Sunday, May 10, 2009

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog shows Mamma Mia How It Should Be Done

So who says they can’t make a 46 minute superhero musical that is cool and rocks? Well, I guess nobody ever said that, now that I think of it. But IF “they” had said it, “they” would have been WRONG.

Yah, I know. This is old. It was first released almost 10 months ago, which is about five and a half years in dog time and roughly that much in internet time as well. (Its funny, until the internet the only people who worried about being the first to check out new media were high school and college age kids. Grown-ups were busy with unimportant stuff like career and family and knew that if you saw a movie or read a book you could talk about it with other people who had enjoyed it for months, if not years afterward. Now everybody is texting and twittering and the discussion space on the net has shrunk to only a few days. The result is that everybody now has the attention span of a 12 year old.) In those ten months the film paid for itself (almost a quarter of a million dollars- in case you thought you could be an internet video sensation without big name stars or a sizable wad of cash and without being hit in the nuts in a new and entertaining way), and won a Hugo and a slew of other awards (including being #4 on Time Magazine's list of best television in spite of never being closer to a television than your computer monitor- new media, who knew?). Neil Patrick Harris is a known singer, having been in numerous Broadway shows such as CABERET and RENT, but if you are only familiar with his TV appearances you might be surprised at his vocal power. Other surprises are Nathan Fillion’s (from Firefly) ability to sing and the smaller part of Moist played by Simon Helberg who plays Wallowitz on the sitcom THE BIG BANG THEORY (and who here portrays a supervillan with the most useless power since Marvel Comics’ Black Hole in Howard the Duck, who had the rallying cry “The Black Hole SUCKS!”). It also features Felicia Day, an excellent singer who has those kind of accessible good looks that geeks go nuts for. And Judd and Zack Weadon, brothers of Joss Weadon and masterminds of this madness, as the Cowboy henchmen singers singing one of the best lyrics ever written:

The Evil League of Evil
is watching so beware,
the grade that you receive’ll
be the last we swear,
so make the Bad Horse gleeful
or he'll make you his mare...

Not since Slim Shady rhymed orINges with syrINges has there been a more inventive rhyme than “evil” and “receive will”.

Anyway, to the folks who read this blog (all two of you) I encourage you to see this if you already haven’t (and if you are reading this blog you probably haven’t because looking to me for what’s new on the web is like asking your grandmother about sex- she might not know the newest positions but she has a pretty good idea about what works and what doesn’t). We strive for quality, not novelty.




And because NBC has decided, for reasons only bureaucratic managers could understand, not to allow SNL to be embedded, you have to click on this link. Even if you don’t like people pretending to play musical instruments you should stay for the punchline.

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