Just in time to ease you through the summer TV doldrums!
Act One (”Wheee!”) of Joss Whedon’s musical web-series, Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion is now available online. Act Two (”OMG!”) is coming on Thursday and Act Three (”Denouement!”) on Saturday.
Don’t dawdle, since the episodes will only be available for free until Sunday, July 20. Read Whedon’s Master Plan for more details on what to do then and how you can support the Doctor Horrible crew.
[Extremely Mild Spoilers Below.]
[OK, barely spoilers at all, but go watch it first just in case.]
We’ll be talking about this in the vlog, but, for now, I’ll share a few notes I took while watching. (Yes, I do have conversations with myself in my notes.)
- The first scene, straight from Doctor Horrible’s personal vlog, reminds me of the opening scene of The Guild. Or is that just because both star Felicia Day? Both scenes share a certain quirkiness, but Harris’s Horrible doesn’t have the same punch as Day’s Codex. Whatever I mean by that.
- Laundromat. Bored now. It’s only the first song, but I have “Once More with Feeling”-sized expectations! OK, that’s totally unfair. You can’t compare your emotional attachment to characters from the sixth season of your favorite show to the characters in Act One of a 45-minute web series.
- Hey! They got to re-use some of the old Firefly costumes. Nice reaction from Doctor Horrible after the threat “or he’ll make you his mare”.
- Wonderflonium! Ha!
- OK, I like that little song of Penny’s. Is that really Felicia Day singing?
- Doctor Horrible has a Horrible Van Remote iPhone app! I was hoping I’d find it in the iTunes store as part of a viral marketing scheme or something, but no such luck.
- The dialogue between Penny and Horrible is a lot more fun than Horrible’s monologue in the first scene. Maybe that’s what I meant by “punch”.
- And starring Nathan Fillion as Zapp Brannigan as Captain Hammer. I like it.
- Balls.
Nutshell: weak start, wonderflonium, Horrible Van Remote, Zapp Brannigan, balls.
If you haven’t seen it yet, head over to Dark Horse Presents on MySpace to read “Captain Hammer: Be Like Me”, a mini-comic preview for Joss Whedon’s Doctor Horrible’s Sing Along-Blog, starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day.
Now the trailer we saw a couple of weeks ago is starting to make more sense!
[Via Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog Blog and Mary (Thanks, Mary!)]
We didn’t mean to do it, but Joss Whedon turns up a lot in this week’s episode:
- Headlines: Sarah Michelle Gellar’s favorite male roles, Doctor Horrible gets a trailer
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8, Volume 2: “No Future for You” and “Anywhere but Here”
- The Astonishing X-Men: Volume 4; Also Whedon.
- Pride High; No Whedon.
- Doctor Who: “Silence in the Library”
- Solar Flare; Yeah we also found a Whedon reference there somehow.
- Wonder Showzen
- Frameline: The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman
- The 9 Greatest Bi and Gay Female Characters in the Sci-Fi/Geek World
All this and Marc’s tour of San Francisco comics shops.
In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the trailer for Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog that we mention in the episode:
Our NY Comic-Con spectacular-palooza-thon episode is now up at AfterElton.com. We recorded it last week, so adjust the temporal references accordingly!
In this episode:
- Headlines: Gay Metalheads Rejoice; Superheroes’ Domestic Partners, Whedon Alumni Update; Manazons
- NY Comic-Con: The Sexual Orientation Game; Tim Fish; Sticky Pages panel on gays in comics
- Stuff We Read: (Young Bottoms in Love; Justice Society of America)
- Stuff We Watch: (Battlestar Galactica: “The Ties That Bind”; Torchwood: “Exit Wounds”; Reaper: “Rebellion”)
- Review: Milo Ventimiglia plays gay in Cursed
- New addition to the Gallery of Gay Action Figure
Be sure to read Marc’s review on AfterElton. We also posted some of our photos on our Facebook page. If you were at Comic-Con, post your photos too!
The Guild is a web sitcom about a group of gamers who make up The Knights of Good in a World-of-Warcraft-style MMORPG. The moments of character development that pop up here and there add a lot to the series, so I’ll hold back on describing the characters:
- Codex is a little like Willow without the witchcraft. Or the lesbianism. The episodes mostly revolve around her, and each one opens with a short and funny (to those of us who make our own fun) entry in her web-cam diary.
- ZABOO’s mis-interpretation an emoticon (and the ensuing crush) drive a lot of the plot. If I were 10 years younger and a foot shorter, I think I’d have a little crush on him myself. Well, at least up until episode 5 or so. Do you remember how Sarah, Saffy’s friend from Absolutely Fabulous, played by Torchwood’s Naoko Mori, went from sweet, shy girl to raving lunatic over the course of the show? It’s sort of like that. Here’s a sapphic Sarah clip if you haven’t seen it (you haven’t seen it?):
- BLADEZZ is the guild’s rogue and does his best to live up to his avatar.
- Vork is the leader of the guild. He’s older than the others and kind of creepy, IMHO.
- Clara is an absent-minded, pleasantly plump, mother of three who became my favorite character after about the fourth episode. You should see the way she treats those kids!
- TINKERBALLA, who always has a Nintendo DS in hand, is what you would call “fierce” or “bitchy”, depending on your social leanings. You should see the way she treats Clara’s kids!
At the beginning of the series, the guild members have still never met IRL, but in “Episode 3: The Macro Problem”, they have brunch face-to-face to discuss a guild problem: BLADEZZ had been banned for spamming a chat room with “fag”. He literally LOLs the whole situation, but I think the series itself stayed well on the funnier side of offensive. It upsets Vork because he wants to maintain The Knights of Good’s untarnished reputation for, well, good. Codex objects that it’s “not cool” and that her father had “turned gay”.
“And her ex-boyfriend too,” quips Clare.
Here’s “Episode 1: The Wake-Up Call”:
There are currently eight episodes available, but the official website says:
We’ve taken our Paypal donate button down for Season 1. Thank you so much to each and every donor! As soon as preparations are made for Season 2 we will replace it!
If Felicia Day, who plays Codex, looks familiar to you, it might be because she also played a slayerette named Vi in a little TV show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You can’t say Joss Whedon isn’t loyal to his actors: she’ll be starring in his upcoming musical web series Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog with Neil Patrick Harris and Nathan Fillion.
[Via Slate Cultural Gabfest]
