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Dr. HorribleJuly 18th, 2008 |
Dr. Horrible is complete, and it’s brilliant. Go watch it now, before it goes away on Sunday.
BTW — low budget? The credits go on for a while…!
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Bored me in the same way Tarantino does, go figure.
I think it’s low budget because they’ve not paid anyone yet 
I was also surprised by the length of the credits. “Low” is obviously being used relative to something I’d consider … astronomically high.
As heard on an NPR story yesterday, the budget was “low six figures,” which could mean anything up to 350k by my estimation. Low by Hollywood standards, since an episode of a television episode usually costs around $1-1.5m. But not low by web standards, eh?
Is it just me, or was that pretty much the awesomest thing ever?
It is awesome in that it is there and it has recognizable stars from the whedon shop. The songs are kitsch just like the Buffy episode that used this genre. It may be low budget perhaps if the cast and crew took scale to do it, they shot it low budget and used off hour time to cut and mix it.
It is great fun. My 19 year old son is having a birthday party today and watching it with his friends downstairs.
It owes a lot to The Tick, to be sure - the biggest infringement probably being supervillain Bad Horse, vs. The Tick’s Man Eating Cow.
i, for one, happen to like the Tick … and Dr. Horrible was more watchable than the live action Tick TV series. Talk about “Horrible”.
… They must release a soundtrack cd! MUST.
I was particularly impressed with the ending - it’s rare for an American producer to be willing to go the direction Whedon did. The “path of the hero” is an incredibly common plot device, but with Dr. Horrible we’ve been given the “path of the villain.”
@cliff, definitely, and I love how much more sympathetic a character Dr Horrible is than pretty much everyone else, and how well realized the inner conflicts are there. The acting jobs given were amazingly well done. The emotion portrayed in the very last shot of the third episode is almost entirely through Neil Partrick Harris’s eyes, and it’s *powerful*.
If I had a signature here, it would now be, “Wow, sarcasm. That’s original.”
…. But the story doesn’t end there, right? Right? …
I didn’t mean to sound like I was slagging the songs. They did a very good job with the soundtrack. It is just a style: stage musical singing with a rock beat. I don’t care for it myself, but it works well here and elsewhere Whedon has done this. I think this genre hits its peak in Rocky Horror and hasn’t done much since.
@rik: I wonder if this is a throwaway. There are a lot of Whedons’ working on this, even Marti Noxon, so it kind of feels like a ‘what the Whedon family did with their summer vacation’ fun project.
It’s still cool. Webisodes are coming along nicely as a genre.
They actually thanked Ben Edlund in the credits, so they’re probably well aware of their Tick homage/theft.
A bunch of minor screen roles were people that had worked behind the scenes on other Whedon shows. I wonder how many of the crew were similar and how many might have worked cheap.
Quoting his Master Plan:
Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic.
The budget started at $100 but quickly ballooned to “low six figures”. That’s still low by most independent film standards, but pretty high for a 45-minute web video. Given the number of hits Joss & co received in the first hour, they will probably not have a problem making that back.
At every convention I got to, it seems like people are always suggesting that the game industry is becoming more and more like the movie industry (as if that is a good thing). Well here is an area where it seems the opposite might be happening. IMO, the day Steam was introduced began the long, slow death of store-bought games in favor of downloadable, disposable, digestible, internet-based content. It stands to reason that frustrated filmmakers might attempt something similar.
I wonder if Tom Cruise will take time during the Oscars to suggest that filmmakers look to the video game industry as a role model. I’m not holding my breath for that one.
My son (fourteen) is listening to the soundtrack over and over and over again. I thought he’d stop it once the weekend ended but of course it’s all on YouTube and so he’s still playing it constantly.
I loved the concept and went in expecting tripe but willing to embrace it on principle. Then to my surprise I loved the actual piece (and wanted to cry at that final look at the camera) but christ, I’m sick of hearing a brand new day at this point.
He (my son) talks about irony and perspective and yeah, I’m glad that he’s pushing beyond his standard black and white but for gods sake someone give the child a headset before I kill him.
Good stuff, I have to admit.
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