Tag: Joss Whedon

A Firefly Animated Series

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The sci-fi television series “Firefly” and its subsequent big screen continuation “Serenity” came out in 2002 and 2005 respectively.  That’s a very long time ago.  So, for that whole 20 plus years there have been rumors that circulated on-line that a sequel tv show or a movie would be greenlit.  And the fanbase of Firefly has been dying for such a sequel all these years.

And now their dreams are coming true.  Well, almost.  There won’t be a live-action tv show or movie.  There will be an animated movie with the original cast providing the voices of their characters.  And other than Ron Glass (who died a number of years ago) the whole cast is coming back.  But will it be any good?

Firefly and Serenity were the creation of Joss Whedon.  He invented them and breathed life into them.  Joss Whedon will not be writing or producing or directing this new movie.  He has been canceled in Hollywood for bad behavior.  Apparently, he hurt the feelings of some actresses before or during the #metoo witch hunts and has been consigned to a lower level of hell where powerful Hollywood men are sent to burn forever.  And without Whedon what are the chances that a new Firefly would be anything like the original?

Well, we’re about to find out.  That’s a slight exaggeration.  It’ll probably take a year or longer to produce this movie.  And whether it’s a tv miniseries or a motion picture you probably have to add a few months to fit it into the schedules for these kinds of things.  So, let’s say eighteen months.

Several years ago, I came to the conclusion that the best thing that could have happened to Firefly was exactly what did happen.  It only lasted a part of a season on tv and then had a motion picture to provide a satisfying climax to the characters and the story.  And the reason I felt that way was because Firefly appealed to me exactly because it went against the kind of female-centric left-leaning stuff that Joss Whedon typically produces.  Things like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” and “Dollhouse” are what he makes.  And those shows are garbage from my perspective.  Firefly was from the opposite perspective.  It was the battle between the oligarchic Alliance which is a stand-in for today’s globalists and the Independents who are the freedom-loving commoners much like today’s Right.  But the danger as I see it is that eventually Whedon would have tweaked the characters and stories until they became “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

And I still think that.  The two showrunners they’ve put in charge of this animated series are as thoroughly left-leaning and devoted to woke culture as anyone else around.  If anything, they’re worse than Whedon because at least he was talented.  They’re not.  So, I fully expect this new show will be pretty awful.

That being said I will watch it when it comes out.  Firefly was enormously entertaining while it lasted.  And it will be nostalgic to see the animated characters and hear the voices of the old crew.  But I would be shocked if it turned out to be good.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 24AUG2025 – Hollywood

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Sadly it seems that Mr. Whedon wants to get a little more, shall we say physical, with the talent if the Rumors out of the Buffy Series are true. This has always been an issue in Hollywood, sometimes they chase the ingenues and sometimes they chase the beefcake.
That aside what Whedon did is loved the material. He loved Captain America, he loved the Avengers and he wouldn’t change the material (more than a smidge or two). This strategy doesn’t always work. Brad Bird Loved/Loves the Barsoom mythos (and clearly knew it well based on how he plotted it). He gave Dejah Thoris more of a part (and far more of a costume) than in the original books, but he didn’t eviscerate/geld John Carter as a hero to do it. Here the issue was the Disney Princess based marketers couldn’t bring themselves to market A Princess of Mars . They couldn’t even bring themselves to call it John Carter of Mars they had no clue how to sell it and so its existence and nature was known only to the more rabid part of the Barsoom fans (e.g. myself). I took my wife and daughters (college/high school age for the girls) and they loved it. They wondered why the heck there was practically no one in the giant IMAX theater on a Saturday PM showing.

Loving the material is a start but is NOT enough. Peter Jackson LOVED Lord of the Rings but was constrained to make 3 movies (albeit nearly 9 hrs in standard form). He loved the Hobbit too but was given FAR to free a rein. In the interests of adding female characters and filling out 3 long films, he padded the heck out of The Hobbit and made a sloppy mess. George Lucas made the original 3 Star Wars films and loved his material and did fairly well until the damnable Ewoks. This is likely because he had his wife (later divorced) riding herd on him as editor. When he made the Prequel Trilogy no one could tell him no and loved himself a little TOO much and he made crap. Many years later Disney said “Hold my beer” and made the sequel trilogy that makes the prequels look like Casablanca or Citizen Kane.

So it looks like the recipe is get a director and/or screen writer that loves the material. Then make sure there is a check to their choices so they don’t go straight up fan boi/fan grrl.

And for heavens sake Disney, please try something NEW. There’s like 20+ marvel movies/tv shows, at least 11 Star wars movies plus hours of TV, Princess movies by the dozens and 4 Toy Stories with a 5th on the way. Try something new and exotic (for you) it can’t hurt more than the last dozen or so flops. And for the love of all that is Holy Send Kathleen Kennedy on an all expense paid 1 year trip to an isolated portion of Borneo with no phone or internet connections. And let Star Wars lie fallow for a couple years that horse (or wookie) is well and truly dead.

 

The Library is Full of Them

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As I mentioned in an earlier post Disney (and by extension Hollywood) realizes that they’ve alienated the male half of the human race.  And as I gleefully mentioned this is all their own fault and it’s hilarious that it’s a surprise for them.  And after torching two of the most valuable male-oriented intellectual properties (Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe), instead of trying to fix the problems and repair the damage to these brands they’ve decided to bury their losses and start from scratch with brand new franchises.

Well, you’ve got to admire their optimism.  Maybe they haven’t heard the old saying about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  But it’s their money (or their stockholders anyway).

But in a sense, they’ve got it half right.  Half of their problem is that sequel after sequel has drained all the life out of their franchises.  So new stories and characters is a good direction to go in.  People like to be entertained and meeting new characters is part of that entertainment.  And even though there are only a few overarching plots to an adventure story it helps to change the names of the heroes, villains, magic rings, super-weapons and princesses from story to story.

So far, so good.  But now comes the tricky part.  Listen up Disney:

DON’T MAKE THE HERO A GIRL-BOSS.  THE GIRL IN THE STORY IS THE LOVE INTEREST OF THE HERO.  SHE IS THE REWARD FOR THE HERO SAVING THE DAY.  SHE MAY TAKE UP A BOW OR A DAGGER IN A PINCH BUT SHE’S NOT THERE TO SAVE THE HERO AND SHE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE IN CHARGE.

I hope I was clear there.  Use the traditional hero saga as the backbone of the story and find a writer and a director who can work with such a story in a creative and entertaining fashion and you will make billions of dollars.  Just as a for instance Joss Whedon directed the first Avengers movie.  It made $1.52 billion worldwide at the box office.  That’s a lot of money.  And part of the reason for that enormous sum is because Whedon knows how to make likable characters in a movie.  He blends humor, action and drama in the correct proportions and at the right moments.  In other words, he’s not a hack like all of the DEI directors that have bungled the last several years of your franchise flops.

Now, granted he is demanding and sometimes slightly abusive toward the “talent.”  But they’re getting paid millions of dollars to dress up in spandex and fool around in front of a green screen.  The least they could do is take a little hectoring from a prima donna director to earn those millions.  So anyway, my advice for Hollywood is to find the few creative talents out there; directors like Whedon and Christopher Nolan.  And purchase the film rights to books that millions of people love.  And don’t mess with the stories and characters.  Put them faithfully on the big screen and then instead of trying to recreate success with endless sequels move onto another story!  Did you know there is more than one book in the library?  There are several.

I know it’s a radical departure. But it’s just so crazy it just might work!

He Isn’t the Plucky Hero, the Alliance Isn’t Some Evil Empire

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Joss Whedon is a Leftist.  Despite his recent fall from grace on account of saying and doing mean things to actors on set, he believes in the cause.  All of his cinematic and television creations to some extent, are shaped by progressive concepts.  So, it always seemed a very strange thing that he created Firefly.  Based, he said, on a book about the battle of Gettysburg he imagined a universe where the elites defeated the freedom loving proles in an interplanetary civil war and these defeated forces maintained an outlaw existence at the edge of a distant new solar system among pirates and barbarians.

In the cinematic finale of this universe, the elites in the “Alliance” send out an agent to eliminate the renegades that have some dangerous secrets about the government’s experiments with controlling the behavior of the ordinary people.

During one encounter the agent recites the title of this essay.

He is portrayed as a true believer.  He is making a better world, a world free of sin.  And he’ll do this, no matter how many people he has to kill to get there.  The agent is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless.  Because he thoroughly believes in what he is doing.  In this portrayal I think Whedon was being completely honest in how he evaluated the Left and the Right.  The Left is polite, intellectual, cultured and completely ruthless.  The Right is crude, naïve, boorish and principled.  And for some reason Whedon sympathized with the Right, at least somewhat.  Possibly he recognizes the inherent lack of intellectual freedom that the Left always creates.  As a creative type himself, maybe he could see how restrictive life under this regime would be.

Well, all of the above is just a long digression because the line from the movie seems to encapsulate our reality.  Our rebellion isn’t like Star Wars.  It’s more like Firefly.  We don’t have any plucky heroes who will save the day by blowing up the Death Star.  We’re outnumbered, outgunned, outmatched in money and buried by the media and Corporate America.  The elites have a firm hand on the levers of power and we are just outlaws living on the margins trying to avoid being rounded up and chloroformed like some troublesome stray cats.

And if we look back through history all free societies seem eventually to collapse into oligarchies like ours.  But I haven’t been able to figure out what is the “smart” way to think and act in this environment.  If I had a strong enough stomach I probably should suck up to the elites and try to find a spot among their toadies.  But I’ve always had trouble convincing them I believed in their bilge.  Something about my sense of humor always gets me in trouble.

But what is the right answer?  Is there a way to live in such a society and still have any self-respect?  It doesn’t appear to be the case.  And what about children?  What do you tell them?  Look at the mess we have with Gen Y and Gen Z.  They’re living in a fantasy world and life will completely pass them by without leaving a trace.

So, there’s my thought.  The elites don’t appear to be vulnerable to anything we can do.  And waiting for their decadence to finish them off might take centuries.  I guess eventually Caesar or Theodoric will appear on the scene and we’ll get a different group of oligarchs and different bread and circuses.

But is it impossible to get a Brutus instead of a Caesar?  And not the Brutus who slew Caesar, not Marcus Junius Brutus, but rather his ancestor Lucius Junius Brutus, the one who overthrow the last Etruscan king Tarquinius Superbus and ushered in the Roman Republic.  Is it impossible that a member of the elites would side with freedom over power?  I think the answer is that it is impossible.  And the reason is that no one man, no matter how smart and strong can rearrange an empire once it’s built up.  All that can be done is bend its path slightly for a few years.

So I’ll finish by saying that there are plucky heroes and it is the evil empire and that in their prime, evil empires outlast plucky heroes every time.  It’s in their nature.  Better to look to the fringes of empire for where the successor to that empire will appear.

Disney Reviving Firefly? Possible? Preferable?

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I stumbled across this video about whether Disney was planning to revive the Science Fiction series Firefly with the original cast.  Even after watching this discussion I wondered if this thing is just clickbait.

Sure, there are millions of Firefly fans who would love to see the show resurrected.  But how could it be done.  From what I’ve read Joss Whedon has been #MeToo’ed out of Hollywood or something and it’s been twenty years since the show went off the air and the lead is involved in a successful tv series.

But put that aside.  Suppose that  it could be done.  Suppose Nathan Fillion and the rest of the cast and Joss Whedon and his creative team from the original series could be reunited.  There remains the question of whether it should be done.  And by that I mean could Disney be trusted not to sabotage the whole thing by doing what they’ve done to Star Wars, The Avengers and every other intellectual property they buy?

I’ve got to be honest.  I think they’d ruin it.  Someway, somehow they’d corrupt the whole thing with the poison that they seem compulsively driven to inject in all their products.  They’d have Malcolm Reynolds discovering that he was a victim of whiteness and Zoe would have to become captain to atone for his sins.  And Jayne would end up transgendered and River would become a social justice warrior and Kaylee would have to go lesbian just to make the math work.

No, Disney should never try to bring Firefly back.  If Whedon were able to buy the intellectual property back and do it without interference there might be a chance of it turning out decent.  He could write some interesting stories for his world.  But Disney would murder it.  And that shouldn’t be done.  Let that special place exist in the past.  We can visit anytime we want with our dvds or streamed or on some network that loves good stories.  But don’t give it to the soulless hacks at Disney.  It deserves better than that.

 

Cowboy Bebop – A Sci-Fi TV Review – Part 3

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I have now finished off all the Cowboy Bebop (CB) available as DVDs on Netflix (Discs 4 and 6 are permanently unavailable).  This includes the 2-hour movie which I watched last night.  And I think that’s sufficient to allow me to make a definitive judgement on the series vis-à-vis my taste.

It’s good.

It has some weaknesses from my point of view.  There is a silliness that can be annoying for me.  The crazy adolescent girl Edward can be a bit much.  Some of the episodes are pretty thin on plot.  And some of the space battle scenes seem (not surprisingly) cartoonish.  I think most of this can be chalked up to the standard cartoon sci-fi conventions.  Things are simplified and standardized to allow economic production of the animation product.  And to be fair, since I have never been a comic book or movie consumer, I’m not their primary audience.  To an anime consume, CB is probably well to the right side of the standard deviation curve with respect to production values, plot and characterization.

I like the quality of the animation especially the scenes in outer space.  Some of it is strikingly well done.  I liked the scenario of independent contractors moving in and out of the legitimate world acting as bounty hunters while they themselves are not without a certain air of criminality.  And obviously here are the similarities with Firefly.  After viewing the majority of CB I’ll state that I’m convinced that Whedon borrowed heavily from it when making Firefly.  But I’m sure CB borrowed from earlier anime for some of its ideas so I don’t think it’s a big deal.  But I will say that at this point I’d much prefer a big screen (or big budget tv) version of CB were made rather than of Firefly.  Whedon is such an SJW that he’d probably have Serenity going back in time just to battle Donald Trump.   My only hedge on having CB instead of Firefly is that is I’d like to see Jet Black played by Adam Baldwin.  He would be damn near perfect for the part.

Anyway, I would say that the CB movie demonstrates how a longer treatment of the material improves it.  More characterization shows through and there is more scope for interesting story telling.  Also, the animation of the city in the movie was extremely well done.  It looked like whole sections of New York City were digitized to make the action possible in the chase scenes.  And speaking of the chase scenes, one of the flying chases was a little too long.  Although intricate and well laid out it eventually started to drag on.  The fight scenes between the protagonist Spike and his nemesis were very good and enjoyable.  Most of the minor characters were fairly well utilized.  Surprisingly, the seemingly superfluous presence of the welsh corgi dog on the space ship actually felt like a positive addition to me.  But maybe I just like dogs.

So, bottom line, Cowboy Bebop is good sci-fi anime.  If you don’t particularly like anime you still might enjoy it.  It has piqued my interest in the genre enough that I’m going to give another anime movie (Ghosts in the Shell 2.0) a look-see and find out if this was just a one off or not.

See you Space Cowboy!