Thoughts on Dr. Horrible

[thewhitelily]

benpayne has made it "Blog your thoughts on Dr. Horrible's Sing-a-long Blog Day", so... well, here I go.

I'm a sucker for musicals. I'm a sucker for superheroes. I'm even more of a sucker for supervillains. I was always going to love a musical about a supervillain made by Joss Whedon. Add in the acting talent on this thing? Be still, my beating fangirl heart!

If you haven't seen it during its limited free-to-internet engagement, you have seriously missed out. Personally, I've seen it um... let's just say enough times that I hope I've got the songs memorised until the DVD comes to Australia. That way I won't have to compromise on my moral objection to giving money to Apple. :P

I'm not going to say it's a searing inditement on the tropes, or an unparalleled parody of the genre. I'm just going to say it was absolutely awesomely rewatchably enjoyable, and I can't sleep because "Slipping" keeps running through my mind, caught like every 3/4 tune always is, and I keep trying to say the line: "Because the world's a mess, and I just need to... rule it" in a way that's even one tenth as good as the original. Not to mention the very fact of introducing the evil plan by means of a love song just warms the cockles of my flowery heart.

There's something delightfully Gilbert and Sullivanesque about some of the rhymes, as well - rhyming words in the middle and then just keeping on going with the line. Nothing quite paralleling their trademark broken words ("... occupied in crime (pied in crime!)") or ridiculous non-words ("I'm plucky and adventury"), so I'm not sure why it's so reminiscent to me - perhaps just the grinningly clever rhymes in there, along with a few unexpected rhyme schemes to keep us on our toes. Nice.

I found Penny annoyingly vacuous, but I think she was meant to be, and it didn't interfere with my emotional connection with Billy's adoration of her. I loved the pie metaphor, which applied just as well to Billy, who was nice on the outside, just a veneer over Dr. Horrible, who in turn was a veneer over the Billy inside who only really wanted to be not a screwup so he could deserve Penny and honestly couldn't have pulled the trigger on the incapacitated Captain Hammer - who exactly was he trying to fool, anyway, with that "no mercy" self-talk?

Regarding the end: there are a number of ways it could have gone. The best alternate theory I think I saw was Penny turning out to actually be Bad Horse. That sparks my imagination with her delivering his rejection from the Evil League of Evil in person (with the chorus around her, of course), and poor Horrible realising that she's just completely out of his league as far as evil goes (no pun intended).

I was horrified, and a little disappointed when the way it would all end became clear. But after walking away with my world rocked, it kept resonating in my head - those last two words from Billy, looking into the camera for the last time, all pride and artifice stripped away. And I don't feel... a thing. Such a brief flash, but... you know what, I think that was the most powerful moment in the whole story.

I guess that's what every artist would wish for.

So be careful what you wish for, kiddies.

Comments

[thebellman.livejournal.com]

Love Dr Horrible. Want to have Joss Whedon's babies. Well, to be entirely precise, want to practice baby making with Felicia Day, but that's posted in the sealed section, in a brown paper envelope, under ice.

Agree with you except for one point: I did not interpret Penny as vacuous, but as so desperately lonely that she would suppress her own personality and character to conform to the ideals of whoever she was with.

I was equally horrified at the ending, but then remembered: this is Joss Whedon. Joss does not do happy endings. Joss definitely does not do happy endings for his leading ladies.

I'm waiting for the other shoe to fall. The people who built this have thrown down a rather large and shiny gauntlet in front of the traditional flim/television industry, and seem to have shown that you can make money out of free-to-air content. To put it another way, depending on how the money works out from DVD and iTunes sales, and T-Shirts and similar, they may have demonstrated the truth of the argument that you can make serious money out of selling rich media content to the long tail.

[thewhitelily]

Delivered to a PO box, under cover of darkness, with a misleading name on the credit card charge, of course.

Penny conformed to the ideals of whoever she was with? I didn't see that at all. Do you mean the song beginning the third act? I saw that as just that she was so supremely convinced that everyone was innately good that she'd believe and give anyone the benefit of the doubt, even when her gut said no. Right to the end, no matter how Captain Hammer humiliated her, no matter that she'd recognised Billy, she was completely unchanged by the story and still not perceptive enough to see that there was more to people than her own hopes for them. *shrug*

I'll take the happy endings thing under advisement and without much comment: my sister and I have just finished season six of Buffy in our weekly TV night, still mostly unspoiled. :) I must say, though, being Joss Whedon and him always doing that would have been a pretty poor excuse if it had been an unsatisfying ending. Fortunately, it was damn powerful the way he did it, so it's all good.

They may make back their money and a serious profit - that won't necessarily mean it'll catch on. This was a pretty low budget production in the first place, and when there's a small, talented team doing it mostly for love, you skip a massive proportion of the overheads generally required for - well, anything. That's the magic of small teams whether in software or anything else. I have no doubt that if this succeeds we'll get more serious productions made by said small, talented teams, and whoohoo - although I think it'll require fame or cult status on the scale of Whedon to make it truly profitable for anyone. But I suspect the big established companies will always need the upfront return to balance their overhead.