Of Course Dolly Parton Produced Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Left: Parton attends the Fall 1994 Fashion Week on April 13, 1994 at Bryant Park in New York City, New York.

Right: Promotional portrait of the cast for the television series, 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer,' c.

1997.

L-R: Nicholas Brendon, Anthony Head, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter and Alyson Hannigan. —From Left: Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection—Getty Images; Fotos International—Getty Images By the time she passed away on Tuesday, Dolly Parton had become an American saint, celebrated not just for giving us immortal songs like “Jolene” and “9 to 5,” but for philanthropic work that provided hundreds of millions of free books to children and proved instrumental in the development of a COVID vaccine.

That wasn’t always her reputation, though.

While her songwriting prowess was always respected within the country-music community, for much of her career, the public knew Parton most for the cartoonishly feminine figure she cut—platinum wigs, costumes sagging under the weight of rhinestones, nails for days, the bustline that launched a thousand punchlines.

As she once put it : “A lot of men thought I was as silly as I looked.” So it makes perfect sense that, among her various and sundry contributions to American culture, Parton was an uncredited producer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer .

Under the auspices of Sandollar Productions, which she founded with her then-manager Sandy Gallin, the music icon and entrepreneur supported not just the cult-classic, Y2K-era teen drama series, but also the 1992 feature film on which it was based.

She was still on board decades later, when Hulu was developing a Buffy reboot with director Chloé Zhao . (It has since been scrapped .) Parton’s involvement with the franchise has only been widely known in recent years.

“I thought Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a wonderful little show,” she told Andy Cohen in a 2021 Watch What Happens Live appearance.

“I was very, very proud to be part of that.” Star Sarah Michelle Gellar has said that, while Parton wasn’t present on set, she honored the cast with gifts and praise.

Well, of course Buffy resonated with Dolly.

In many ways, she was the real-life equivalent of Buffy Summers.

Creator Joss Whedon (a man whose relationship to feminism is notoriously complicated at best ) conceived the character as an empowered antidote to the hot, scantily clad victim types of 1980s slasher flicks.