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The Browncoats Rise Again
The Original, One and Only, Hippy of Death writes "There's an interesting read posted on The Weekly Standard website talking about Joss Whedon and the unusual marketing campaign he is waging for the upcoming Serenity/Firefly movie." From the article: "It was ignored and abandoned, and the story should end there--but it doesn't. Because the people who made the show and the people who saw the show--which is, roughly, the same number of people--fell in love with it a little bit. Too much to let it go. . . . In Hollywood, people like that are called unrealistic, quixotic, obsessive. In my world, they're called Browncoats."
... and yeah, pretty much everything the article says is right. (How often does that happen?) The crowd was much less over the top than, say, the stereotypical Star Wars / Star Trek / LOTR opening night crowd; very few costumes. We were there to see the movie, and we did, and we walked out grinning from ear to ear. It's great stuff.
Oh, it's not perfect yet (lots of editing still to be done, I think) but it was still, in its unfinished form, the best movie I've seen in a long time. And the fact that Whedon et al. are actually paying attention to the fans -- treating us as part of the effort of making the movie instead of $TARGET_DEMOGRAPHIC -- is really damn cool.
It occurs to me that what's happening with Firefly/Serenity is very similar to what happened with Star Trek way back when. The fans basically kept alive what was originally considered a failed series for over ten years between the cancellation of the series and the greenlight for the first movie. We should count ourselves lucky that things moved faster this time around.
Anyway. This is some of the best storytelling you'll ever see on screen. Don't miss it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I really liked it until the last 3 or 4 minutes.
I hope that they change the ending before the final release.
Having the bad guy behave the way he did at the end cheapened the whole 'believe in something' theme that they were trying to push throughout the movie.
It was totally weak for the guy to change his entire world view based on one unsubstantiated news clip.
Other than that, I thought that movie kicked ass.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
I thought a long time about what I'd seen after a four hour drive home from a preview showing, and the main thought I came up with is this. We live in very uncertain times and the main attraction of Firefly that inspired its cult following was the comfort of a family that would weather all dangers. That comfort is gone in this movie. It is a GREAT movie, but it somewhat lacks the core quality that drew people to Firefly in the first place. SO, whether this is just a better than average movie release or the beginning of the pop cultural phenom the fans had hoped it would be remains to be seen.
The episode you saw (also titled Serenity, IIRC) was neither the worst nor the best of the series, but it happened to be one that required having watched a good deal of the series to really get into that particular storyline. This is a problem with a lot of Whedon's work, actually -- not a problem for serious fans, of course, but it does sometimes put off the more casual viewer. OTOH, the long, intricate story arcs in all of his series are one of the reasons the guy has so many dedicated fans, so it cuts both ways. He's telling stories, not episodes; if a story takes one episode to tell, that's great, but he'll also tell it in ten episodes if needed.
;)
If you're willing to give Firefly another shot, I'd recommend finding someone who has the DVD boxed set, and watching the series premiere (the real premiere, the two-hour one, not the fairly mediocre episode that Fox actually showed first) and then, if you like it, watching the rest of the episodes in sequence.
What's so great about it? Well, for me, it's pretty much the same stuff I think is so great about all of Whedon's work to date: terrific dialogue, immensely likable characters, intricate storytelling, and a willingness both to use cliches as needed and then discard them the instant they're no longer useful. Buffy, Angel, and Firefly all managed to surprise me, repeatedly, just when I thought I was being led down a familiar path. Hardly any TV shows ever do that, and few enough movies.
It's the characters who make it work, ultimately. You may not always agree with them, or admire them, or even understand them, but you like them, and you care what happens to them. They're not archetypes; they are, even when they're fighting vampires or flying spaceships, people you feel like you could sit down and have a beer with. This is Whedon's great talent, and it's what keeps his fans coming back to his work.
Not sure if this answer is un-cult-like enough for you, but it's what I've got.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Once upon a time, there was a TV show that was very popular with the geek crowd. It was cancelled two seasons in, then resurrected for one final season (in the worst time slot possible). The fans refused to keep quiet, so four years later the studio created a really bland animated version of the show. That didn't shut them up either; fans still demanded more. Ten years after the show went off the air, a theatrical movie was released. Even though it was a special effects showcase loosely held together with an unlikely plot and really wooden acting, it was financially successful enough that Paramount studios finally gave in and decided that they'd let the fans shower them with money for the next twenty-five years.
I think it's great that Joss found a way to bring back Firefly, but I wonder if the press is taking this serisously is because they've burnt themselves out from thirty-five years of mocking the people who kept Star Trek alive (after a fashion).
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
Fox delibrately purchases sci-fi series so it can shoot them in the foot. Which it did to Firefly. It was delibrately destroyed, played in the wrong order, preempted by random shit, not promoted at all.
It's not the least bit surprising you hadn't heard of it.
It had the potential to be the next Buffy, minus the weird image problem Buffy has to this day. Get rid of the silly name, get rid of the silly premise, get rid of the much mocked manner of speakage, keep the important concepts. Instead of the 'best show you're not watching', maybe people would watch it. (And there were a lot of Buffy fans to pull in. Except, of course, Fox never purchased any ads during Buffy or Angel to actually locate them. Not that ads would do any good when you move the damn show around.)
Or it could have been the next Star Trek, written by someone who actually understands characters and plot. (The next next Star Trek, I guess, as B5 would be the next one.)
Or, hell, fans would have settled for a cult classic.
Instead the show got cancelled before all the episodes ever aired. It is possibly unique in TV history for being canceled before the pilot aired, because they showed the episodes out of order.
The only reason anyone heard of it is that fans pestered the studio for months. Not to renew the series, which is hopeless, but to release the DVDs....which they then proceeded to purchase like madmen. They didn't manage to break any records I'm aware of, but they did manage to convince the studio the movie would sell.
And people like it for different reasons, so it's nearly impossible to explain.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It starts with Mal clutching a piece of machinery, then falling to the deck where his blood drips through the grate. Followed by a flashback to when he buys Serenity (the ship) and enlists the crew (not the passengers, whose enlistment is depicted in "Serenity" the pilot).
"Out of Gas" is the best episode in the series, but only if you've watched all the ones leading up to it and so have an attachment to all the characters already. It is the worst episode to watch first.
100 posts and a +5 mod for the parent, yet I'm the first one to point this out. Does that seem right to you?