Firefly – LonelyMachines

Serenity is a go!

Well, the Firefly movie is on schedule for a release date next spring. The original cast are all on board. As usual, Harry Knowles claims to have a leaked first-draft script, and he quotes a very apropos and encouraging bit of dialogue:

Wash: Yeah well if she doesn’t give us some extra flow from the engine room to offset the burnthrough the landing is gonna get pretty interesting.

Mal: Define “interesting.”

Wash (calm suggestion): “Oh god, oh god, we’re all gonna die?”

Nice to see Whedon’s still got it. Incidentally, rumor has it he’s also working on an X-Men script.

Visual Media

“We can’t die, because we are so very pretty.”

Well, the Firefly DVD’s out, and it was worth the wait. All the original episodes are here, as well as two others that weren’t shown. What’s nice is that they’re arranged in chronological order, rather than the shuffled mess that Fox chose to present them in.

In case you don’t know, Firefly was a great sci-fi/western show written by Joss Whedon (Buffy, etc). It received a lackluster push from Fox, and like the much-deserving-but-ultimately-slighted Futurama (which also received a great treatment on DVD), it ended up dying in relative obscurity. Despite this, the show had a fervent following, and fans were willing to wade through the pre-emptions and random schedulings to see it. When Firefly was cancelled, a large group even went so far as to take out a full-page ad in Variety to petition its reinstatement.

In the end, though, Fox just didn’t know what to do with it, and the show folded.

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Visual Media

Thoughts on Firefly

When I first heard about Firefly, all I could think was, “Hmmm…live-action Cowboy Bebop.” The set-ups are remarkably similar-so much so that most feedback from geek cognoscenti has cried rip-off at every turn. Add to that the fact that this show is written by the same guy who gave us Buffy, and you’ve got a sure-fire recipe for disaster.

Well, I’m relieved to say that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Fox has been willing to take quite a few risks over the years, especially with their prime-time lineup. Sometimes they’ve stumbled and quickly moved past such mistakes, and sometimes they give the right push to something that turns out to be not only brilliant but highly influential. Witness the success of The Simpsons or the X-Files.

They’re certainly taking a big risk here. Prime-time science fiction hasn’t done well since the original Star Trek run in the ’70’s.

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