
I must say I've been loving Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and now it's gone I feel there is a hole in my life normally only felt when either the football season has ended or when the doors on the Big Brother house have closed one last time. In a week that sees the media hype for The Dark Knight hijack every pixel of screen space and every second of TV time put before us, it has been an absolute joy to watch this 3 act relatively low-budget 'made for the internet' superhero sing-along.
Dr Horrible is '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'. Though it's called a blog, it's not. It's simply 3 acts in which the main character played by Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser/How I Met Your Mother) occasionally talks to the camera in a video blog kinda way. Act 1 went live last Monday and was down in hours due to the demand on the servers. Over the week acts 2 and 3 went up and are due to be taken down at midnight tonight (July 20th).
The whole thing came from the mind of Joss Whedon, a Hollywood writer and director who has previously written Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Toy Story, and Alien: Resurrection. He's also done quite a bit of comedy on TV including Roseanne and The Office (US). Apart from the great script, good songs and some decent one-lines what I really like about the project is that it came about as a result of the writers strike. I'll let Joss explain further...
"Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; the mushrooms did not dance, the elderberries gave no juice for the festival wines, and the Teamsters were kinda pissed. (They were very polite about it, though.) During this work-stoppage, many writers tried to form partnerships for outside funding to create new work that circumvented the Forest King system.
"Frustrated with the lack of movement on that front, I finally decided to do something very ambitious, very exciting, very mid-life-crisisy. Aided only by everyone I had worked with, was related to or had ever met, I single-handedly created this unique little epic. A supervillain musical, of which, as we all know, there are far too few.
"The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first."
If you're the kinda person that lives by the rule of always turning a negative into a positive then the success of this story will not come as a surprise. I've often found that my best work has come through such circumstances, or through being restricted in what I can do. Though it's been well documented that restrictions on cigarette advertising produced some of the most memorable print ads of the 70's and 80's, and Dr Horrible is excellent, I'll hold back judgment on the forthcoming StrikeTV (online channel filled with content written during the strike) having watched the trailer below...
www.strike.tv Teaser from StrikeTV on Vimeo.
