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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.
OIC firefly is good enough for a dvd set and good enough for a movie but not good enough for a series. Sometimes I wonder about the people making the decisions. Are they making a decision to not do a series because of business reasons or just well because they say so and those weenie viewers arent going to change our minds because they might get it in their heads that they matter. Yes I'm bitter. Its like they say "come here viewers come check out this great new series!" then they go "SUCKERS !! haha no show for you !!".
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
So they actually decided to make a movie about a web browser?
Oh, wait...
They're really naming it Serenity to avoid being prematurely cut off during production. This would surely have happened had the name started with 'F'.
Firefly - cancelled
Family Guy - cancelled
Futurama - cancelled
Someone ought to cancel Fox.
Sharpies don't just sniff themselves.
... that they like to cancel great TV shows, just to make a few extra bucks on a movie they know people have been dying to see.
...I am terrified of people in business suits wearing bright blue gloves.
On the up side, I know now how to say "Fuck everyone in the universe to death!", "Shut up," and my favorite, "Holy mother of God and all her wacky nephews!" in Mandarin Chinese.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Shiny!
"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand". -Milton F.
I would rather have the series returen
Joss Whedon should call up USA. With Monk and Dead Zone it's obvious that USA isn't afraid to back a strange-yet-brilliant show.
Or maybe FX (Nip Tuck, The Shield) or Bravo (Keen Eddie, Touching Evil).
Cable is really the only place you can find good shows that don't dumb down to the common denominator.
Fox is just stupid. How much money are they making from the Firefly dvds and Family Guy dvds? Compare that with how much money you would expect an any reality TV DVD to make.
In a couple of years, fox is going to have to reach all the way back to In Living Colour in order to make DVD sales... because no one wants to buy anything that they currently air.
Y'know, that same thought has occurred to me before. I don't watch much TV, and I find myself buying/borrowing/renting DVD sets of the few shows that I actually watch. Turns out a great number of them either air(ed) on Fox or are Fox properties. They greenlight stuff that I like! It just burns me up that they preempt these shows to death and subsequently cancel them after they give them a chance.
Perhaps the right hand doesn't agree with the left.
Sharpies don't just sniff themselves.
Fox did everything it could to kill this show.
First, they aired the episodes in a random order so there was no continuitySecond, they changed the time it was aired, then changed the day, all within a span of three weeks
Third, and most insulting, is that they assumed the demographic watching Firefly would switch to watching Fastlane, as some of the numbers from Nielson were similar
Sadly, I've had more people become "fans" of the show after the cancellattion by loaning them the DVDs, with most of them not being scifi fans.
I know, isn't that crazy? Next thing you know they'll be making a television series out of a box office flop.
Oh wait...
"But the cars are all flashing me, bright lights are passing me, I feel life passing me by" - Stiff Little Fingers
They are calling the movie 'Serenity'? Now what am I supposed to do with all these Firefly Movie posters?
"They've canceled the show but we're still here. What does that make us?" "Big Damn Junkies, Sir!" "Ain't we just"
I am not a native Chinese speaker (or even a remotely good Chinese speaker), but here's some tasty bits of Firefly Mandarin dialog:
Tai-kong suo-yo de shing-chiou doh sai-jin wu di pigu: Stuff all the planets in the universe up my ass!
Huh choo-shung huh tza-jiao duh!: Filthy fornicators of livestock!
Nee ta ma duh. Tyen-shia suo-yo duh run doh gai si! - F--- everyone in the universe to death!
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.
You have absolutely no clue whatsoever how much energy would be required for such space travel, because in real life there is neither any theory nor any experiment that covers faster-than-light travel. Once your suspension of disbelief goes so far as to allow FTL, trying to do things like energy calculations is just silly.
You also have no clue at all what the value of livestock might be in an interstellar economy. If that livestock is key to allowing a colony to thrive on a planet, it could be very valuable.
And ancient projectile weapons? I'm sorry, my suspension of disbelief only goes so far
So you have no problem with FTL, which is something that is, as far as we know currently, impossible, but having some people using projectile weapons while others use more sophisticated weapons bothers you? Even though if you just look around on Earth, you can find societies that still use rocks and pointed sticks?
This is one of the things that Firefly got right that most other science fiction gets wrong--technology is too uniform in most science fiction. Based on a couple thousand years of Earth history, it is far more believable to have a wide range of technology.