- by Owen Morton
You might think this is a fairly strange question. In fact, most avid watchers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer might contest that Angel is, in fact, not missing these two vital limbs at all. I will admit that on most occasions, Angel comes fully equipped with his legs. However, there is one important exception to this rule.
I own a Buffy the Vampire Slayer poster. I have owned it for over a year now; it adorned my wall in Goodricke B Block last year, not far from the Sylvanian Families one, and now it is on the back of my door. This poster is a Season 3 publicity shot, showing (from left to right) Xander, Giles, Cordelia, Buffy, Angel, Willow and Oz, standing at the gates of Sunnydale High School. Setting aside the fact that Angel is a vampire, and therefore shouldn’t be standing there in broad sunlight, there at first glance appears to be nothing wrong with this poster, a picture of which I include below:
This feeling of there being nothing wrong with the poster persists for some time after the first glance, in fact. Given that I owned it for a good fifteen months before suddenly having my eyes opened to its peculiarity, it obviously takes several more glances than one. However, having allowed you all to peruse the picture, I’m sure you will agree that Angel’s legs appear to be nowhere to be found. Giles’ legs are there behind Cordelia, but Angel’s are conspicuous by their absence. One of them should be visible in the space between Buffy’s legs, though I suppose a case could be made for the other being concealed behind Oz and Willow. But the fact remains: Angel is missing at least one, and probably two, legs.
What is the reason for this? There are several moderately plausible explanations. Maybe the creators were trying to suggest that vampires don’t have legs when photographed, though a) I don’t know particularly why they would, as that isn’t a generally accepted part of the vampire myth, and b) it wouldn’t explain other photos, such as this one:
in which it can plainly be seen that Angel has a full set of legs. Therefore I think I’ve successfully disproved that theory.
The second explanation is that, as a vampire, Angel is reacting rather badly to the sunlight he’s being exposed to, and is dissolving into dust, legs first. This seems like a fairly plausible theory until we consider that, firstly, Angel doesn’t appear to be displaying any signs of pain (though, admittedly, he isn’t a very good actor), and that, secondly, on the second picture I just showed, he is also standing in the sunlight and isn’t dissolving. So, this theory also can be declared useless.
The final reason that I can think of is that, for some reason, the people taking the photo for the publicity shot found Angel’s legs distasteful for some reason, and accordingly airbrushed them out. I think this is almost certainly what happened, and so we now need to turn to the new question that arises from this: why would they do this?
Well, it’s always possible, of course, that the actor – David Boreanaz, I believe he’s called – turned up for the shoot in entirely inappropriate dress. Perhaps he was indulging a previously unknown tendency to cross-dress, and his legs appeared on the poster attired in a skirt and high heels. Or perhaps he was wearing the lower half of a bear suit. Maybe he wasn’t wearing anything at all. Interesting as this particular suggestion is, I’m tempted to disregard it on the basis of the likelihood that the photographers would refuse to actually take the photo at all in such circumstances, and would wait until Boreanaz had gone and got changed into something more intelligent. So, fascinating as that idea is, I think we can consign it to the dustbin of history, to quote Trotsky (though admittedly he was talking about Menshevism and not the possibility that an actor in an American TV series sixty years after Trotsky’s own death might perhaps have not been wearing what was appropriate for the role).
However, I can’t for the life of me think of another reason why Angel’s legs would be airbrushed out of the picture. And as it happens, I don’t care either, so I’m just going to stop writing this article now.