Trivia / Buffy The Vampire Slayer S 7 E 5 Selfless

• Completely Different Title:
  • Portuguese: Caridade (Benevolence)
  • German: Wandlungen (Transitions)
  • French: Crise d'identité (Identity crisis)
  • Hungarian: Önkívület (Delirium)
• Deleted Scene: This line was cut due to length, when D'Hoffryn tells Anya she must pay a price:
  Xander: Something that involves grueling, hard labor. At fair market value taking into account your project's special needs.
• Executive Meddling: The network was unhappy with D'Hoffryn’s Abercrombie and Fitch line ("It looks like someone slaughtered an Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue"), not because they may lose a sponsor, but because D'Hoffryn didn’t care about the deaths of the frat boys. Drew Goddard explained that D’Hoffryn is in fact evil but the network still didn’t get it. He wrote another line - "It looks like Maxim has just lost 15 subscriptions" - but the original line eventually was okayed by the network.
• Real Life Writes the Hairstyle: Sarah Michelle Gellar was only available for three days to film the episode, as she was getting married to Freddie Prinze Jr. that week. Drew Goddard said in his DVD Commentary for the episode that her hair in the show (the little braid at the side of her head) was her "wedding hair".
• Throw It In!:
  • Emma Caulfield and Abraham Benrubi were told that the flashback scenes in Sjornjost were planned to be dubbed badly in English (fitting with the Stylistic Suck of the sequence). But they learned their Swedish lines phonetically for the scenes, and the crew were so impressed they just left them in with subtitles.
  • When doing research for the Swedish flashbacks, Drew Goddard read about a Viking called Olaf who had a wife named Aud - known for her sense of humor and ability to manage money. Finding that fit Anya so well, he made Aud her original name.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The flashback of Anya and Halfrek during the Russian Revolution was originally supposed to take place during the Renaissance. But they decided that would contradict the hints that Halfrek and Cecily (Spike's human crush) were the same person, and moved it forward a few centuries.
  • They considered allowing the "I'll Be Mrs" segment to air in widescreen to match "Once More With Feeling". But that idea was abandoned, feeling viewers would find the switch too jarring.
  • Drew Goddard considered a flashback to "Hush", but decided that it would be difficult to show Anya defining herself through Xander without dialogue.

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