Entertainment
The Forgotten Buffy The Vampire Slayer Contest That Blew Up The Phone Lines
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show that has only gotten better with age. It was arguably the best genre series of the ‘90s, and the streaming era has brought new generations of fans into the fold. Most of those fans feel a very personal connection with Buffy because the show tells stories about teenage drama and trauma through the lens of urban fantasy. In this way, the show was never really about vampires, werewolves, and other demons. It was actually about the heartbreak and fear that young people have about feeling helpless, and the transcendent joy they feel when they finally discover their own power.
Of course, the show changed one fan’s life in a much more direct way by giving her a walk-on cameo in one of the series’ best episodes. The drama-filled episode “Lovers Walk” had an over-the-top, comedic ad with a special sweepstakes where one lucky fan could get a cameo in the upcoming episode “The Prom.” The winner was Jessica Johnson, who became a small part of the show’s history thanks to the strangest advertisement in Buffy history.
Reach Out And Dust Someone
“Lovers Walk” was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode that (you guessed it) was all about the messy romantic relationships of our favorite characters. Bad boy vampire Spike tries to coerce Willow into making a spell that will force his old girlfriend, Drusilla, into loving him again. Willow, however, has her own problem: she has been making out with Xander behind the back of Oz, her faithful werewolf boyfriend. Cordelia discovers their affair, causing her to break up with her boyfriend, Xander. Meanwhile, Angel reluctantly admits he cannot tell Buffy what she really needs to hear: he doesn’t love her.
While “Lovers Walk” is one of the better episodes of Season 3 (arguably Buffy’s best season), the sweepstakes attached to this episode is even more entertaining than the story. It’s part of a 1-800-COLLECT advertisement. Sarah Michelle Gellar pops up and tells fans they don’t have to be alone for the holidays. At this point, the announcer tells audiences that every call will enter fans into a Buffy contest where they can win a cameo in an upcoming episode. After the narrator hypes the upcoming “Lovers Walk” episode, David Boreanaz shows up, startling Gellar. She nearly stakes him with an icicle. The ad ends with her telling fans that their “Christmas wish might just come true.”
’90s Nostalgia Overload
There is something impossibly nostalgic about watching this vintage advertisement. For one thing, a commercial for a collect calling company seems downright quaint in an age of smartphones and video calls. Additionally, the ad seems hilariously tacky in retrospect. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the most critically acclaimed genre shows in television history, but its two biggest stars were forced by the network to do a goofy commercial that seemed more suited for a Saturday morning children’s cartoon block than prime time TV.
The commercial also plays with ambiguity regarding whether these actors are actually playing their iconic Buffy characters. On one hand, it makes no real sense for our favorite Slayer to break the fourth wall and talk directly to the audience about how great collect calls are. On the other hand, she nearly takes out Boreanaz with an icicle in the shape of a stake. If this is supposed to be Gellar and not a fierce vampire killer, it’s insane to think that this was the best self-defense tool rather than, say, some mace.
The Weirdest Contest In Buffy History
At any rate, all’s well that ends well with this bizarre advertisement. It did a great job promoting “Lovers Walk,” which ended up being one of the best episodes (currently sitting at an 8.8 out of 10 on IMDB) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Meanwhile, the sweepstakes was successful, and Jennifer Johnson of Maryland got a non-speaking cameo in the fan-favorite episode “The Prom.” Ironically enough, the only real loser here was 1-800-COLLECT, a company that, like a vampire, basically turned to dust shortly after its run-in with the Slayer.
Incidentally, it’s pretty funny to see Buffy shilling for a 1-800-COLLECT, a telecom giant whose parent company would go bankrupt before the show aired its final episode. But what else would you expect from a character whose earliest tagline was “if the apocalypse comes, beep me”?
Entertainment
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Entertainment
The best Dyson vacuums actually make vacuuming fun: See my favorites for 2026
Read my full review of the Dyson PencilVac.
The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones takes the small space vacuum to a whole new level. It’s unbelievably slim and lightweight, and seamlessly scoots into tight crevices near furniture that don’t get dusted often enough. If there are certain spots in your home that you avoid cleaning just because it’s too tight of a squeeze, the PencilVac is about to change your life.
“Fluffy” references the ultra-soft material cushioning the four brush rolls, which provide a gloriously glide on hardwood you don’t want to scratch. The PencilVac’s short battery life and limited suction power wouldn’t be ideal in homes with more than just a few rooms or lots of carpeting.
No stick vacuum takes “stick” as literally as the Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones. It doesn’t have a main body with a battery pack, handle, or dustbin like any other traditional cordless vacuum. It’s just a wand and a funky cleaning head with four microfiber cones as brush rolls — the coolest little vacuum that’s truly grab and go.
The whole vacuum can fit just about anywhere, and tight squeezes are even more accessible with a cleaning head that can spin a full 360 degrees. The agile design led me to so many awkward dusty spots that other cordless vacuums can’t comfortably reach: the small chunks of floor between furniture and the wall, between island and bar stool legs, beside the toilet, or under the low-hanging credenza. The PencilVac had commendable hard floor performance in my apartment, offering near-perfect pickup of daily debris like cat hair and long human hair, kitchen crumbs, multiple types of cat litter, and dust.
Oh yeah, the Fluffycones cleaning head has two dust-detecting lasers. One laser projects out the front to point out the hair and tiny flecks lying ahead, and one laser projects out the back to illuminate anything that you just missed. It’s so satisfying that you’ll accidentally end up cleaning for much longer than you meant to, only to be cut off by the pitiful battery life.
With the precision nozzle wand attached, the PencilVac weighs in at just 2.9 pounds. This uniquely compact design makes cleaning cobwebs out of ceiling corners or dusting baseboards so much less of a pain. The wand’s diameter is just 1.5 inches the entire way down, which made it possible to vacuum behind my dresser without pulling it out a foot from the wall.
Entertainment
RAMageddon is making it harder to find the best Windows laptops. These 10 are actually worth it.
I highly recommend the Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU for running the most demanding sorts of apps. That includes photo and video editors, graphic designers, and animators.
Most professional creatives need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $2,000 Acer Swift X 14 with a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and RTX 5070 graphics because it’s super powerful, fairly priced, equipped with a glorious OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking. You can go with a gaming laptop instead, but most aren’t nearly as compact.
This 14-inch desktop replacement is just as fast as an M5 MacBook Pro when it comes to demanding multi-core scenarios (i.e., most creative tasks). In my testing, its RTX 5070 GPU was more than capable of running graphically taxing games like Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100fps at 1080p resolution without the help of any AI upscaling technology, so it’s very well-suited for the likes of Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (And other AAA games, obviously.)
For what it’s worth, I also tried a $1,700 Acer Swift X 14 AI with an AMD processor and RTX 5060 graphics, and the Intel/RTX 5070 version performed much better. The AMD/RTX 5060 one had 17 percent worse multi-core performance, so it couldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro, and it could barely run Cyberpunk at its 60fps minimum without upscaling tech. It also had a much worse battery life of about 6.5 hours per charge. My go-to RTX 5070 model lasted just over 10 hours, which is fantastic for a laptop with a dedicated GPU.
Note that the Swift X 14 is not a Copilot+ PC, meaning it doesn’t have a super-powerful NPU for running on-device AI tasks. This isn’t a deal-breaker for creatives, but it is for serious machine learning engineers and software developers.
The Swift X 14 comes with plenty of creator-forward ports (like a microSD card slot) as well as a crisp, vivid 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It’s a real attention-getter on an otherwise plain laptop. You can’t draw on it with the included stylus, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad. It functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.
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