This post is so belated that spoiler warnings are hardly an issue (I suspect) so I don’t think I need to give any, though I don’t warrant all the links are spoiler free.
So the saga began with the anticipation… fueled by the unfortunate non-viewability-ness of the Joss Whedon intertubes serial in Australia. You have to give the guy big props for the cleverness of this model - something not entirely new to the Whedonverse though a bit of an extrapolation. I figure the uneven success rate Whedon’s had with getting projects up and keeping them on air has actually stimulated a lot of creativity - for instance the Buffy Season Eight continuation by comic. If anything’s a great example of the “intercreativity” of fans and various pros in constructing a fictional ‘verse across all sorts of platforms, it’s all things Whedon. So I guess the expectations for Doctor Horrible were pretty high. I thought it was kinda… well, meh. Diehard Whedon fans loved it. Others turned a more critical eye on the Doctor’s adventures.
Bring back Firefly I reckon!
The issue is that it’s a musical. There’s no getting around the crappy crapness inherent in the crapiness of musicals. Musicals are crap, and they smear crap on all they touch.
But the bit where Captain Hammer says “My penis… that’s the hammer”, that bit is great.
I thought it was great. The only other Joss Whedon thing I’ve seen is “Once More with Feeling” which was likewise fantabulous. I read Fray a couple of weeks ago and it was OK.
The songs were sharp and clever, there were some great jokes and dialog and the Doctor and the Captain turned in terrific performances and it was a pity Penelope Pureheart didn’t have anything to do. But come on! Bad Horse and his Evil Whinny of Death! “He rides across the nation, the Thoroughbred of Sin…” (I’ve been singing it around the house for days. I think the kids are about to ask me to move out)
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I watched it online as it was released, but I was looking forward to being able to download it so my better half could also enjoy it, and am mightily miffed that that I can’t pay to download it from the iTunes store in Australia.
And I knew that I should have got my doctorate in horribleness, but just didn’t see a viable career in it. How wrong I was.
I read an interview with Jed Whedon (Joss’s brother) that they’re working on making it available on iTunes internationally. Canada was the easiest, other countries take longer to sort through the paperwork, he reckons.
I enjoyed it. It’s not a work of art, but it’s fun and funny enough for me to overlook the musical format. Neil Patrick Harris and Nathon Fillion are just great in their roles.
CAPTAIN HAMMER: It’s curtains for you, Dr Horrible! Lacy, gently wafting curtains.
CAPTAIN HAMMER: This is so nice, I just might sleep with the same girl twice. They say it’s better the second time, they say you get to do the weird stuff!
GROUPIES: We’d do the weird stuff.
And Dr Horrible’s quest for “anarchy… that I run”.
I got the damn tunes stuck in my head, and the only way to exorcise them was to figure them out on piano. (Badly, of course.)
There were definitely some great one-liners and many LOLz
That said, I’m still bloody annoyed that Penny ended up as just another Woman in a Refrigerator (a female intimate who dies simply to further the emotional narrative of the protagonist). What the hell, Joss? You could undermine all those other tropes but you had to play along with that one? (And no, the ironic newspaper heading with “Whotsername dies” is not a subversion, it’s just a nod.)
Penny was going along with her life just fine until she came to the attention of two men engaging in a pissing contest. She didn’t need them, but they need her as a score-keeping device, until they got so caught up that they didn’t even notice that they’d broken their trophy.
Sure, that’s a valid criticism of some competitive male archetypes. But I expect more in a major female character from avowed feminist Joss Whedon. She didn’t have to kick butt, but she could at least have survived to tell them they were both jerks and they should get the hell out of her life.
So yeah, I really liked parts I and II and hated part III.
Feh. Didn’t last past the Bad Horse song. You Whedonites can go get shot, in space, with a space-shotgun, while setting up a big space-net to catch a starship…
You can buy an itunes gift card for the US store on ebay or get a friend in the US to buy one for you. The only postal address verification they do is if you register a credit card, and you can create an account with fake information. If you can live with lying to apple about your address
Having multiple itunes accounts on the same machine as the same user works fine. Given the current exchange rate music is much cheaper from the US store too. Gotta love globalisation.
I’m not a die hard Whedon fan. Frankly a lot of his “feminist” stuff ends up being more anti-male than pro-female. The last couple of seasons of Buffy were an exercise in Tedium to get through.
But I did love this.
I love musicals. Well, usually not a fan of anything post-West Side Story but I loved it.
And I adore superhero spoofery.
So I’d love to see more of this.
Oh boy. The commentary on the DVD is going to be called “Commentary! The Musical” and set to entirely new songs performed by the cast and crew.
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I enjoyed it. More musicals, I say.
The best songs were Dr Horrible’s freeze ray song and Captain Hammer’s “everyone’s a hero”. I had them both stuck in my head, and occasionally catch myself humming the former.
But Penny was weak writing. She wasn’t a character, she was a McGuffin: an object that exists to drive the plot without playing an active role in it.
If Penny had been properly developed (and not killed off), this would have been good for at least a few more episodes.
i liked the ending jump cut