fling93 loves fishies

Serenity

Well, this is just a rough sketch, but for those of you who recognize it (and no, it’s still not the Flying Spaghetti Monster), you should know what the rest of this post is going to say. Yes, this is the ship, Serenity, from the short-lived Joss Whedon show, Firefly. The movie Serenity, which is a continuation of the story, will be opening on September 30th.

What’s it about? Well, via Dan Drezner, M.E. Russell at The Weekly Standard said it best: “Think of it as Star Wars, if Han Solo were the main character, and he still shot Greedo first.” Yeah, that’s Captain Malcolm Reynolds all right (you’ll see what I mean if you watch the two-hour pilot episode). Actually, it isn’t really like Star Wars in that you don’t have a lot of spaceship combat, but don’t worry, there’s still plenty of action and special effects. Yeah, the show doesn’t really look at all like my rough pencil sketch — maybe I’ll turn it into a painting someday. And yes, I also drew this (no, I didn’t trace it) in Corel Painter 8, which I blogged about earlier. As always, click on the image for a larger view.

But anyway, enough about my stupid drawing. What I really want to talk about is Firefly. Since it’s too late to alert you to the Sci-Fi channel’s rebroadcast of the show, I very highly recommend checking it out on the four-disc DVD set, because you need to see it from the beginning, and in order. Yeah, the main reason the show got canceled so early is that Fox, in its infinite wisdom, aired the pilot last and showed the rest of them out of order and often preempted it for baseball. Yeah, maybe that would be fine for some shows that don’t have an ensemble cast to introduce or multi-episode story arcs, but can you imagine a show like Lost or 24 or The Sopranos gaining an audience if subjected to conditions like that?

Yeah, I can’t wait for television to be reborn, leaving pointy-haired television bosses out of the picture, but thankfully, the show experienced a rebirth in the DVD format, selling well enough to allow Joss to make a movie. Can you believe that? A movie out of a show that was canceled after eleven episodes!

But the movie will be better if you watch the DVDs first, and believe me, they’re worth every penny. All of the characters are complex and engaging, and played by an excellent ensemble cast (the acting level is well beyond that of Buffy or Angel). And of course, the dialogue is Joss Whedon at his witty best, and the plot twists and story arcs are all there too (and from little we could see, the ongoing storyline seems much more epic than the typical “end-of-level bad guy” on Buffy).

Best of all, the universe he’s created is a fascinating and very believable place. I know, a space western sounds corny, but the premise is that this is after a civil war, and the winners settled in the rich core planets while the losers scattered to the outer rim. And with fewer resources comes less technology. Yeah, Joss has actually put in a lot of thought into creating a plausible universe, and has filled it with a lot of little details that really help sell it. For example, there is no sound in space. This is something that Babylon 5 and even the new Battlestar Galactica failed to do (despite being obviously influenced by Firefly).

Don’t just listen to me. The aforementioned Dan Drezner has already plugged it, and the economic godliness that is Tyler Cowen was also impressed after watching just a single episode. So go check it out (I suggest not reading the episode descriptions on the back of the cases, as they do give away some spoilers). And after you’re done, go back and listen to the commentary. It points out a few things that you might have missed, along with some neat trivia (like what Tudyk did with the red button from “Out of Gas”).

And for anybody in the South Bay Area, there’s a very lively group of fans you can meet. There’s also a large group in San Francisco, but I don’t know the link offhand. And feel free to give me a holler if you’d like to borrow the DVDs. I’m currently lending out discs 3 and 4 already, but should get them back within a couple of days.