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Firefly Movie Gets The Green Light
An anonymous reader writes "According to FireflyFans.net and Ain't It Cool News, Universal has greenlit production of 'Serenity,' the motion picture based on Joss Whedon's cancelled TV series 'Firefly.' Both sites point to an article from Variety that says the film will start production in June, and be ready for release in 2005." The informative Whedonesque weblog is also monitoring developments regarding this much-deserved resurrection.
I hope they're referencing the ship and not the battle the ship was named for. If it's the battle we'll miss out on most of our favorite characters :(
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Fox did everything it could to kill this show.
I think the problem was that Fox didn't know what to do with it.
Anyhow, Universal is backing the film - not Fox.
I'd cure this if I hadn't already posted. For those who don't know, in Firefly, "Shiny" was sometimes used as slang for "good". So whoever modded this offtopic, is some kind of knucklehead who never saw the show.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Full opening theme lyrics:
Take my love, take my land,
Take me where I can not stand.
I don't care, I'm still free;
You can't take the sky from me.
Take me out to the black,
Tell them I ain't coming back.
Burn the land and boil the sea;
You can't take the sky from me.
There's no place I can be,
Since I've found Serenity.
But you can't take the sky from me.
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
Fox had never zipped up the deal for a complete season of Firefly so right from the start it was a nail biter for Joss. Fox didn't even allow the premiere (Serenity) to be the premiere because they thought it lacked a certain pace. If you take notice, Fox generally takes the approach of more action right at the get go = better ratings over elegantly gripping television. So yes, it was that Whedon's vision didn't quite fit Fox's business model or formula rather. All of this is actually touched on in the box set.
I enjoyed Firefly except for those random bits of bad chinese. I suspect that they were talking in mandarin, maybe even cantonese, but the actors always butchered the language so badly that it always sounded more like nails on the chalkboard.
This message was brought to you by the death of 30 brain cells.
Can someone point out what was especially good about it? I'll grant without having seen more than half an episode that it was better than Enterprise or any other show in the genre on tv currently, but that's not saying much.
I'll take a shot at this one. I've been catching the episodes on Canada's SPACE channel, and to me the series definitely had a fairly solid setting and mood in its first season, which is rare for a sci-fi series.
The show fuses sci-fi space conventions with Wild West-era characters and environments. The whole "space Western" thing is not subtle, but that might actually be a good thing. I've found that when sci-fi producers try to be "subtle", their works ends up coming across as obvious and pretentious, like the ST:TNG episodes that tried to disguise the contemporary parallels, then beat you over the head with The Contemporary Moral Message. The Western aspects aren't taken so far as to be implausibly anachronistic; the six-shooters and shotguns seem to fire some kind of directed energy instead of projectiles, and there is still advanced technology. It just so happens the super-cool machines have some rust and loose screws, which only adds to the plausibility. I still have some trouble conceiving of just what volume of space the series takes place within, but then again, technobabble is kept at a minimum, which is a plus.
What little CGI I really took notice of looked pretty darn good, which isn't difficult to do nowadays--but then, compare Firefly to Babylon 5's first season and a half, and Starhunter. Also, there is no sound in space scenes. This threw me at first, but it's also accurate. For all the lack of adherence to anything resembling physics and scientific accuracy, I found this to be a nice touch.
Firefly worked really well in a contained-episode format, instead of the plot arcs that damn near everyone tries to shoehorn into shows now. Thing is, Whedon has shown a tendency to start with just such a pure episode format, then eventually move the series into multi-episode or even full-season arcs. This makes the short life of the series even rougher, because the creative team didn't even have a chance to really go places with the show.
Incidentally, J. Michael Straczynski's Crusade series died under similar conflicts with its network (demands for more sex and violence, episode juggling harming continuity), and it appeared to be developing in a similar fashion. JMS had the pressure of following up Babylon 5 with an expected second strong effort right from the start. When TNT demanded new episodes be shot and aired before the originally-shot episodes could see airtime, there was little chance the series' potential would be realized early on, or allowed to develop.
I wonder how amazing Firefly could have been in further seasons, given time to settle in. I say it again, the series felt quite well-realized for a first-season sci-fi program, and it got cut off at the knees by a network known more for trashy "reality" TV and amusing cartoons than fantasy and science fiction.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
More info here.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The IMDb has an interesting trivia point about this, on the entry for Angel
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I'm placing this in here because most FireFly fans are probably also fans of Whedon's other program, Angel. As you know, the WB Network made the announcement that they will not be renewing Angel for the sixth season, despite its majorly improved ratings over last year and that its the #2 show on their network for the major 18-34 aged advertising demographic.
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If you wish to help with the efforts to save the show, there are several websites coordinating fan activities, and I will list them here:
Petition Online:
Here's the petition protesting the cancellation of the program. Please sign it and join the 72,000 + other fans who already have...
http://www.petitiononline.com/ai5d0162/p
http://www.savingangel.org/
Saving Angel is placing ads in the Hollywood Reporter and Variety. You can find them here:
http://www.supportangel.org/
Support Angel has been coordinating a lot of the fan base postcard campaigns. They are a great source of information.
Some of the other information you'll find on the pages include the fact that Tribune Broadcasting itself (a 20% + shareholder in The WB Network) is encouraging fans to protest the cancellation. The WB wants to replace Angel either with a teen version of "Dark Shadows" or another revamp of "Lost in Space." It is reported that UPN has passed on picking up the show because they'd rather try to run their own version of "Teen Wolf" and borrowing heavily from the Buffy (Whedon) format to make it a success.
If you've been holding off on purchasing any of the Angel Season Sets on DVD, now is the time to purchase them; the networks ARE watching the sales figures. Remember, Fox decided to relaunch "Family Guy" after witnessing their sales success. And while UPN might have passed on picking up Angel for Season Six, we still have TNT, FX Network (fitting since Angel is a Twentieth-Century Fox production), SciFi, or even Tribune Broadcasting syndication to fall back upon!
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
http://www.tvtome.com/FamilyGuy/
and this:
http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,13622,00.htm l?tnews
Could it be...?
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Firefly Chinese-English Translations
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.