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First Clip from Firefly Movie to be Shown at Comic-Con
Snaller writes "It's almost a tradition. At Comic-Con a few years back, Joss Whedon showed a stunned audience the first clip from Serenity, the pilot for his new show Firefly. Although the movie isn't due to open until April 22nd next year, Whedon is ready to show the first clip from from Serenity, the motion picture based on the Firefly series. He'll do it this weekend at Comic-Con, also present will be the cast from the series/movie (all 9 actors), editor Lisa Lassek, special effects guru Loni Peristere and producer Chris Buchanan.
It will take place on Sunday July 25th, 1-2pm, Room 20, afterwards there will be a signing session in room 28DE.
This was reported on what used to be the official Fox board, by the user 'AffableChap' which has previously been confirmed to be Chris Buchanan."
Lets wait for something to happen three times before declaring it a part of our regular cultural fabric, eh?
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
film based on strangely good space western - funny, good plot, character development. Neat fx, more millenium falcon bucket of bolts style future, than super shiny trek style. So of course it got yanked after 1 season. Didn't help that the episodes weren't shown in order, and not all shown on TV at all.
Bunch of rogues, misfits, escort, etc. on a mission to line their own pockets, and not get killed by whoever they bump into that week. You can pick it up on DVD.
Cowboys-in-space, what a stupid concept. Lifted straight from a fake American dream. Had nothing interesting, no proper stoyline, no intriquing science-fiction element.
To address your comments 1 at a time:
Cowboys-in-space. Cowboys doesn't seem quite right -- more kind of bandits. But you got the general feel, at least.
Stupid concept. I'll agree there -- it really didn't seem to work right, and this is probably one of the reasons so few people watched it first time around. It feels dumb.
Had nothing interesting. I think the characters were interesting, and that was enough to make me watch; after all, there are a lot of very popular shows where the characters are the only thing even approximately out of the ordinary.
No proper storyline. How many episodes did you watch before coming to this conclusion?
No intriguing science-fiction element. Well, that's hard to judge -- a character who's been turned prescient-but-slightly-crazy by medical experimentation? I think that counts. It's probably the only one, though, and is soft SF at that. Yeah, sorry, it's not hard SF.
But, guess what, other people have different tastes, and resent your suggestion that they shouldn't be allowed to indulge them. If you don't like it, don't watch it. Nobody's forcing you.
You mean like the hyper-realistic Star Trek $FLAVOR_OF_THE_DECADE? Maybe Farscape? Anything involving a Spaceship, aliens, languages that stopped evolving? Teleporters? Touch screen interfaces that never have fingerprints on them?
It's sci-fi, not a documentary. And while there are some minor plot elements that I still question (even as a huge fan of the show) overall Joss does a much better job of a painting a future universe than most ever have.
It seems that you haven't even watched the show. They aren't just "flying around in space", they are taking whatever job they can just so that they can continue to fly!
They make it painfully obvious that it IS expensive to run the ship, and that most of the time they are just scraping by. In fact in the pilot, they can't afford a replacement for a critical part, and it come back to haunt them further in the season. They are excited when the preacher has fresh vedgetables and spices. Because they generally eat crap.
Try actually watching the show, before criticizing. I looks like all the knowledge you gathered about the show came from a 30 second commerical you might have seen a few years ago.
Most of the plots would be exactly the same (e.g. the train robbery).
I think the train robbery was pretty clearly the hand of the studio at work. We know that it got moved up from something like 10th to replace the planned debut, because the studio wanted something more straightforward (read: predictable) to hook viewers. That alone probably helped doom Firefly; it started in the middle with characters we knew nothing about, but with an episode that presumed a bit was already known.
I think it would have been even better to just do a Western-set "historical" series (with fantasy elements)
You're assuming that the raison d'etre for Firefly was to explore fantasy elements in a western setting. I don't think that's true; I think that Firefly was meant to explore the question of frontiers - with the viewer in a present that is, for the first time in centuries, without convenient frontiers to escape from society to. We've got the ocean and space left, and neither of those is accessible to the types that have historically pushed out frontiers and rewritten society's code.
I think Firefly was meant to think about where we're going rather than where we've been. How well it did that is another question (not terribly well) and it's unclear how much that was Whedon and how much that was studio influence.
Unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Whedon use some obviously unrealistic settings in order to tell some very realistic stories about being human. Unlike almost all other TV which use some apparently realistic settings to tell very unrealistic stories about humans.
Firefly had the markings of a show that could have been great, had it not been for the interference from the network and the premature death.
why did he set it in space
Because there are things with a small ship setting that you can't do with a land setting. For instance, once they're "in space" there's nowhere for anyone to go; characters are forced to deal with interpersonal problems, which means more involved dialogue. It would have been difficult IMHO to make a series where the characters were in a small sailing ship trading up and down the west coast of the US in the 1800s. For a start, if they're never far from the coast, you lose the plot device of isolation - events in one location are far less separate when people can move on land almost as fast as a ship can sail.
Remember, Firefly isn't Star Trek. There is no stupid technobabble, this is a show about PEOPLE not technology. There isn't always a happy ending and a moral to the story. It's no Babylon 5 with pretensions at deciding the entire fate of the species then wrapping up neatly at the end of the series, it's just about the lives and fate of ordinary folk living on the outskirts of civilization. It's no "weird for the sake of weird" Farscape or Lexx. Whedon is to be applauded to the originality he'd brought to both Western and sci-fi genres.
Its this kind of elitism that makes people wonder why theres so much shitty sci-fi out there
As compared to your obnoxious arrogance?
Sci-fi is popular and everywhere.
You're delusional. In terms of movie and book sales, scifi/fantasy comprise a very small portion of the total amount. Reason? *Most people don't care for scifi or fantasy*.
But once again you think your personal opinion is actual fact, regardless of evidence to the contrary.
In other words, glass housing is relative and you're setting yourself up for a fall defending some show, especially when TV entertainment is so very subjective.
And yet you have no problem screaming "Firefly sucks!" every chance you get. So which is it? Moron or hypocrite? Or both?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
>Cowboys doesn't seem quite right -- more kind of bandits.
Hmmm...Sidearms modeled after long-barreled cap and ball Smith and Wesson revolvers, worn low on the hip in gunslinger rigs, at least one episode where people are riding horses and wearing dusters and cowboy hats, they actually haul cows as cargo, and so on. Since I own horses and ride a lot, I don't see any of this as a bad thing. The Firefly universe is a bit seedy, but it works. You not only get westerns, but a bit of Dickens thrown in as well.As parent notes, the characters worked. The Ron Glass character was developing nicely, as was the very messed up River. And, I would be happy to sit for hours and watch Jewel Staite do anything, anything at all. Seriously too bad the show got cancelled. It had some real potential.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
The yous in those sentences don't all refer to the same entities.
Most of the show takes place in the outer worlds, recently settled and far away from civilisation. Also, there was a civil war (the captain fought on the losing side), and the formerly independent worlds are in a state similar to the Southern states after the US Civil War (the South was not a nice place to live during the Reconstruction).
So yes, in the firefly universe, there is high technology, like FTL travel or cloning, but only the inner worlds have it... and we don't see those worlds often in the series (and when we do, there aren't any cowboys or 1850's tech).
In case you can't tell, I really like the show, looking forward to the movie.
When it was first described to me as a space western, I thought I'd hate it (all I could think of was Battlestar Galactica, which is exactly like a western, basically about a wagon train in space)... but Firefly got my attention in a way that no TV show has since Blake's 7 (which I recommend to anyone who likes Firefly and doesn't mind terrible BBC special effects from the 1970s).
You have the technology to go faster than light. You have the energy to take a ship out of a damn deep gravity well w/o sweating and you don't have the technology to breed cattle from embryos and you have to ship it around in a spaceship which is full of forementioned technology.
We have the technology to go faster than sound, we have the energy to take a ship out of the damn deep gravity well, we have the technology to breed cattle from frozen embryos.
Doesn't mean everyone has the budget for it.
Have you ever been faster than sound? Or out of the gravity well? Why not? You have the technology don't you?
You know that right now, on this planet, there are people eating genetically altered foods grown hydroponically while working on the latest fusion rector designs, while somewhere else, on this very planet, someone is planting rice, by hand, and worrying about the health of the family donkey? A donkey they need to get their rice to the market! What will they do if the donkey dies? Use a fusion reactor to move their rice from their crappy hand-built hovel to the market?
Similarly, you have a ship which can go in space but your "cowboy mates" still sit in 1850s kitchen to have their lunch.
It just doesn't work.
Yes, because, as soon as you invent FTL travel, you have no more need for a gorram kichen table.
Look at us now, its the 21st century, we have telecommunications satellites and doors that open by themselves when you walk up to them. No one, no where, uses wooden tables anymore!
Personal anecdote:
I once took a jet plane to mexico, from the airport I rode in an air conditioned pick-up to a comfy solar-powered fith-wheel trailer in a camp ground. There, I watched as vacheros (mexican cow boys) on horses hurded their cows to the nearby village.
According to your logic, this is impossible. If we have the technology for jet propulsion airplanes, therefore everyone on the planet is rich enough to afford all the latest technology and will therefore never EVER again ride on a horse (a self-replicating, self-refulling, edible, semi-autonomous all terrain vehicle) to herd cows (self replicating food sources that can be used as farm equipment AND that fertilises the very soil it uses to feed itself). As soon as a commercial spaceship goes on sale, WHAM, all of humanity stops herding cows.
I mean, as soon as someone invents something high-tech, humanity as a whole has no more use for its low-tech predecessors. Right?
And right now, as throughout all of history, some people live in high-tech luxury, while others have to run barefoot for hours to find barely-drinkable water. They think a fat insect is a feast. They struggle to scratch a living off the dry dirt they had the misfortune be born on, or were displaced to forcibly by well-armed thugs. This is reality: People are poor, people are uneducated, dirty, desperate, while others are rich, educated, comfortable and well fed. Any other setting is unrealistic. Having very rich people in one place and very poor people in another, THAT is realistic.
You can't take the sky from me...