Serenity Pushed Back to September

iontyre writes "According to Joss Whedon and reported at fireflymovie.com the much anticipated feature film adaptation of the superb but canceled tv show Firefly has been delayed till September from its original April release to supposedly avoid too much genre competition."

My experiences with Firefly

[Seek_1]

I'm posting this simply because I'd heard from a number of people that Firefly was worth watching, and want to continue to spread the word about it.

---

I download the Firefly pilot. I watched it. I enjoyed it so much that I then got off my ass, ran down to Futureshop and picked up the DVD set (that afternoon) without a second thought.

Not everyone may like this series, but I certainly did. Enough that even though I'd already downloaded a few of the episodes (without watching any but the first), I went out and bought the DVDs anyways, based on how good the first one was.

And it's NOT Sci-fi. It's set in a sci-fi environment yes, but the show itself is not sci-fi themed. (ie, there's no alien-of-the-week-kinda-crap going on..)

Re:what else?

[Pxtl]

epIII. I sense great disappointment in you.

Re:Logic failure

[Jtheletter]

It was cancelled because the majority of people did not think it was superb.

While there is certainly merit to this argument, I think a huge part of the problem was lack of awareness. I never even heard about FireFly until months after it was cancelled, along with most of my other geek friends. Having watched the entire DVD set I can say with no reservations it was leaps and bounds better (IMHO) than at least two of the major sci-fi franchises currently out there; SG1 and Enterprise.

It needed some work as well, but a second (or even just a full first) season would have gone a long way to smoothing out any wrinkles. The groundwork was all laid, the characters had depth and were believable, there was an evil empire to hate, space pirates, and there was less than usual number of abominations of physics than we see in most space sci-fi. Not to mention a whole social caste of high-class call girls, who couldn't get behind that?

I think what may have turned a lot of viewers off was the character-centric nature of the stories, too much "mushy stuff" for geeks to handle apparently. I don't know about others but after decades of hour long episodes devoted to finding a clever way of rebooting warp drives in record time, or decoding a signal before some hostile race killed everyone; some serious focus on characters and emotion - and how the future world actually affects people - was a welcome change.

Before I get flooded with responses berrating me for blatantly ignoring the humanitarian aspects of ST:TNG and the like, I know, they're there. And I love TNG, and DS9, don't get me wrong. But there was just something about FireFly that has been somehow lacking in scifi for a long time.

Re:Logic failure

[Scrameustache]

If was superb it would not have been cancelled

Since when does quality garantee survival?
What kind of insane world view are you basing this on?

Given that we live in majority rule world

See, again with the insane world view. The minority elite rules the world buddy, they just allow the unwashed masses to voice their opinion every few years on which of these two identical members of the elite is gonna be VISIBLY in power for the next few years. Works well too, people spend so much energy on elections, they don't even bother with bloody revolutions...

It was cancelled because the majority of people did not think it was superb.

Well, first of all, no. It was cancelled because a MINORITY of people had the power to cancel it and did so. That minority might even be one single Fox tv exec with too much power and not enough judgement.

But what IF a majority of people did not think it was superd? That doesn't mean that it wasn't superb. A majority of people didn't even SEE it. Why? Because they couldn't see it. It wasn't on when fox claimed it would be on, it was actually on a random shifting time slot of death (such as airing on 12:20am on a friday night. No kidding).

show and was unable to generate sufficient viewing figures and/or sufficient advertising revenue to sustain itself, so its probably pretty poor in the eys of most people.

It was killed BEFORE it ever got a chance to generate sufficient advertising revenue. And yet another company picked it up and is funnelling millions into it...hmmmm...
Man, you are either making a really half-assed attempt at trolling, or you are really gonna be screwed when you get around to the logic portion of your math education, or god forbid, college philosophy classes. Seriously, "someone cancelled it therefore the majority didn't like it therefore it is of bad quality" is probably the lamest logical leapfrog game I've seen all week and I read fark flame wars! Sheesh!

Re:Logic failure

[proverbialcow]

No, it was cancelled because Fox doesn't want another 800 pound gorrilla like the X-Files and the Simpsons. They want to keep a steady churn of new shows that will capture interest for a season or two. Then, before they become too entrenched with popularity and the actors/producers start looking for more money they can dump the show and put the next-new-thing on in it's place.

That's an interesting thought, even if it is wholly unsupported by facts. There was never any danger of Firefly becoming an 800-lb gorilla. It did poorly in its time slot, end of story. There was no hope of bringing it back as a mid-season replacement (like what did the trick for X-Files) because it cost $1e6+ per episode to produce, and you can always churn out another Joe Millionaire for a quarter of that.

Remember, for every X-Files that made the jump from Friday obscurity to Sunday limelight, you have a Lone Gunmen, Harsh Realm, M.A.N.T.I.S. and Brisco County, Jr. that didn't.

Re:inspiration for Firefly

[Scrameustache]

It seems like there is this new genre in sci fi developing. You've seen it before if you watch anime. Things like Trigun and Cowboy Bebop where they mix western elements with sci-fi.

Like I just said in another post: "Those genres have been mixed for as long as the sci-fi genre has existed. Star Trek was originally called "wagon train to the stars", there's been numerous japa animés in the genre, etc."

Seriously, Even Toy Story touches that theme!

I have comix from the 80's where the Fantastic Four are fighting cowboys on rocket-horse-machine things. There were older jap shows with cowboys in space (late 70's or early 80's). As soon as people started writing stories with people in space, they wrote westerns in space. Its an old concept, Joss just went with it full blast instead of hiding it.

P.S. Loved Trigun and Cowboy Bebop : )

Everything does poorly in that timeslot.

[AzrealAO]

Fox didn't air the pilot.
Fox showed what episodes they did show, out of order.
Fox preempted the series several times for baseball playoffs, and poorly communicated time changes.
Fox did almost no promotion of the show, the only promotion for the show they DID seem to do, hinged around the "girl in the box" scenario, which they never even showed, because it was from the Pilot episode (which never aired until they had decided to cancel it).

Fox could not have done more harm to developing an audience for an episodic series if they had tried.

Watch Battlestar Galactica Instead of Lamenting

[superultra]

Huge Firefly fan myself, and this news makes me sad. However, thanks to some "peers" of mine I've been watching the revamped Battlestar Galactica episodes and have been blown away. It's obvious that Whedon was not alone in his realist approach to science fiction. He was just one of the first of what appears to be a School of scifi reactionaries, creative TV people tired of the fantastic and generally ungrounded science fiction of Star Trek.

The new BSG begins airing "officially" in January. What it lacks in wit and humor ala Firefly, it makes up for with amazing drama that rivals anything on ER or West Wing. I would not be surprised if it comes up for Emmy, and not just for special effects. Watch it to quell the pain of Firefly withdrawl, and you mind yourself nearly forgetting about Serenity. Nearly.

A conspiracy theorist tells why Fox killed Firefly

[software_trainer]

Hank Parnell of the Texas Mercury asserts that Fox deliberately killed Firefly for political reasons. Personally, I don't think Fox's politics had anything to do with it, but his article is entertaining. The complete essay is on fireflyfans.net [fireflyfans.net]. I copied the most inflammatory, er, interesting, excerpts below:

They wanted to kill this show. I believe that, as surely as I do that the sun rises in the east...

The conscious patterning of the Firefly milieu on the Confederate defeat that Whedon publicly stated was the case may have not set very well in the Yankee-dominated halls of Political Correctness that rules modern America, be they "liberal" or "conservative" ("neoconservative"; again, the two are virtually indistinguishable). Firefly was an unabashed post-Civil War space Western where the losers were the good guys; and everything about the series echoed that, from the desert settings of the frontier moons and planets, the costumes, the music, even the characters' patterns of speech. We knew who these people really were. They had no slavery to fight for, only the right of self-governance...

Firefly, in its way, was, in this post 9-11 climate, almost downright seditious. The Alliance enforcers--the "bad guys"--were called "Feds." The attempt to unite and homogenize people was seen, by Firefly, as not a "good" thing; and yet it is the undeniable Zeitgeist of the modern age and behind every bit of mischief and misadventure in the world today...

Nor do most people agree with Captain Reynolds' words (as quoted by Reverend Book in the episode "War Stories"), "The government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned."...Do not think that Firefly was not drawing allusions and parallels to our own society and its attendant beliefs, or that this implicit criticism went unnoticed by the powers-that-be...

And Firefly made the case, through Reynolds, as persuasively as it has ever been made in American fiction, print, TV, film or otherwise, in my opinion, for the ultimate superiority of the rule of honor over the rule of law...For you see, the rule of honor demands what law must defer: individual responsibility, personal culpability, what is fair and what is just, of every man (and woman) who lives by it...And it is the greatest offense, the greatest affront, that Firefly could give to our vaunted modern age, and why, in my opinion, Fox never gave the show any kind of a chance.

Re:Take my love, take my land,

[corbettw]

They were shown in order here in the UK, and *still* the majority of people I ask think it sucked

Yeah, but that's the UK. Westerns have always been more popular in the US. Ask most Americans*, and they'll tell you they think Red Dwarf sucked, for much the same reason (eg, it's just too different than anything they normally like).

* I shouldn't have to point this out, but Slashdotters are not "most Americans". So you don't have to reply with "But I loved Red Dwarf. Kryton's the man!"

Re:Dang...

[tap]

Lexx had four movies that ran on Showtime, then just three seasons. The first two for showtime, then the third for the sci-fi channel. I liked the first season, but the third was just terrible.

The sci-fi channel passed on buying Babylon 5: Crusade when TNT canceled it. They didn't pick up the Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers spinoff. They canceled Farscape! But they did buy the third season of Lexx (crap) and Andromeda (crap after 1st season). Plus their reality show, John Edwards, Scare Tactics, etc. double plus crap.

Sci-Fi Channel: Stuff so bad, we get it really cheap.

Re:A conspiracy theorist tells why Fox killed Fire

[software_trainer]

Yeah, because Malcolm Reynolds and his fellow Independents were all fighting to keep their slaves. Don't be ridiculous.

In The Soul of Battle : From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, Victor Davis Hanson discusses how the motivations for fighting the Civil War differed between rich and poor southerners. The rich were fighting to keep their slaves. The poor, who generally didn't own slaves, were fighting to keep their culture and right to self-rule. When the Union general Sherman marched through Georgia, looting and destroying plantations and Southern infrastructure, he concentrated on destroying the property of the rich Southerners. Of course, a lot of poor farmers got caught in the swath of destruction that he cut across the state, but his intention was to break the will of the Southern leaders by bringing the cost of the war home to them.

I think it was these conflicting motivations for fighting--greed vs. self rule--that gives rise to comments like yours and the conflicting view that many Americans have about our Civil War. For some Americans, it was about slavery. For others, it was about self rule.

Another interesting fact is that the original American colonists, who were English citizens, practically begged the English king to forbid slavery in the Colonies. They believed it was immoral, and feared that it would pollute and ultimately divide the culture of the new Colonies. The king insisted on permitting slavery in the New World because he thought it would help the agricultural trade. Guess those original colonists knew what they were talking about, didn't they?

What the slightly-paranoid writer of this article suggests is that Firefly (remember, this was a discussion about Firefly?) offers us a chance to explore the politics and emotional fallout of that war, without the slavery issue.

Re:Watch Battlestar Galactica Instead of Lamenting

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I second that wholeheartedly. Forget everything you know ...forget that there was another TV show with the same name back in the 70s. The new "Galactica" is a wonder. It's realistic and gritty and unrelentingly dark and SMART. It doesn't underestimate the intelligence of its audience. In one episode the lead cast used the jargon term "UNREP" repeatedly, and not once did anyone explain it. The audience was expected to just glork it from context.

I'll say this, too: It's a show that would not have been made, or at least would not have been made in any similar way, before 9/11. I mean, for cryin' out loud: the premise of the show is based on the near-annihilation of the human race. During the first regular-run episode after the pilot, the civilian government (such as it is) is obsessed with getting an accurate head-count not of the casualties of the attack but of the survivors. Why? Because the number of survivors is smaller. The writers do not try to gloss over this aspect of the story in order to make the episodes easier to watch. They face it head-on and expect the audience to just fuckin' deal.

Watch it. It's incredible.