Of birthdays and Firefly
My own CMOAT had a birthday earlier this week, which resulted in the arrival at our apartment of three highly anticipated boxes: one containing the complete Buffy DVD set, one containing the complete Firefly DVD set, and one containing sweet, sweet cupcakes.
Unlike Chris, I’ve previously been immune to the many and varied charms of Joss Whedon, and so have sampled the delights of Buffy only briefly. But we’ve been making our way through Firefly over the course of a few evenings, and I am firmly hooked. I’m not sure how I missed this when it was on the air (although it probably had something to do with me watching very little television in that 2002-2003 year) but in some ways I’m glad I’m seeing the episodes for the first time in the order in which they were intended to be seen. I think one of the reasons I never got into Buffy was that by the time I bothered to watch an episode or two, there was too much backstory I didn’t know and I found it too confusing to hold my interest for long. It’s possible I’ll start that from the beginning too now that we have the DVD collection.
Although this is our first exposure to Firefly the series, we did rent Serenity a while back. We enjoyed it probably about as much as people who have not seen the series could have enjoyed it, but it’s already become clear that we’re going to have to see it again as soon as we’re done with the show, now that we actually know who all these people are.
CMOAT?
“Firefly” is a vastly underrated series. I remember a friend of mine trying to turn me onto it when the DVDs had just come out. I think the description turns people off. When I asked him what it was, he called it a “Space Western”.
“Pass,” I said. I would later go on to love the series and apologetically tell him how right he was. He still lords it over me to this day.
It’s definitely a series that I would one day hope gets the “Family Guy”/”Futurama” revival treatment. It appears that there was no one at Fox between 2002 and 2003 who knew how to let a show grow, since all three series were cancelled in 2002/2003.
I think the problem with Fox is that they consistently do stupid shit with good shows. So consistently in fact that it almost seems purposefully malicious. Firefly, Harsh Realm, Millennium, Wonderfalls, and probably a bunch more slipping my mind. Another network good at this is NBC where it looks like Friday Night Lights is sadly about to get the ax.
But on the subject of a revival, at this point, it seems highly doubtful. The Onion did a Joss interview awhile back and I seem to recall him saying that Fox still owns the rights to Firefly but Universal owns the right to Serenity. If anything we’d be more likely to see another movie.
One of the actors said there was talk about doing a straight-to-DVD sequel of the movie:
I best leave these html linking things to the pros
That post was supposed to have this link: http://www.moviehole.net/news/20071004_serenity_2_a_new_hope.html
Firefly quotes you say? Well let me start..
“Jayne: “Ten percent of nuthin’ is…let me do the math here…nuthin’ into nuthin’…carry the nuthin’…”
Mal: “Inara, think you could stoop to being on my arm?”
Inara: “Will you wash it first?”