Dr.
Horrible's Sing-Along Blog Webseries Review
Dr.
Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, the webseries
creation from Buffy the Vampire Slayer mastermind Joss Whedon,
siblings Jed and Zack, and Jed’s fiancé Maurissa Tancharoen,
initially hit the Internet during the summer of 2008 and quickly crashed
after 200,000 eager viewers-per-hour flooded the website’s servers
within the first few hours. Simultaneously released on iTunes, Dr.
Horrible likewise became the top TV download in a relatively short
time, and media outlets from USA
Today to Variety
dubbed the three-part web “mini-series” a monumental event
in the short history of Internet video. The Academy of Television Arts
and Sciences has honored the series as well, awarding it an Emmy in
2009 for “Short-Format Live-Action, Special Class.” Eventually
released on DVD (with an accompanying musical commentary), Dr. Horrible
has even been screened in local theaters, similar to how the musical
episode of Buffy once stormed across the nation before legal
considerations shut it down.
The webseries—which
Whedon describes as “the story of a low-rent super-villain, the
hero who keeps beating him up, and the cute girl from the laundromat
he’s too shy to talk to”—stars Neil Patrick Harris
as Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion (who worked with Whedon on Firefly
as well as its big-screen adaptation, Serenity) as Captain
Hammer and Felicia Day (potential slayer Vi in Buffy) as Penny.
While a musical in style—and both entertaining and comic in nature—Dr.
Horrible is actually more detailed and depth-oriented than one
might expect; each of the characters evoke a naïve innocence, while
the narrative itself explores what happens when that innocence both
fades and eventually shatters.
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Dr.
Horrible Revisited: Three Years Later
It
would be incorrect to say that Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
single handedly invented the webseries medium when it initially launched
in July 2008. While the online musical—created by television producer
Joss Whedon, his brothers Jed and Zack and Jed’s fiancé
Maurissa Tancharoen—generated a magnitude of positive press and
served as the inspiration for a countless number of other webseries
that have sprung up on the Internet ever since, in reality the medium
had been around for a number of years. The female lead of Dr Horrible,
Felicia Day, had already established her online credentials with another
webseries (The Guild), for instance, while the Los Angeles
Times and Washington Post had previously written about
such online video creations like Break a Leg and Chad Vader.
It would
likewise be incorrect to say that the idea for Dr. Horrible’s
Sing-Along Blog was directly born from the 2007 strike by the Writers
Guild of America. While Joss Whedon was an adamant supporter of both
the strike and the need for greater financial compensation that led
to the work stoppage, in reality he had already been an independently-minded
rebel when it came to the entertainment industry before Dr. Horrible
had generated a single frame of film. His initial television creation
was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a ridiculously titled show that
melded together a number of genres, including horror, comedy and action,
into an effective metaphor for high school and young adulthood.
The ambiguously
entitled Firefly, meanwhile, was a “space-western”
that was mishandled by the FOX network and cancelled after a mere eleven
aired episodes. Whedon refused to let the series die, however, and convinced
Universal Studios to fund a big-screen continuation of the narrative
with the 2005 feature film Serenity. Clearly Joss Whedon is
a man not willing to budge in terms of his principles or creative visions—Buffy,
after all, would no doubt have been taken more seriously by the uninitiated
had the show enlisted a more mainstream moniker—and the webseries
medium obviously offered a fair amount of freedom for such a person.
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Dr.
Horrible and How to Be a Villain
In
July 2008, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog took the Internet
by storm, crashing servers and turning millions of fans into minions
along the way. The main protagonist, the Dr. Horrible of the title,
was a scientific genius armed with both Freeze and Death Rays as well
as a specially designed app for his iPhone that could commandeer security
vans by remote control. By the end of the three-act webseries, the budding
villain had achieved his dream of ascending to the ranks of the Evil
League of Evil alongside such luminaries as Dead Bowie, Fake Thomas
Jefferson and the “Thoroughbred of Sin” himself, Bad Horse.
But how
did young Billy, as he had previously been known, reach such lofty heights?
How does any evil wannabe, for that matter? In 2003, freelance writer
Neil Zawacki attempted to answer that question in his humorous, tongue-in-cheek
book, How to Be a Villain: Evil Laughs, Secret Lairs, Master Plans,
and More!!! (Chronicle Books). Accompanied by skilled illustrator
James Dignan, whose drawings have appeared in the New Yorker
and Wall Street Journal, Zawacki put together a step-by-step
guide on how to achieve the level of evil success that Dr. Horrible
himself reached a half decade later. Although Dr. Horrible’s
Sing-Along Blog is the original creation of television producer
Joss Whedon and members of his immediate family and has no connection
to How to Be a Villain, it is still worthwhile to explore the
rise of Dr. Horrible through the strategies and guidelines advocated
by Zawacki.
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