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Sunday, January 22, 2006

Finding Serenity

While visiting If I Ran the Zoo I became curious as to why Tom has posts in July 2004 then nothing until September 2005. Well, the pickup in posting seems to be related to Serenity. Cooool. He got a special press pass to see the film on September 27th. I was particularly entertained by this part of his review:
If you're a fan, I don't need to convince you; you've died and gone to heaven. If you aren't, then go see the most purely entertaining movie to come out of Hollywood in a long time.

And then buy the DVDs.
Although I was a huge Joss fan from back in the day I totally missed Firefly. It was the year that I changed jobs, bought a house and got married, so I was a bit distracted. Still, the fact that they somehow didn't reach supergeek me is a sign that there was something wrong with their marketing. But what Tom says there is exactly what I did. After seeing Serenity in the theater I charged into Best Buy wild-eyed and looking for the series. Fortunately a fellow geek who worked at the store intercepted me as I was bolting up the center aisle and asked what I was looking for.

"Firefly!"

"It's up here at the front," she said, taking me to the promo shelf at the front of the dvds. "Last copy," she said longingly. "I hope they get some more in soon because I really want to get one."

I could see the haunted look in her eye as I seized the last copy and beat a hasty retreat to the cash registers to redeem some of my Rewards Dollars. I felt a little guilty, but it's part of the Geek's Code. All's fair in collection and obsession.

p.s. Vic was just about to get killed AGAIN when the Black Whip came in just in time to save him. BUT WILL SHE HAVE TO REMOVE HER MASK?!?!?! You gotta love cliff hangers.

4 comments:

  1. I've argued for the the SG-1/Atlantis/BSG lineup that for this particular type of show Friday nights aren't a death slot. We geeks need something to do on Friday nights. Sci-fi understands this.

    Regarding Fox, I have to assume that the executives who pick new shows are not the same ones who decide if they should continue because they actually pick some good shows - they just don't keep them. Firefly, Titus, and Arrested Development have all suffered from this amazing lack of vision. I'm glad that Monk started on USA. I'm sure it would have had a short life on a station like Fox.

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  2. Yes, it's true--it's all about the screening pass. ;)

    Firefly is great, and I think it's better than Serenity in the sense that the series form is more suited to Joss's style of storytelling and character development. That said, I think he made the best of the limitations of the movie form, and made Serenity a damn great movie. Obviously, it worked for you as a stand-alone (and you were excited enough to go buy Firefly--yay!).

    I like to call Fox the 'Graveyard of Quality Television'. Besides the shows you mentioned, there's Futurama, Wonderfalls (by Tim Minear and the guy who created Dead Like Me--a wonderful series, check it out if you haven't already), Tru Calling, etc., etc.

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  3. Off topic for a sec: I did some digging at HaloScan, and it turns out it's a 4-month window. But your older comments aren't actually gone, they're just being held hostage; according to HaloScan, you can recover them by forking over your hard-earned simoleons for HaloScan Premium.

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  4. Interesting. But I can't afford to have yet another monthly cost associated with my online life. If I have to choose between proIMDB and HaloScan - well, duh. I loooooove my full access to IMDB. Heck, maybe I would love HaloScan Premium, too, but then they didn't get to me in time.

    Hopefully I can eventually figure out how to display my comments better. The DarkWraith's are really cool and use blogger. I just don't know what I'm doing. I do like the fact that if you stay in blogger they are searchable and right there with the post. The multiple clicks to get to where you can post - sucks.

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