (voice), Touched by an Angel, 7th Heaven, Ellen and Chicago Hope.

Sheila Rosenberg

Sheila Rosenberg was Willow’s neglectful hippy mother, seen only in Gingerbread, though we heard her voice in Lie to Me. She was a psychiatrist who was so wrapped up with her work and with various feminist issues that she paid little or no attention to Willow. She joined Joyce’s movement ‘MOO’ under the influence of a demon, and almost burned Willow at the stake. Willow revealed in The Killer in Me that her mother was delighted when Willow came out as she felt it was some kind of statement.

Any better?

In Gingerbread, Buffy asks, “Is Sunnydale any better than when I first came here?” We know it definitely IS a better place after the events of lathe previous episode, The Wish.

Buffy confuses herself

A continuing joke for Buffy throughout the show is her misunderstanding of common phrases or sayings. In Gingerbread, she and Angel have the following conversation:

In What’s My Line, Part One, Buffy says, “They had tools, flashlights, whole nine yards. What does that mean, anyway? ‘Whole nine yards’? Nine yards of what? Now it’s gonna bug me all day.”
In No Place Like Home, she says to Giles, “Yeah. You’ll be making money hand over fist” before holding her hand over her fist in a puzzled way, “…Which I guess is a good thing.”
In End of Days, Buffy says to Xander, “Of course I’m not putting you out to pasture. …What does that even mean?”

Dead children

Unlike Angel, children in Buffy the Vampire Slayer don’t die very often. The first child to be vamped was The Anointed One (by the Master in Never Kill a Boy on the First Date). He was killed by Spike in School Hard, after being exposed to sunlight.
The first child actually to be killed on Buffy was in Killed By Death, in which a child was killed by Der Kindestod in the hospital. We also saw a flashback to Buffy’s cousin Celia’s death in that episode. The only other kid killed on the show was in season four’s Goodbye, Iowa, in which a small boy was killed by Adam, using his Polgara skewer.
We saw two ‘dead’ children in Gingerbread but it was later revealed that they were not actually children, but a demon disguised as kids.

Floating pencils

In Gingerbread, Willow says she can make pencils float, seen later in Doppelgängland and Choices. In Triangle, Willow tries to persuade Anya to join her in doing spells by saying, “You could be floating pencils by the end of the day”. In Hush, Willow says she’d like to “float something bigger than a pencil one day”. By the end of the episode, she meets Tara and together they magically move a vending machine.

I will not rest…

The Mayor seemed to have a nice smooth patter down for talking about deaths for the press. Well, a Mayor of Sunnydale, you’d have to, wouldn’t you? In both Gingerbread and Consequences he talks about ‘not resting’ until a murder is solved and the murderer brought to justice. Odd, considering he makes no real attempt to solve in Gingerbread and doesn’t attempt to bring Faith to justice after Consequences.

Knocked out

In Buffy vs Dracula, Giles falls into Dracula’s basement, where he is surrounded by the sisters. After he falls he says, “Good show, Giles. At least you didn’t get knocked out for a change.” In A New Man, Giles says he has a “tendency to get knocked on the head”. He’s not kidding. Giles has been knocked unconscious in the episodes:

• The Witch (by vampires who want to raise the Master again)
• Never Kill a Boy on the First Date (by Andrew Vorba in the crematorium)
• Prophecy Girl (by Buffy, to stop him from trying to help her)
• When She Was Bad (by the vampires attempting to raise the Master)
• Passion (by Angelus, after Giles attacks him for killing Jenny)
• Becoming (Part 1) (by a group of vampires who take him to Angelus)
• Beauty and the Beasts (shot with a tranquilizer gun)
• Homecoming (by Lyle Gorch and Candy).
• Revelations (by Gwendolyn Post, in his office)
• Gingerbread (by the MOO mob as they come to take Buffy away. When Cordy wakes him up shes says, “I came over here to tell Buffy to stop this craziness and found you all unconscious… again. How many times have you been knocked out, anyway? I swear, one of these times, you’re going to wake up in a coma.”)
• Earshot (he doesn’t get knocked out in this episode - but he does walk into a tree in a very amusing manner)
• Flooded (by the Mfashnik demon as it breaks ino Buffy’s house. Giles later says, “Well, I know I’m back in America now. I’ve been knocked unconscious”).

Skinning

In her MOO speech in Gingerbread, Joyce mentions “skinning” - referring to the skins that were left after the fish-monsters had “hatched” in Go Fish.

Hans and Greta Strauss

In Gingerbread, Buffy and her mother found two murdered children in a playground, with occult marks on their bodies. The ‘children’ were really a chaos demon which fed on negative emotion. As Giles says in the episode, “Some demons thrive by fostering hatred and persecution amongst the mortal animals. Not by destroying men, but by watching men destroy each other. Now, they feed us our darkest fear and turn peaceful communities into vigilantes.” The demon in the episode took the form of two dead children, and haunted the local community, making people believe the children were murdered by witches. The local community became fearful, leading Joyce to set up a steering committee called ‘MOO’ (Mothers Opposed to the Occult). Eventually, the people of Sunnydale decided to get rid of any occult forces in the town and tried to burn those they thought were witches, including Buffy, Willow and Amy. The demon had been tricking communities for hundreds of years, from when it first took the form of Hansel and Gretal Strauss, who were killed at the ages of eight and six in 1649 in the Black Forest. Since then it had appeared as their dead bodies every 50 years, including Omahagh in 1949, and Utah in 1899.

Hecate

In Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, Amy calls upon Hecate, the patron goddess of witchcraft, to turn Buffy into a rat. Hecate is known in many different guises, including a young woman in a black robe holding torches, as three bodies standing back to back, and as a dark and evil ghost found haunting dark nights with terrifying hounds of hell. In Gingerbread, Amy did a spell to turn herself into a rat, which involved invoking Hecate. Willow also called upon the goddess in Him to turn R.J. Brooks into a woman.

Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now is a Vietnam war movie made in 1979, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It is based on Conrad’s book The Heart of Darkness. In Restless, Xander brings a video of Apocalypse Now for the Scoobies to watch. Later, Xander dreams of the scene in the movie of the encounter between Lieutenant Willard (Martin Sheen) and Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in which Principal Snyder plays the role of the Colonel. In Gingerbread, Snyder says, “I love the smell of desperate librarian in the morning” which is an adaptation of the famous line from the movie, when Lieutenant Colonel says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”.
A third Snyder-related reference to Apocalypse Now is in The Puppet Show. At the end of the episode, we get to see the dramatic scene that Buffy, Willow and Xander perform. One of Xander’s lines is: “Darkness! And horror of darkness.” At that moment, the camera cuts to Snyder sitting in the audience. The most memorable line of Conrad’s book belongs to Kurtz (the character that Snyder spoofed in Restless), who says, “The horror. The horror!”
The Angel episode Apocalypse Nowish is a clear reference to the book and film.

Grimm brothers

In Gingerbread, Xander puns admirably by saying to the MOO supporters, “What’s with the grim?” The Grimm brothers wrote Hansel and Gretel.

Hansel and Gretel

The story of Hansel and Gretel as we know it first appeared in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of fairy tales, published sometime between 1812 and 1815. Grimm’s stories were based on folk tales that had previously been told in oral storytelling traditions. The episode Gingerbread takes a lot of elements from Hansel and Gretel. Additionally, Xander following a trail of chocolate in Nightmares is inspired by the trail of breadcrumbs in the fairytale Hansel and Gretel.
In Couplet, Angel says, “It’s better than breadcrumbs.”

Hansje Brinkers

In Gingerbread, Buffy talks about a boy who stuck his finger in a ‘duck’ (which Angel explains is actually a ‘dike’ - another name for a dam). They are referring to the story of Hansje Brinkers, which can be found in full here.

Hard Head

Cordelia’s confiscated hairspray in Gingerbread is Hard Head by TIGI Bed Head. It is American and $12, not imported and $40.

Jack and the Beanstalk

Xander says to Buffy in Surprise, “You ground his bones to make your bread,” referring to the events of season two’s opener When She Was Bad, when Buffy destroyed the Master’s bones. It’s also a reference to the classic fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk, where the giant shouts: “Fee fi fo fum. I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”
In Gingerbread, Xander says, “I don’t know about you but I’m gonna go trade my cow in for some beans.” This is another reference to Jack and the Beanstalk.

Joan of Arc

Willow dressed as Joan of Arc when going to a Halloween party in Fear, Itself. Joan of Arc is the patron saint of France. From a young age she thought she heard voices which she believed to have been sent by God. They told her to free France from the English, who were occupying northern France. She was given troops to command and she led them to victory but she was captured, interrogated and tried for witchcraft. Joan was burned at the stake at only nineteen years of age. The people of Sunnydale attempted to burn Buffy and Willow at the stake in Gingerbread when they were under a spell and thought the girls were witches.
In Tabula Rasa, after losing her memory, Buffy decides to name herself Joan (“I feel like a Joan”). This isn’t completely random - like Buffy, Joan of Arc also died young after a violent life.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

In Gingerbread, Willow and her mother discuss the Mister Rogers puppet show, and one of the show’s characters, King Friday. This is a reference to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a children’s show that has been running since 1965.

My Friend Flicka

In Gingerbread, Buffy rues the loss of Giles’ occult library when she asks about how they will research, “Using what a dictionary and My Friend Flicka?” The book My Friend Flicka was written in 1941 by Mary O’Hara. It features a boy and his horse, Flicka, and nothing occult at all.

Nazis

Nazis have been referenced a few times in Buffy:

• In The Witch, Buffy says Amy’s mother is, “Nazi-like”.
• In I Robot, You Jane, a student’s essay has been changed by Moloch the Corrupter, “This isn’t my report! Nazi Germany was a model of a well ordered society’? I didn’t write that! Who’s been in my files?”
• In Nightmares, Xander says, “I’m sorry, I’m unruffled by spiders. Now, if a bunch of Nazis crawled all over my face…”
• In Becoming (Part 1), Cordelia says of Principal Snyder, “How about because you’re a tiny impotent Nazi with a bug up his butt the size of an emu?”
• In Gingerbread, Xander says, “Aw, man it’s Nazi Germany and I’ve got Playboys in my locker!”
• In The Freshman, Buffy mentions the Nuremberg rallies, where the Nazi’s held their anti-Semitic rallies from the early 1920s to 1938.
• In the episode The Initiative, Spike is in his containment cell talking to another vampire about who could have captured him, Spike says, “And they are? The government? Nazis? A major cosmetics company?” In the Angel episode ‘Why We Fight‘, we see in a flashback that Spike was captured by Nazis in 1943, who were experimenting on vampires as a means of controlling them for their war effort.

Playboy

In Gingerbread, Xander says, “It’s Nazi Germany and I’ve got Playboys in my locker”, referring to the famous magazine. Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia) appeared in Playboy in May 2004.

Salem

In Gingerbread, Giles says that the events of Salem were similar to those in Sunnydale. He’s referring to the Salem Witch Trials in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, where mass hysteria led to many people being tried on the charge of witchcraft and hanged. In Intervention, Tara says, “Willow wants to see this thing on the History channel tonight. Salem Witch Trial stuff, which is just gonna get her all upset.”

Seen at 17.18 minutes:

During the locker search, a cop is looking through a purse. A long time later, and after looking through other things, the same cop is seen looking through the same purse.

Seen at 27.35 minutes:

Giles and Oz use the computer on the table in the library - but have you noticed that the computer is only occassionally there? Who spends time plugging in a computer (which the Scoobies spend a lot of time using) and then moving it off the table? And where is it kept when not in use? Wouldn’t it make more sense for Giles to set up a separate computer desk?

Seen at 29.29 minutes:

The German article on the computer is full of mistakes, especially the grammar. It looks like Giles’s explanation was translated word by word from English into German - and that often doesn’t make any sense.

Seen at 29.42 minutes:

It’s a well-known fact that Giles hates computers - so why’s he such a fast typer? This can be seen when he’s looking at the German article, and is typing away (for no apparent reason).

Seen at 29.42 minutes:

The gang look at a German webpage depicting Hans and Greta. Why is Giles typing? The page doesn’t change and nothing happens to the computer, but he types a few things in anyway.

Seen at 30.40 minutes:

When Willow is locked in her bedroom, why doesn’t she just go out the door that leads directly outside? The door has been seen and used several times before and since this episode (such as in Lie to Me and Consequences). That side of the room is conveniently not shown in this episode at all.

Seen at 33.38 minutes:

Not only are the residents of Sunnydale burning their own kids, but they’re doing it inside too! What if City Hall went up in flames? Proves once again that the vast majority of people in Sunnydale are total idiots.