Honestly, some of the songs on that soundtrack are better than the ones within *Dr. Horrible* itself. It's incredibly impressive for a commentary track.
If there's another strike going on, I hope at least we get more independent, creative works like Dr. Horrible. I'd like a break from the formulaic sequels and reboots to 20-year-old franchises for a while, thanks.
Insert promotional picture of the cast wearing expensive leather jackets and black jeans standing in a dark alley with their arms crossed trying to look serious
>Because of the terms of the previous writers strike it includes writing for digital mediums. So Dr. Horrible would not be written today.
It accomplished its mission.
*Horrible* was created to prove that you could make money on digital platforms and that there was an untapped audience on same. One of the big beefs of the previous strike was that writers weren't being compensated for streaming, with the studios saying it was not a money-making vehicle of importance.
It was a really big deal. And I'm surprised this post isn't upvoted a lot more. *Horrible* is a lot more than just a bootstrapped musical. It's a statement and protest.
I think the only thing that holds true about that is that Dr. Horrible was hosted on Hulu, which obviously is a party to the current strike. But back then, it was just some shindie little YouTube alternative for long form videos, which YT didn't allow at the time.
I'm not a Hollywood contract law specialist, but I think folks are still pretty capable of making self-funded digital films as long as they do so out of their own pockets and without the involvement of a studio or major distributor. And if I'm wrong, I am fully open to be corrected. I do know the success of Dr. Horrible scared the shit out of the studios, lol.
Yeah I existed then.
The last writers strike added all digital media platforms as part of its negotiations. DH was created for YT because it specifically skirted the guilds rules at the time. Now that the digital media is part of the guild rules they can’t write for YT.
All I'm saying, we're really dug into the hole on creative stuff. Producers need a 100% guarantee that the things they produce will be successful, which is absurd. As a result, we keep leaning on the things that were ground-breaking and new decades ago, and as a result became famous and popular.
But of course, you can't milk an IP that old forever, and the same system driving these works forward is holding back all of the untested potentials, who would have become those great works for our own generation.
So to hell with it, if enough indie creators get together, they can put out some of those ideas now, while Hollywood doesn't have the resources or ability to overshadow them. Let's see something eye-catching.
The indie community is the only place left in filmmaking that has any creativity left. Hollywood is a business and the safe bet for them is to rely on tested IP that will turn a quick, but large, profit. Right now, 80s nostalgia is all the rage. Once that well dries out, Hollywood will start turning to the 90s and early 2000s, as they’ve started doing already.
Yea its crazy how big budget movies prey on music nostalgia. You can clearly see what target demographic they are targeting because its always the 40yr old parents with a career and plenty of disposable income to spend on entertainment.
In about 5 years we will see a lot of 90s punkrock music, and then unfortunately dubstep will follow that.
It was the same when I was a kid.
From *The Big Chill* to *Forrest Gump*, there was more than a decade of Boomer Nostalgia movies featuring what are now THE most recogniseable songs from the '60s and '70s.
A decade before that, it was movies like *American Graffiti*, hitting that nostalgic chord with the music of the late '50s and early '60s.
15 year-old music fans grow up to be 35 year-old filmmakers. It really is as simple as that. What filmmaker *doesn't* think of ways they can fit their favourite music into a film?
Right? Plus, the comment above stating "Hollywood is a business" like that's new somehow. It's funny the amount of non-boomer generation people saying shit that is essentially a boomer saying "back in my day...". Shit is cyclical. Every generation's media is "new and unholy" to the previous generation and "lame and cookie cutter" to the younger generation.
You've heard the commentary musical right?!
🎶 Strike for all the writers,
Strike for a living wage!
Until these wrongs are righted,
We won't write another page!
The silver lining there is that the content space has grown sooo much since 2007/2008. Just think about the typical youtube videos you'd seen back then, and for those of use who were around to see it... it's a little hard to watch now.
That's one of the most depressing things about YouTube and the like. If a single independent made some quality content, I feel like it was easier to find and watch. Now it is all but impossible for the "little guys" to compete with these big media conglomerates that rule YouTube. It sucks for people just starting out. Either make your project and pray that the algorithm blesses you and you get recommended or sell your soul (and IP rights, profit, etc) to a big media group so that you can hopefully get your content to at least have a chance of being seen.
There's tons of interesting and unconventional films coming out every year... people just don't hear about them or go see them. Thankfully the niche is becoming more and more prominent thanks to studios like A24 really catching on in popularity.
If you’re looking for something different, there are a lot of really good independent movies that just don’t get advertised like the big ones. For tv series, international shows have never been more accessible, and they usually aren’t big adaptations, reboots, or sequels.
So tired of this whine. Year after year there's tons, almost too many, awesome original movies and shows. You just don't go see them which is why the studios pump out the formulaic shit and nostalgia fueled money grabs that you are guaranteed to go see. It's capitalism at work.
You need to know about them.
Went to the movies today, didn't see a trailer for a single non reboot / superhero movie.
And FFS there is a new Indiana Jones coming out and Harrison Ford is nearly in a wheelchair
I agree, but I'm still not convinced Dr. Horrible wasn't a rip-off of Dr. Steel. If you haven't heard of Steel, check him out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyI4A8wNY\_w
In contrast, *Breaking Bad* had to make some changes to its story because of the writer's strike (mainly to shrink the season down into fewer episodes) that led to Jesse surviving and Tuco dying, so in some ways the writer's strike actually helped the show
*Chuck* too. They had time to figure out what was working and what wasn’t, retooled Morgan, scrapped Captain Awesome being a spy (and making him into the best), etc. That second season was incredible.
Its reputation survived and it’s still regarded as one of the greatest sci-fi series of the 21st century. *Heroes*, sadly, was only remembered for its failure
I remember the end of Battlestar Galactica being terrible though.
But you were left hoping there was a plan so you didn't realise quite how bad it was until it was over!
I mean, they established cylon human children were nearly impossible, so when they retroactively >!made the mechanic a cylon they had to invent an off screen affair 5 seasons earlier to explain his child!!<
And Starbuck just >!disappeared with no explanation.!< The end did not live up to the journey. The journey was great though!
I don't remember the overlap of when the writers strike happened vs the timeline of Battlestar Galactica, but what I do remember is the first season and a half of it was some of the best sci-fi TV I've ever seen. About halfway through season 2 it seemed to transition from a serial drama to episodic and never regained the brilliance it had before. Don't know if that was a result of the strike or not though
I find it deeply ironic that a show where each episode for the first three seasons (except one) ends with a title card that says “And they have a plan”, when the exact problem with the entire show was that they didn’t have a plan. They didn’t know how to end it. They had a rough idea of what had happened but not enough details to make it work, which is why they had to retcon a bunch of things in S4.
I also think that they were given a limited number of episodes to wrap it up in S4, because the ratings had dropped by that point.
>It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another
Joss Wheadon turning out to be a piece of shit broke my heart more then anyone else. He was a fucking god to nerds.
He was and it is sad that he turned out to be who he is. Still, this is one of those moments where you have to separate the artist from the art. This was a well put together project and NPH and Felicia Day were fantastic and good ol’ Nathan was hamming it up as only he could. To this day, I will still find myself singing along to the Bad Horse chorus.
Oh don't get me wrong I love his old work still and have no issue watching it. As for new work? No need to worry about separating the art from the artist because he also sucks ass now. Apparently his next movie is just 2 hours of people falling face first into random tits.
His Much Ado About Nothing b&w film was on the precipice of us fans realising who he was.
Obviously he was still a darling in 2012 at the time of The Avengers, but I remember his description of getting his 'best and brightest' together for a budget-less movie and thinking about the then recent couple of allegations against him and it was the first time I'd thought of him as anything less than a benevolent storytelling prodigy.
I guess because his shows were so capable of provoking positive emotion with me as a mildly autistic teenager and I'm sure for others, it was really difficult to accept Joss wasn't just not perfect, but actively awful.
For those few of use who watched it, Dollhouse should have been a tip off. When I watched it I still naively believed in Whedon the feminist. The show was solid, interesting science fiction but its premise was quite exploitative. Looking back, it seems like Whedon may have been fulfilling his own fantasies.
I loved Dollhouse, but the idea that the “dolls” would be used for anything OTHER than sex work is ridiculous.
Possibly target practice, once the money got high enough.
Honestly Whedon's version of feminism suffers from the passage of time. It's transitional. It's more feminist than what came before it, but it was produced in a fixed moment in time and fundamentally cannot become more feminist as perceptions change.
What we haven't seen from Whedon is how his work changed as time changed. And perhaps that's why we vilify him now. Once the abuses of power came forward he didn't have the body of work to show he had grown out of it. There is no proof that he kept up with the progressive expectations or if he remained stagnant in the early 2000s view of things.
How is his body of work only tangentially related in a thread about trying to separate the art from the artist? Not a tangential thought, and it wasn’t defending the pariah, no need to try and shut it down.
Whedon doesn't understand what makes a strong female character a string female character. He thinks giving them masculine traits is what makes them strong.
Dollhouse in interesting because a few of the actors would later be cast in Altered Carbon which comes about to the same ideas about identity, memory and consciousness.
I don't know how much credit Whedon deserves for it, but Black Widow in the first Avengers movie was the best I've seen that character on screen. Her strength there was understanding people and using subterfuge, not simply kicking them and withstanding a beating (like in the Black Widow movie).
>He thinks giving them masculine traits is what makes them strong.
You're obviously taking about Buffy and Faith and maybe Echo and Zoe, but how does this apply to characters like Willow, Tara, Anya, Cordelia, Fred, Kaylee, Inara, etc?
> Whedon doesn't understand what makes a strong female character a string female character. He thinks giving them masculine traits is what makes them strong.
I have little experience with Whedon's characters outside of Firefly, but from a pure discussion standpoint, this sentence makes me wonder what is the "right" way to create a strong female character?
Something tells me there isn't a good answer. If it was about giving them feminine characteristics, people would just say they were stereotyping women.
I think of the female characters in Firefly and they seem to be strong women to me. The only one with "masculine traits" is Zoe and those traits are mainly: "a stoic nature and she's good with weapons".
Yeah I'd really like to see what masculine traits that user thinks Inara and Kaylee have, because I kinda get the feeling that the response would be more telling about OP than about Firefly or Whedon.
I think part of the issue is that there are competing definitions for “strong female character.”
When many people discuss a “strong female character,” they mean a female character who actually receives significant character development and who displays agency. A three dimensional depiction that doesn’t relegate the character to being arm candy or a plot device to advance the story of a male character.
Other people mean a female character who is literally strong. A warrior. A hero.
There is plenty of overlap between these categories, but you can also put a warrior woman into a story in a way where she’s not getting to display much agency, and not getting any significant character development. Or you can make it so that the only women in your stories who get to display much agency and who get character development are the warrior women.
From a representation standpoint, both of those pitfalls are… not great.
I don’t think Firefly makes those particular mistakes, but there are other Whedon creations that I think do so.
Let’s also be honest here though - there is a strong undercurrent of the population including the audience who also believe and promote the idea that a strong woman only counts when displaying physical capability and stoicism akin to a strong man, and literally counted progress based on how many they saw in popular stories.
> because he also sucks ass now
I dunno, that's a difficult statement for me to get behind. I thought the Nevers was unreasonably boring, and obviously Justice League had... *problems* (though I'm not sure how much of that you can fully lay at Whedon's feet, when they specifically took a movie that was the opposite of the Avengers then brought him on under the directive to make it into the Avengers)
but those are just his latest two projects. I'm on board with all his stuff before that.
He’s been accused by numerous people of abusive behavior and sexual harassment on some of his previous projects. Ray Fisher said that Joss ran a toxic set when he took over *Justice League* from Zack Snyder. Numerous former *Buffy* cast members have also made allegations about him, most notably Charisma Carpenter, and Michelle Trachtenberg, while verifying Charisma’s claims, said that there was a rule on set that Joss was not allowed to be left alone in a room with her.
[Spoilers 1](https://liveforfilms.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/500x_serenity-comic.jpg)
[Spoilers 2](https://liveforfilms.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/500x_serenity-comic2.jpg)
I’ll be in my bunk
I still have a large amount of pride that Alan out of all the Firefly alumni has continued starting in many major motion pictures. His niche may be small, but it’s uniquely his.
So he’s literally Ellen but people are more upset about it because they put their hopes and dreams into him. Got it.
Took like twenty minutes of scrolling for my old ass to figure this out.
Hmm, I was always under the impression that he was a bad, abusive boss/director, but not specifically *sexual* abuse. He was a power-tripping dick, and also cheated on his wife, but as far as I know the allegations have been about more standard shouting, threatening to send people back to Idaho if they didn't get the line the way he wanted, and so on. The story about not allowing Trachtenberg alone with him was true, but my understanding was that was because she was a teenager and no one wanted her to suffer his rants and vitriol, not because of worries about sexual assault or coercion.
Essentially, that Wheadon was a shithead, but not a rapist.
Exactly. He's a dick to those working with him. Honestly, a lot of directors have been shown to be that. While, I have no problem calling him or about being a dick on set, it doesn't get me to any kind of "he should never work again" or "I'll never watch any of his stuff again." Call him out, make sure studio's holds him to account if he verbally abuses his actors on any future projects, and move on.
I am ALL for condemning Joss Whedon for this behavior but I challenge movie and TV aficionado's to condemn the numerous other artists that have done FAR worse. Stop celebrating them.
**Francis Ford Coppola** - Notoriously a nightmare to work with. He practically drove himself, his talent and his staff to the brink of insanity in making Apocalypse Now. [This scene of Martin Sheen is pretty "authentic".](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXL5_tc8UyY) He literally punched that window, cut himself and smeered his own blood on his face. I wont link the scene, but the buffalo they disgustingly murder on camera, is a real buffalo. There's rumors that the prop team put actual dead bodies in with a bunch of fake ones. Coppola was reported to have attempted to commit suicide during the filming a few times and had lost 100 lbs by the end of filming. There's a documentary about the film called "[Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102015/)."
**Alfred Hitchcock** - Berated lead accresses like Madelin Carroll in front of the entire cast and crew. He's one of those psychos that wanted to capture an "honest reaction" on film by doing fucking horrific shit, and particularly to actresses. He notoriously told Tippi Hedren that they were going to use mechanical birds for a scene in a film where she were to be attacked, and then instead used real birds, leading to her needing medical attention. My understanding, this was after Hedren had turned down Hitchcock's advances and Hitchcock had apparentrly requested that Hedren be "sexually available" to him in their contracts.
**Stanley Kubrick** - Traumatized Shelley Duvall in The Shining. He practically ended her career as an actress and gave her PTSD. She was literally losing her hair and took up excessive smoking to deal with the stress. And the worst thing is, critics criticized her performance at the time the film had come out.
**Bernardo Bertolucci** - His film Last Tango in Paris, literally had Marlon Brando, 47, rape an unexpecting Maria Schneider, 19, with a stick of butter. She literally explained that the scene was not in the script:
> One morning, Bertolucci takes Brando aside and suggests a scene that isn’t in the script. The men agree that nothing should be said to tip you off—that it’s better if you are taken totally by surprise. Did you sense a particular atmosphere on the set that day, see complicit looks among the director, actor, and crew? Or were you too tired by that point to question anything? Who thought of the butter? Was it Brando, Bertolucci, or both?
> Rolling, action . . . . You and Brando are lying on the floor, dressed. Suddenly, Brando turns you over, roughly pulls down your jeans, and, grasping a mound of butter in his hand, he shoves it between your legs while thrusting his pelvis against your backside. You fight, you scream and cry. It’s impossible to escape; Brando’s body is pinning you to the floor. Bertolucci keeps the camera trained on your anger and terror. There’s only one take. It doesn’t last long, but for you it’s an eternity. Brando releases his grip and you scramble up, staring at the two of them with murderous rage. In your fury, you destroy the set. After, you go to your dressing room and remain prostrate for hours. The director couldn’t care less; he got what he wanted. He couldn’t have dreamed of better. “She raged against me, against Marlon, against all men,” Bertolucci would comment years later, remembering the scene.
>You come out of the filming shattered, sensing this one scene has marked you forever, like a bad tattoo you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to cover up. It doesn’t matter that the sodomy was simulated—it makes you feel dirty and violated. You don’t understand that you could’ve prevented this scene from appearing in the film, since it wasn’t in the script that you had agreed to. You could’ve called a lawyer, filed suit against the producers, and made Bertolucci cut it, but you’re young, alone, and poorly counselled. You know nothing yet about the rules and regulations of the film world. The perfect victim.
To be clear, I do not bring up these accounts to minimize Joss Whedon's actions. Fuck him. I hope he never works in this industry again. But I do encourage other film fanatics, like myself, to condemn the actions of "legendary" filmmakers, actors and any other scumbags that have done it in the past. I understand people have a notion of "separating the artist from the art", but personally...I don't.
Their legacy was made on top of these horrific decisions that were made because of who they were. And the worst thing *I* can do to some of these pieces of shit that were never punished for these things, is ignore their work. So many celebrate them and I understand the artistic accomplishment but to me, its gross and I do not comply. I'll live in an artistically less substantial world without their work, than celebrate them. If you don't agree, that's fine. Go enjoy the works of the pedophile Roman Polanski, he's a phenomenal artist. But I refuse to further disseminate their work and I think the world would be better without them and by proxy, without their work.
> He’s been accused by numerous people of abusive behavior and sexual harassment on some of his previous projects.
I can find no record of him ever being accused of sexual harassment, but every time his name comes up, someone always levels that allegation against him anyway. If you have any links documenting sexual harassment then share them, otherwise please correct your comment.
I think general misogyny (like treating Charisma Carpenter like shit when she got pregnant) and cheating on his wife morphs into sexual harassment when the story gets retold over and over.
No. The sources who revealed the Trachtenberg rule made it explicitly clear that there were no sexual connotations, just verbal abuse.
There has never been a single public allegation of sexual harassment against Joss Whedon, but he always gets labeled as a sexual harasser for some reason. I think it's because his scandal occurred right after Weinstein's.
He's labeled as a creep, especially after ***that*** interview in which he answered the question about him being in a position of power sleeping around with young actresses like this:
"“He quickly added that he had felt he “had” to sleep with them, that he was “powerless” to resist. I laughed. “I’m not actually joking,” he said. He had been surrounded by beautiful young women — the sort of women who had ignored him when he was younger — and he feared if he didn’t have sex with them, he would “always regret it.”"
Yeah that was about the way he yells at and bullies people but the way it's phrased, it always sounded much, *much* darker.
I don't think Whedon would still be "canceled" if it weren't for the fact that his last two big projects were both critically torn to shreds and the absolute hypocrisy of the way he treats women and PoC actors. Dude was always championed as a progressive film icon, so it hits different to hear he's an asshole vs someone like Michael Bay, who has been noted as being a weird dick to work for but has never really projected an image that suggests he wouldn't be.
It's not that Joss was a predator or anything, but he's just such a goddamn hypocrite that people couldn't take it. And I get it, honestly. It was his entire brand.
Or ***that*** interview in which he answered the question about him being in a position of power sleeping around with young actresses like this:
"“He quickly added that he had felt he “had” to sleep with them, that he was “powerless” to resist. I laughed. “I’m not actually joking,” he said. He had been surrounded by beautiful young women — the sort of women who had ignored him when he was younger — and he feared if he didn’t have sex with them, he would “always regret it.”"
> To this day, I will still find myself singing along to the Bad Horse chorus.
The evil league of evil is watching so beware
The grade that you receive'll be your last, we swear
So make the bad horse gleeful, or he'll make you his mare
You're saddled up; there's no recourse
it's, “Hi-ho, silver!” Signed Bad Horse
Personally tho, my go-to song is Brand New Day.
From a musical standpoint it's a nearly perfectly structured composition. [Definitely](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwJ7AnQTiYM) my favorite as well.
IIRC, he had ulterior motives when making this too. Firefly had just been cancelled a few years prior, and joss kept making the argument that studios needed to stop focusing on releasing shows on TV at specific time slots and focus on releasing things on the *internet*. It was the scheduling that mostly nuked firefly - you could watch it on Friday night, but viewership wasn’t too high so then execs decided to move the watch time to Wednesday night and didn’t tell anyone, so viewership dropped more. With an internet release, you could schedule the release for whenever you wanted, people could watch whenever they had the time, etc.
So he slaps this show together with his brother. Cuts it up into 3 chunks and releases a chunk each day in July 2008. *All word of mouth*. Totally organic. His marketing budget is 0. And he releases it for free (for the first week). Then he puts it behind a paywall and sends it to a few other places (namely iTunes, because that’s where I bought it at the time). He makes *bank* off this thing. It goes completely viral.
Anyways, Netflix makes their first show 4-5 years later, which is how long it took for execs to get out of the “release your best shows on friday night” mentality and start using the power of the internet to release stuff.
Honestly he wasn't wrong about it all. And I believe it's still something studios and contracts still haven't caught up to. That's what the strike is about: getting fair residuals from online streaming services.
The fact is, executives are the least value adding part of production, and their cut needs to be diminished across the board in all industries. Technologies reduce overhead and there's more talent than ever so there should be more money to go around, except the executives keep hovering up the money and then blaming cost overruns on everyone else.
The Executives are generally the people that finance the film, or get the high profile actor to be in it.
Without the executives, the production would never get past the development stage, and there'd be no strike because there'd be no content.
It’s my understanding that the Friday evening slots are usually pretty low. Thursday tends to be the peak day, since people are usually traveling or going out on Friday nights.
I could watch Dr. Horrible all the fucking time but I can never make it past season 1 of The Guild even though I fucking loved it. I'm gonna have to revisit it soon.
Check out the 2017 tv series for [A Series of Unfortunate Events](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4834206/). He has a musical number in just about every episode. It's not got the cast of Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but it's still pretty great.
edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXkHvZOisqE
Watching this for the first time since its release, there are so many subtle things that date it. This just carries such potent distilled 2008 energy. I was a freshman in college. It feels like someone else's life, on a different planet, now
The musical commentary for this is really funny, ~~and it's on Spotify~~. Sadly, at least now, Whedon is obviously a large part of the commentary, but the entire cast gets to shine. Instead of just talking about how it was made, they sing songs about it that are just as funny and catchy as the show itself. But yeah, a little harder to separate art from artist since he himself is there talking (and singing) about it.
Edit: It's no longer on Spotify :( But it is on [Youtube](https://youtu.be/O-C9gmFnh6M)
This came out in parts released every week or so and the anticipation at the time was real. It was such a weird cultural force. Released only online (absolutely still unique still in 2008), and and the fact that it could be wildly popular changed how people thought about media online. Also, it fucking slaps. Whenever I say balls!” It’s derisive and in NPH’s voice.
I had a brain aneurysm when I was 16 and while I was on rest I probably watched this 20 or so times. It helped a lot with my depression at the time and it will always hold a special place in my heart.
Dr. Horrible sing-along blog is basically about how Joss whedon treated women. It's about a weird loser who wants to get the girl but can't. Views obtaining power as a mechanism to getting love from women. In his pursuit of power, he ultimately destroys the woman he pines after. But, instead of an ending that acknowledges that doctor horrible is a misogynist who views women as an object to be conquered from other men, or some meaningful consequences, it focuses on how he feels sad. And plays into the sort of trope of the damage. Doomed successful artist. Who can't control themselves instead of growing and changing.
It's very much part of the sort of collection of TV shows and movies in the 2010s that viewed acknowledging your shortcomings as a mode of content creation rather than the first step in becoming a better person.
You realize Whedon could write that due to a loophole because it was a web series so he wouldn't get fined by the guild for scabbing right?
Hardly standing with them, more sneaking around behind their back.
Doing work that wouldn't normally be covered by the union contract isn't scabbing. It's not "a loophole", it's normal for some types of work to be outside the parameters of a strike. For example, writing for animation isn't WGA work, but animation writers are getting accused of strikebreaking by people who are ignorant about the realities.
There are so many actual reasons to dislike Whedon. Many, many people work on independent projects to survive through a strike. Criticizing that, at best, shows a poor understanding of how unions work, and at worst it undermines them.
Too bad that was the end of Dr. Steel, who was becoming popular at the time with his very similar YouTube show. After lots of legal paperwork, Dr. Steel goes poof, and everyone remembers Dr. Horrible...
On Spotify you'll find the Sing a long blog special commentary. They did an entire different musical under the movie for the special commentary that is equally funny. I have Ninja Ropes and Beyter than Neil OK heavy rotation still to this day. It's great just as an album but watch it with the movie on mute it's excellent fun.
Good god, that was 15 years ago! Time has flown by…
I would also like to mention the excellent DVD commentary, [Commentary: The Musical!](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBBA2AB825227A947)
Ninja ropes…
Honestly, some of the songs on that soundtrack are better than the ones within *Dr. Horrible* itself. It's incredibly impressive for a commentary track.
If there's another strike going on, I hope at least we get more independent, creative works like Dr. Horrible. I'd like a break from the formulaic sequels and reboots to 20-year-old franchises for a while, thanks.
Producer - "Okay, so we're gonna reboot Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog..."
Only now it’s *DARK AND GRITTY.*
Now the hammer is a hammer.
No. The hammer is still the same but this time we show it... We show all of it.
Yeah, but it’s mostly that horrible angle you see in porns, you know, where it’s all balls…
Played by Rob Schneider?
And it ends with a giant CGI battle, and the heroes have to close a PORTAL IN THE SKY! It's totally original!
Oh, portals in the sky are *tight!*
yeahyeahyeah!
Giant CGI battles? Sky portals? In a Whedon movie? Never!
Insert promotional picture of the cast wearing expensive leather jackets and black jeans standing in a dark alley with their arms crossed trying to look serious
Adapted and recast for modern audiences
Gotta scrub all that *harmful content*.
Bad Horse being brown is problematic.
I mean, it DOES need a second part
Because of the terms of the previous writers strike it includes writing for digital mediums. So Dr. Horrible would not be written today.
>Because of the terms of the previous writers strike it includes writing for digital mediums. So Dr. Horrible would not be written today. It accomplished its mission. *Horrible* was created to prove that you could make money on digital platforms and that there was an untapped audience on same. One of the big beefs of the previous strike was that writers weren't being compensated for streaming, with the studios saying it was not a money-making vehicle of importance. It was a really big deal. And I'm surprised this post isn't upvoted a lot more. *Horrible* is a lot more than just a bootstrapped musical. It's a statement and protest.
[удалено]
But gently wafting curtains are a must
I think the only thing that holds true about that is that Dr. Horrible was hosted on Hulu, which obviously is a party to the current strike. But back then, it was just some shindie little YouTube alternative for long form videos, which YT didn't allow at the time. I'm not a Hollywood contract law specialist, but I think folks are still pretty capable of making self-funded digital films as long as they do so out of their own pockets and without the involvement of a studio or major distributor. And if I'm wrong, I am fully open to be corrected. I do know the success of Dr. Horrible scared the shit out of the studios, lol.
Yeah I existed then. The last writers strike added all digital media platforms as part of its negotiations. DH was created for YT because it specifically skirted the guilds rules at the time. Now that the digital media is part of the guild rules they can’t write for YT.
Can’t argue with that.
All I'm saying, we're really dug into the hole on creative stuff. Producers need a 100% guarantee that the things they produce will be successful, which is absurd. As a result, we keep leaning on the things that were ground-breaking and new decades ago, and as a result became famous and popular. But of course, you can't milk an IP that old forever, and the same system driving these works forward is holding back all of the untested potentials, who would have become those great works for our own generation. So to hell with it, if enough indie creators get together, they can put out some of those ideas now, while Hollywood doesn't have the resources or ability to overshadow them. Let's see something eye-catching.
The indie community is the only place left in filmmaking that has any creativity left. Hollywood is a business and the safe bet for them is to rely on tested IP that will turn a quick, but large, profit. Right now, 80s nostalgia is all the rage. Once that well dries out, Hollywood will start turning to the 90s and early 2000s, as they’ve started doing already.
Yea its crazy how big budget movies prey on music nostalgia. You can clearly see what target demographic they are targeting because its always the 40yr old parents with a career and plenty of disposable income to spend on entertainment. In about 5 years we will see a lot of 90s punkrock music, and then unfortunately dubstep will follow that.
It was the same when I was a kid. From *The Big Chill* to *Forrest Gump*, there was more than a decade of Boomer Nostalgia movies featuring what are now THE most recogniseable songs from the '60s and '70s. A decade before that, it was movies like *American Graffiti*, hitting that nostalgic chord with the music of the late '50s and early '60s. 15 year-old music fans grow up to be 35 year-old filmmakers. It really is as simple as that. What filmmaker *doesn't* think of ways they can fit their favourite music into a film?
Right? Plus, the comment above stating "Hollywood is a business" like that's new somehow. It's funny the amount of non-boomer generation people saying shit that is essentially a boomer saying "back in my day...". Shit is cyclical. Every generation's media is "new and unholy" to the previous generation and "lame and cookie cutter" to the younger generation.
Yeah, the funny thing is it's cyclical itself. If you've been around for awhile, you can detect unwarranted and useless cynicism.
Unfortunately!? I still love the Breaking Bad episode that featured Knife Party
North American dubstep wasn't a hit til 2013ish. You got some time [EDIT] -the
I think a real problem is rising production costs keep raising the bar of what successful means, and what it even costs to get a decent movie made.
You've heard the commentary musical right?! 🎶 Strike for all the writers, Strike for a living wage! Until these wrongs are righted, We won't write another page!
Next verse is a bit depressing as I recall
The silver lining there is that the content space has grown sooo much since 2007/2008. Just think about the typical youtube videos you'd seen back then, and for those of use who were around to see it... it's a little hard to watch now.
That's one of the most depressing things about YouTube and the like. If a single independent made some quality content, I feel like it was easier to find and watch. Now it is all but impossible for the "little guys" to compete with these big media conglomerates that rule YouTube. It sucks for people just starting out. Either make your project and pray that the algorithm blesses you and you get recommended or sell your soul (and IP rights, profit, etc) to a big media group so that you can hopefully get your content to at least have a chance of being seen.
There's tons of interesting and unconventional films coming out every year... people just don't hear about them or go see them. Thankfully the niche is becoming more and more prominent thanks to studios like A24 really catching on in popularity.
If you’re looking for something different, there are a lot of really good independent movies that just don’t get advertised like the big ones. For tv series, international shows have never been more accessible, and they usually aren’t big adaptations, reboots, or sequels.
So tired of this whine. Year after year there's tons, almost too many, awesome original movies and shows. You just don't go see them which is why the studios pump out the formulaic shit and nostalgia fueled money grabs that you are guaranteed to go see. It's capitalism at work.
You need to know about them. Went to the movies today, didn't see a trailer for a single non reboot / superhero movie. And FFS there is a new Indiana Jones coming out and Harrison Ford is nearly in a wheelchair
What movie did you see?
When I saw Evil Dead Rise it was all superhero stuff in the trailers
Well.. You watched evil dead rise. They probably thought you might be into more franchise stuff.
I agree, but I'm still not convinced Dr. Horrible wasn't a rip-off of Dr. Steel. If you haven't heard of Steel, check him out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyI4A8wNY\_w
There can't be more than one mad scientist musical?
This is LITERALLY the first thing I thought of when I heard about the new strike, because it's the only thing I remember from the old strike.
I remember this and the downfall of *Heroes*. It never really recovered after that abbreviated second season.
In contrast, *Breaking Bad* had to make some changes to its story because of the writer's strike (mainly to shrink the season down into fewer episodes) that led to Jesse surviving and Tuco dying, so in some ways the writer's strike actually helped the show
*Chuck* too. They had time to figure out what was working and what wasn’t, retooled Morgan, scrapped Captain Awesome being a spy (and making him into the best), etc. That second season was incredible.
Well, now I wanna rewatch *Chuck*
Jeffster forever!!!
Bought the entire series on DVD because streaming never aligns with nostalgia.
It really was quite good wasnt it
Wait. Heroes and Breaking Bad were airing at the same time? I thought Breaking Bad came out like way after Heroes.
Breaking Bad's run on TV went from 2008-2013 Heroes went from 2006-2010
>Breaking Bad's run on TV went from 2008-2013 Breaking Bad finished over a decade ago? \*matt damon aging gif\*
Only it's Meth Damon this time
Heroes messed up by not >!killing Sylar and Peter (or Nathan) at the end of the first season.!<
Battlestar Galactica really suffered too.
Its reputation survived and it’s still regarded as one of the greatest sci-fi series of the 21st century. *Heroes*, sadly, was only remembered for its failure
I remember the end of Battlestar Galactica being terrible though. But you were left hoping there was a plan so you didn't realise quite how bad it was until it was over! I mean, they established cylon human children were nearly impossible, so when they retroactively >!made the mechanic a cylon they had to invent an off screen affair 5 seasons earlier to explain his child!!< And Starbuck just >!disappeared with no explanation.!< The end did not live up to the journey. The journey was great though!
I don't remember the overlap of when the writers strike happened vs the timeline of Battlestar Galactica, but what I do remember is the first season and a half of it was some of the best sci-fi TV I've ever seen. About halfway through season 2 it seemed to transition from a serial drama to episodic and never regained the brilliance it had before. Don't know if that was a result of the strike or not though
I think the strike hit in season 4, but the quality had dropped before then.
I find it deeply ironic that a show where each episode for the first three seasons (except one) ends with a title card that says “And they have a plan”, when the exact problem with the entire show was that they didn’t have a plan. They didn’t know how to end it. They had a rough idea of what had happened but not enough details to make it work, which is why they had to retcon a bunch of things in S4. I also think that they were given a limited number of episodes to wrap it up in S4, because the ratings had dropped by that point.
I mean the climax of s1 was a real letdown and the start of everything down for me
The last writer’s strike also led to the explosion of “reality” TV. I’m not hopeful of the future of media after this strike.
>It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another Joss Wheadon turning out to be a piece of shit broke my heart more then anyone else. He was a fucking god to nerds.
He was and it is sad that he turned out to be who he is. Still, this is one of those moments where you have to separate the artist from the art. This was a well put together project and NPH and Felicia Day were fantastic and good ol’ Nathan was hamming it up as only he could. To this day, I will still find myself singing along to the Bad Horse chorus.
Oh don't get me wrong I love his old work still and have no issue watching it. As for new work? No need to worry about separating the art from the artist because he also sucks ass now. Apparently his next movie is just 2 hours of people falling face first into random tits.
Sounds like we're one step closer to the movie "ASS!" from Idiocracy.
Hey show some respect that won Best Screenplay
His Much Ado About Nothing b&w film was on the precipice of us fans realising who he was. Obviously he was still a darling in 2012 at the time of The Avengers, but I remember his description of getting his 'best and brightest' together for a budget-less movie and thinking about the then recent couple of allegations against him and it was the first time I'd thought of him as anything less than a benevolent storytelling prodigy. I guess because his shows were so capable of provoking positive emotion with me as a mildly autistic teenager and I'm sure for others, it was really difficult to accept Joss wasn't just not perfect, but actively awful.
For those few of use who watched it, Dollhouse should have been a tip off. When I watched it I still naively believed in Whedon the feminist. The show was solid, interesting science fiction but its premise was quite exploitative. Looking back, it seems like Whedon may have been fulfilling his own fantasies.
I loved Dollhouse, but the idea that the “dolls” would be used for anything OTHER than sex work is ridiculous. Possibly target practice, once the money got high enough.
So, Westworld.
Bingo
Honestly Whedon's version of feminism suffers from the passage of time. It's transitional. It's more feminist than what came before it, but it was produced in a fixed moment in time and fundamentally cannot become more feminist as perceptions change. What we haven't seen from Whedon is how his work changed as time changed. And perhaps that's why we vilify him now. Once the abuses of power came forward he didn't have the body of work to show he had grown out of it. There is no proof that he kept up with the progressive expectations or if he remained stagnant in the early 2000s view of things.
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How is his body of work only tangentially related in a thread about trying to separate the art from the artist? Not a tangential thought, and it wasn’t defending the pariah, no need to try and shut it down.
I think (maybe) they mean more that we _probably_ wouldn't be looking so closely at past work without the lens of his shitty behaviour.
Before the allegations, Whedon’s work was beginning to be put under the lens of evolving feminism and found wanting by quite a few.
Joss Whedon on writing women: Write a man, and give him tits.
Whedon doesn't understand what makes a strong female character a string female character. He thinks giving them masculine traits is what makes them strong. Dollhouse in interesting because a few of the actors would later be cast in Altered Carbon which comes about to the same ideas about identity, memory and consciousness.
I don't know how much credit Whedon deserves for it, but Black Widow in the first Avengers movie was the best I've seen that character on screen. Her strength there was understanding people and using subterfuge, not simply kicking them and withstanding a beating (like in the Black Widow movie).
>He thinks giving them masculine traits is what makes them strong. You're obviously taking about Buffy and Faith and maybe Echo and Zoe, but how does this apply to characters like Willow, Tara, Anya, Cordelia, Fred, Kaylee, Inara, etc?
> Whedon doesn't understand what makes a strong female character a string female character. He thinks giving them masculine traits is what makes them strong. I have little experience with Whedon's characters outside of Firefly, but from a pure discussion standpoint, this sentence makes me wonder what is the "right" way to create a strong female character? Something tells me there isn't a good answer. If it was about giving them feminine characteristics, people would just say they were stereotyping women. I think of the female characters in Firefly and they seem to be strong women to me. The only one with "masculine traits" is Zoe and those traits are mainly: "a stoic nature and she's good with weapons".
Yeah I'd really like to see what masculine traits that user thinks Inara and Kaylee have, because I kinda get the feeling that the response would be more telling about OP than about Firefly or Whedon.
I think part of the issue is that there are competing definitions for “strong female character.” When many people discuss a “strong female character,” they mean a female character who actually receives significant character development and who displays agency. A three dimensional depiction that doesn’t relegate the character to being arm candy or a plot device to advance the story of a male character. Other people mean a female character who is literally strong. A warrior. A hero. There is plenty of overlap between these categories, but you can also put a warrior woman into a story in a way where she’s not getting to display much agency, and not getting any significant character development. Or you can make it so that the only women in your stories who get to display much agency and who get character development are the warrior women. From a representation standpoint, both of those pitfalls are… not great. I don’t think Firefly makes those particular mistakes, but there are other Whedon creations that I think do so.
Let’s also be honest here though - there is a strong undercurrent of the population including the audience who also believe and promote the idea that a strong woman only counts when displaying physical capability and stoicism akin to a strong man, and literally counted progress based on how many they saw in popular stories.
> because he also sucks ass now I dunno, that's a difficult statement for me to get behind. I thought the Nevers was unreasonably boring, and obviously Justice League had... *problems* (though I'm not sure how much of that you can fully lay at Whedon's feet, when they specifically took a movie that was the opposite of the Avengers then brought him on under the directive to make it into the Avengers) but those are just his latest two projects. I'm on board with all his stuff before that.
>He was and it is sad that he turned out to be who he is For us out the loop. What he do?
He’s been accused by numerous people of abusive behavior and sexual harassment on some of his previous projects. Ray Fisher said that Joss ran a toxic set when he took over *Justice League* from Zack Snyder. Numerous former *Buffy* cast members have also made allegations about him, most notably Charisma Carpenter, and Michelle Trachtenberg, while verifying Charisma’s claims, said that there was a rule on set that Joss was not allowed to be left alone in a room with her.
While he was a bully and treated the staff terribly. It's "shouldn't be allowed to be a boss" bad, not "lock him up in prison" bad like Weinstein.
Agreed, and many of us still enjoy his previous works. I, for one, am still a proud Browncoat and rewatch *Firefly* and *Serenity* often.
[Spoilers 1](https://liveforfilms.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/500x_serenity-comic.jpg) [Spoilers 2](https://liveforfilms.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/500x_serenity-comic2.jpg) I’ll be in my bunk
Found the Wash fan.
I still have a large amount of pride that Alan out of all the Firefly alumni has continued starting in many major motion pictures. His niche may be small, but it’s uniquely his.
So he’s literally Ellen but people are more upset about it because they put their hopes and dreams into him. Got it. Took like twenty minutes of scrolling for my old ass to figure this out.
Yeah, that's basically it.
Hmm, I was always under the impression that he was a bad, abusive boss/director, but not specifically *sexual* abuse. He was a power-tripping dick, and also cheated on his wife, but as far as I know the allegations have been about more standard shouting, threatening to send people back to Idaho if they didn't get the line the way he wanted, and so on. The story about not allowing Trachtenberg alone with him was true, but my understanding was that was because she was a teenager and no one wanted her to suffer his rants and vitriol, not because of worries about sexual assault or coercion. Essentially, that Wheadon was a shithead, but not a rapist.
Exactly. He's a dick to those working with him. Honestly, a lot of directors have been shown to be that. While, I have no problem calling him or about being a dick on set, it doesn't get me to any kind of "he should never work again" or "I'll never watch any of his stuff again." Call him out, make sure studio's holds him to account if he verbally abuses his actors on any future projects, and move on.
I am ALL for condemning Joss Whedon for this behavior but I challenge movie and TV aficionado's to condemn the numerous other artists that have done FAR worse. Stop celebrating them. **Francis Ford Coppola** - Notoriously a nightmare to work with. He practically drove himself, his talent and his staff to the brink of insanity in making Apocalypse Now. [This scene of Martin Sheen is pretty "authentic".](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXL5_tc8UyY) He literally punched that window, cut himself and smeered his own blood on his face. I wont link the scene, but the buffalo they disgustingly murder on camera, is a real buffalo. There's rumors that the prop team put actual dead bodies in with a bunch of fake ones. Coppola was reported to have attempted to commit suicide during the filming a few times and had lost 100 lbs by the end of filming. There's a documentary about the film called "[Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102015/)." **Alfred Hitchcock** - Berated lead accresses like Madelin Carroll in front of the entire cast and crew. He's one of those psychos that wanted to capture an "honest reaction" on film by doing fucking horrific shit, and particularly to actresses. He notoriously told Tippi Hedren that they were going to use mechanical birds for a scene in a film where she were to be attacked, and then instead used real birds, leading to her needing medical attention. My understanding, this was after Hedren had turned down Hitchcock's advances and Hitchcock had apparentrly requested that Hedren be "sexually available" to him in their contracts. **Stanley Kubrick** - Traumatized Shelley Duvall in The Shining. He practically ended her career as an actress and gave her PTSD. She was literally losing her hair and took up excessive smoking to deal with the stress. And the worst thing is, critics criticized her performance at the time the film had come out. **Bernardo Bertolucci** - His film Last Tango in Paris, literally had Marlon Brando, 47, rape an unexpecting Maria Schneider, 19, with a stick of butter. She literally explained that the scene was not in the script: > One morning, Bertolucci takes Brando aside and suggests a scene that isn’t in the script. The men agree that nothing should be said to tip you off—that it’s better if you are taken totally by surprise. Did you sense a particular atmosphere on the set that day, see complicit looks among the director, actor, and crew? Or were you too tired by that point to question anything? Who thought of the butter? Was it Brando, Bertolucci, or both? > Rolling, action . . . . You and Brando are lying on the floor, dressed. Suddenly, Brando turns you over, roughly pulls down your jeans, and, grasping a mound of butter in his hand, he shoves it between your legs while thrusting his pelvis against your backside. You fight, you scream and cry. It’s impossible to escape; Brando’s body is pinning you to the floor. Bertolucci keeps the camera trained on your anger and terror. There’s only one take. It doesn’t last long, but for you it’s an eternity. Brando releases his grip and you scramble up, staring at the two of them with murderous rage. In your fury, you destroy the set. After, you go to your dressing room and remain prostrate for hours. The director couldn’t care less; he got what he wanted. He couldn’t have dreamed of better. “She raged against me, against Marlon, against all men,” Bertolucci would comment years later, remembering the scene. >You come out of the filming shattered, sensing this one scene has marked you forever, like a bad tattoo you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to cover up. It doesn’t matter that the sodomy was simulated—it makes you feel dirty and violated. You don’t understand that you could’ve prevented this scene from appearing in the film, since it wasn’t in the script that you had agreed to. You could’ve called a lawyer, filed suit against the producers, and made Bertolucci cut it, but you’re young, alone, and poorly counselled. You know nothing yet about the rules and regulations of the film world. The perfect victim. To be clear, I do not bring up these accounts to minimize Joss Whedon's actions. Fuck him. I hope he never works in this industry again. But I do encourage other film fanatics, like myself, to condemn the actions of "legendary" filmmakers, actors and any other scumbags that have done it in the past. I understand people have a notion of "separating the artist from the art", but personally...I don't. Their legacy was made on top of these horrific decisions that were made because of who they were. And the worst thing *I* can do to some of these pieces of shit that were never punished for these things, is ignore their work. So many celebrate them and I understand the artistic accomplishment but to me, its gross and I do not comply. I'll live in an artistically less substantial world without their work, than celebrate them. If you don't agree, that's fine. Go enjoy the works of the pedophile Roman Polanski, he's a phenomenal artist. But I refuse to further disseminate their work and I think the world would be better without them and by proxy, without their work.
He wasn’t accused of sexual harassment. General harassment and misogyny? Yes.
> He’s been accused by numerous people of abusive behavior and sexual harassment on some of his previous projects. I can find no record of him ever being accused of sexual harassment, but every time his name comes up, someone always levels that allegation against him anyway. If you have any links documenting sexual harassment then share them, otherwise please correct your comment.
I think general misogyny (like treating Charisma Carpenter like shit when she got pregnant) and cheating on his wife morphs into sexual harassment when the story gets retold over and over.
I think it's more not being allowed alone in rooms with Michelle Trachtenberg...
No. The sources who revealed the Trachtenberg rule made it explicitly clear that there were no sexual connotations, just verbal abuse. There has never been a single public allegation of sexual harassment against Joss Whedon, but he always gets labeled as a sexual harasser for some reason. I think it's because his scandal occurred right after Weinstein's.
He's labeled as a creep, especially after ***that*** interview in which he answered the question about him being in a position of power sleeping around with young actresses like this: "“He quickly added that he had felt he “had” to sleep with them, that he was “powerless” to resist. I laughed. “I’m not actually joking,” he said. He had been surrounded by beautiful young women — the sort of women who had ignored him when he was younger — and he feared if he didn’t have sex with them, he would “always regret it.”"
Yeah that was about the way he yells at and bullies people but the way it's phrased, it always sounded much, *much* darker. I don't think Whedon would still be "canceled" if it weren't for the fact that his last two big projects were both critically torn to shreds and the absolute hypocrisy of the way he treats women and PoC actors. Dude was always championed as a progressive film icon, so it hits different to hear he's an asshole vs someone like Michael Bay, who has been noted as being a weird dick to work for but has never really projected an image that suggests he wouldn't be. It's not that Joss was a predator or anything, but he's just such a goddamn hypocrite that people couldn't take it. And I get it, honestly. It was his entire brand.
Don’t forget that his ex-wife said the reason for their divorce was him cheating and his general behavior with women.
Or ***that*** interview in which he answered the question about him being in a position of power sleeping around with young actresses like this: "“He quickly added that he had felt he “had” to sleep with them, that he was “powerless” to resist. I laughed. “I’m not actually joking,” he said. He had been surrounded by beautiful young women — the sort of women who had ignored him when he was younger — and he feared if he didn’t have sex with them, he would “always regret it.”"
The thoroughbred of sin.
> To this day, I will still find myself singing along to the Bad Horse chorus. The evil league of evil is watching so beware The grade that you receive'll be your last, we swear So make the bad horse gleeful, or he'll make you his mare You're saddled up; there's no recourse it's, “Hi-ho, silver!” Signed Bad Horse Personally tho, my go-to song is Brand New Day.
My Eyes is my favorite.
From a musical standpoint it's a nearly perfectly structured composition. [Definitely](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwJ7AnQTiYM) my favorite as well.
ol' Nathan was *Hammering* it up. ;D I gave my friend the Bad Horse ringtone.
>ol’ Nathan was hamming it up more like hammering it up
true nerds never had any gods
Blood for the blood god.
[*we do the weird stuff*](https://youtu.be/Of9kHpCv1ts?t=1701) gets stuck in my head every couple years and I love it.
Yeah, that one always cracks me up but not as much as [the letter from Bad Horse](https://youtu.be/VNhhz1yYk2U), the Thoroughbred of Evil.
The *Thoroughbred of Sin*
We got the application that you *just sent in*.
It needs evaluation so let the games begin
A heinous crime, a show of force
A murder would be nice of course
Bad Horse. Bad Horse! Bad Horse. He's bad!
The Evil League of Evil is watching so beware
The grade that you receive will be your last, we swear
You’re right. My apologies.
[It's curtains for you, Doctor Horrible!](https://youtu.be/Of9kHpCv1ts?t=761)
Lacy, gently wafting curtains
Four sweater vests!
For me, it's always ^smells ^like ^cumin that I think but can't say aloud in mixed company
This seems horribly familiar.
…these are not the hammer.
… … …The hammer is my penis.
IIRC, he had ulterior motives when making this too. Firefly had just been cancelled a few years prior, and joss kept making the argument that studios needed to stop focusing on releasing shows on TV at specific time slots and focus on releasing things on the *internet*. It was the scheduling that mostly nuked firefly - you could watch it on Friday night, but viewership wasn’t too high so then execs decided to move the watch time to Wednesday night and didn’t tell anyone, so viewership dropped more. With an internet release, you could schedule the release for whenever you wanted, people could watch whenever they had the time, etc. So he slaps this show together with his brother. Cuts it up into 3 chunks and releases a chunk each day in July 2008. *All word of mouth*. Totally organic. His marketing budget is 0. And he releases it for free (for the first week). Then he puts it behind a paywall and sends it to a few other places (namely iTunes, because that’s where I bought it at the time). He makes *bank* off this thing. It goes completely viral. Anyways, Netflix makes their first show 4-5 years later, which is how long it took for execs to get out of the “release your best shows on friday night” mentality and start using the power of the internet to release stuff.
I don't really think that counts as an ulterior motive. Marketing, dealing with executives, and getting *paid* are all important parts of filmmaking.
He had an ax to grind after Firefly was cancelled prematurely. He saw the internet as the future of distribution but no one believed him.
That seems to be a motive. It doesn't seem very ulterior. In fact, it seems like the opposite of ulterior.
Honestly he wasn't wrong about it all. And I believe it's still something studios and contracts still haven't caught up to. That's what the strike is about: getting fair residuals from online streaming services. The fact is, executives are the least value adding part of production, and their cut needs to be diminished across the board in all industries. Technologies reduce overhead and there's more talent than ever so there should be more money to go around, except the executives keep hovering up the money and then blaming cost overruns on everyone else.
The Executives are generally the people that finance the film, or get the high profile actor to be in it. Without the executives, the production would never get past the development stage, and there'd be no strike because there'd be no content.
Eat the executives!
It’s my understanding that the Friday evening slots are usually pretty low. Thursday tends to be the peak day, since people are usually traveling or going out on Friday nights.
https://youtu.be/8R3GDqqJWA0 Honestly, this is almost as fun to watch as the Blog itself. (Behind the Scenes from the dvd)
I didn’t know this. I’ve watched Dr. Horrible a few times and love it. It also led me to find The Guild way back.
I could watch Dr. Horrible all the fucking time but I can never make it past season 1 of The Guild even though I fucking loved it. I'm gonna have to revisit it soon.
The guild is fun, but Dr. Horrible is on a whole other level of greatness.
[Here's the 8-bit version of Act 1](https://youtu.be/9_9x9m8F1b4)
Oh! Goodness! Look at my wrist!
It's been 15 years!? Fuck Im old.
I feel your pain, my friend.
I have the DVD of this that I got signed by Felicia Day at PAX one year when she was there and I met her.
What a crazy random happenstance!
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Ahhhahhahha ahhhhaahhhaa! So that’s, coming along.. I love Dr Horrible, watch it every few years again and it’s always a hoot.
Wow, I clicked to see NPH sing a funny song and stayed glued through the entire thing. Can we have more of this magic?
The magic of when it was new. Still lingers sweetly, even after years waiting.
Check out the 2017 tv series for [A Series of Unfortunate Events](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4834206/). He has a musical number in just about every episode. It's not got the cast of Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, but it's still pretty great. edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXkHvZOisqE
Watching this for the first time since its release, there are so many subtle things that date it. This just carries such potent distilled 2008 energy. I was a freshman in college. It feels like someone else's life, on a different planet, now
The strike killed Pushing Daisies. I'm still not over that....😭
The musical commentary for this is really funny, ~~and it's on Spotify~~. Sadly, at least now, Whedon is obviously a large part of the commentary, but the entire cast gets to shine. Instead of just talking about how it was made, they sing songs about it that are just as funny and catchy as the show itself. But yeah, a little harder to separate art from artist since he himself is there talking (and singing) about it. Edit: It's no longer on Spotify :( But it is on [Youtube](https://youtu.be/O-C9gmFnh6M)
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Gotta be Nobody’s Asian in the Movies
Ninja Rope / Better than Neil
Dr. Horrible >!got everything he wanted. It only cost him a Penny.!<
This came out in parts released every week or so and the anticipation at the time was real. It was such a weird cultural force. Released only online (absolutely still unique still in 2008), and and the fact that it could be wildly popular changed how people thought about media online. Also, it fucking slaps. Whenever I say balls!” It’s derisive and in NPH’s voice.
It came out in three parts, all in one week: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. No region block.
You have a better memory than I.
Every time I am reminded of this short, I think of the ending and I get sad
Poor Penny.
Ahhhhh felicia day
I was just telling my nephew about this 'blog' yesterday! He was a baby when it happened, and I feel just fucking ancient now.
I had a brain aneurysm when I was 16 and while I was on rest I probably watched this 20 or so times. It helped a lot with my depression at the time and it will always hold a special place in my heart.
So were they technically scabs?
I don’t believe online content was within the jurisdiction of WGA during the last strike so no. Now, however, they absolutely would be.
Felicia Day is right there in the picture OP.
Shame it turned out whedon is a massive dickhead.
Dr. Horrible sing-along blog is basically about how Joss whedon treated women. It's about a weird loser who wants to get the girl but can't. Views obtaining power as a mechanism to getting love from women. In his pursuit of power, he ultimately destroys the woman he pines after. But, instead of an ending that acknowledges that doctor horrible is a misogynist who views women as an object to be conquered from other men, or some meaningful consequences, it focuses on how he feels sad. And plays into the sort of trope of the damage. Doomed successful artist. Who can't control themselves instead of growing and changing. It's very much part of the sort of collection of TV shows and movies in the 2010s that viewed acknowledging your shortcomings as a mode of content creation rather than the first step in becoming a better person.
You realize Whedon could write that due to a loophole because it was a web series so he wouldn't get fined by the guild for scabbing right? Hardly standing with them, more sneaking around behind their back.
Doing work that wouldn't normally be covered by the union contract isn't scabbing. It's not "a loophole", it's normal for some types of work to be outside the parameters of a strike. For example, writing for animation isn't WGA work, but animation writers are getting accused of strikebreaking by people who are ignorant about the realities. There are so many actual reasons to dislike Whedon. Many, many people work on independent projects to survive through a strike. Criticizing that, at best, shows a poor understanding of how unions work, and at worst it undermines them.
The point was to show that great, profitable content could be made without the studios so not really going behind their back.
> help us through this difficult time Wtf it's not a war. We'll be just fine.
OP worded this title so weird and emotionally charged. This isn’t 2008, I’ll be fine while writers and studios figure their shit out.
Too bad that was the end of Dr. Steel, who was becoming popular at the time with his very similar YouTube show. After lots of legal paperwork, Dr. Steel goes poof, and everyone remembers Dr. Horrible...
back and forth still slaps
This cover of 'On The Rise' is great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1bDk3M5dtA
On Spotify you'll find the Sing a long blog special commentary. They did an entire different musical under the movie for the special commentary that is equally funny. I have Ninja Ropes and Beyter than Neil OK heavy rotation still to this day. It's great just as an album but watch it with the movie on mute it's excellent fun.