A surprise attack of Firefly fannishness. Eek, it's got me!

So way back in November, I preordered Finding Serenity: Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon's Firefly (that title's a mouthful, no?) and settled in to wait patiently for its long-off publication. And then today it arrived, even though Amazon still has the projected delivery date as May 3- 5. Huh? Strange, but I'm not complaining. I have the Buffy, Angel and Stargate anthologies from Benbella already, and each is a mixed bag, but enjoyable overall. If you want real, deep, juicy analysis, you might be better off sticking with LJ. We do it better, for free, and with pretty icons to boot. Even so, I do like the books. The good essays are good, the bad ones aren't bad enough to make me throw the book across the room (how do people do that? I'd feel so guilty), and the silly ones can really be very enjoyable. On a quick flip-through, Finding Serenity looks to be much the same mix, so we'll see. Even if every other essay is shallow, boring or bizarre, though, I'm glad I bought it for three reasons: 1) it's Firefly, I'm easy, and I've been saying since the start that TPTB missed a huge opportunity to sell me Firefly junk; 2) Jewel Staite wrote an essay. Aw, Jewel! Yay, Jewel! Looks like it's some of her thoughts and comments each of the episodes. Oh goody, that should be neat. (Tom McBeath has one in the Stargate book. I forget if I liked it, though. Hm); and 3) There's an essay titled "Firefly vs. The Tick." That'd be the animated Tick. EEEeeeeeEEEEEeeeeeEEEE! Ahem. Yes. (eeeee!) So, looks like that gets bumped to the top of the reading pile.


And I'm sure most people who wanted to have seen them by now, but the prototype Serenity AFs were unveiled at Wizardworld LA week before last: scroll down for pics of Mal, variant Mal, Jayne, and variant Jayne (there are microspoilers in the blurb, but nothing new). There's also supposed to be a fifth, currently unknown "monster" figure- a Reaver, I suppose, unless they're making AFs of little old space-Russians. Which would be very keen. Oh well. The bodies are really, really good. Really. Costumes, guns and accessories look dead-on so far. But the facial sculpts... erm. I'm reminded of the various Aragorn figures, all of which I've decided actually portray his distant halfwit cousin, Daragorn (royal families and their inbreeding, doncha know). The Jayne ones are a little better than the Mals, though considering how... off the Mal sculpt is, that's no great compliment. Hopefully there will be some resculpting before these come out. Or maybe I can just behead them and keep the nice body sculpts. That's not weird, is it? And where are my Simon and Zoe figures? And Wash and River and everyone else? Greedy? What's that mean?

A-F.com also had pictures from ToyFair of the "Bad Girls" Wesley AF. I know glasses on AFs are prohibitively expensive and complicated, but I've always preferred Wesley in glasses. Oh well. I have mixed feelings about this figure, too. It's tough to judge how the jacket will look in the end, because prototypes are made of a slightly different plastic than production figures, but right now it looks bulky and odd. I mean, in this picture, Wes looks a bit Young Frankenstein-ian. "Puttin' on the Ritz!" So I haven't made up my mind on this particular variant yet (I'm tempted), but I have the "Rain of Fire" and "Parting Gifts" ones on preorder, and if they're not delayed (a big assumption), they'll be a nice birthday present to myself. (No preordering available on Mal or Jayne yet, but Wesley arrives, hopefully, in late May.)


It was really good timing on Finding Serenity, actually, since I just finished rewatching the series for the first time in ages. It's just too painful to watch it very often (sob!). And I have to say, Firefly has some of the coolest looking extras and bit players I've seen in a long time. Like, in "Serenity," around minute seventeen or so, the camera is panning around Persephone (one of my favorite settings on the show), and it moves past this beautiful, solemn Asian girl with writing tattooed down the left side of her face. For all I know it says something terrible (my knowledge of Asian scripts could generously be called lousy), but it just looks so striking. I'm surprised no one's iconned her, though again, no idea what the tattoo says, so maybe that's why. One of Badger's henchmen, too, really caught my eye this time around. Tall-ish guy with long dreadlocks and this wonderfully stern, fierce face. He'd make a good ship's figurehead. He's lurking back by the door during Mal and Badger's confrontation in "Serenity," and he's the one holding the gun on Mal and Jayne when Badger first pops up in "Shindig." Such an interesting-looking guy (and I'd love to see him square off with my beautifully severe Zoe. Oooh). And then there's the lady deputy in "The Train Job." She's not very tall or daunting, but she looks tough and strong in a real "frontier mother" sort of way. She has long black hair pulled back into a braid, and I bet when she goes home after a long day of warning the townsfolk again to keep the sidewalks clear, wrangling miners who've had one too many, and dealing with the occasional great train robbery, her shopkeeper husband runs a brush through its silkiness while they talk about work and the kids and what they're doing the next time they can take some time off. Or something like that. Heh. Moral of the story is, Firefly has some fascinating, eye-catching extras.

And Niska was on tonight's Without a Trace. Thursday is Firefly day at Joan's house! snerk.

And new Zoe icon from fileg. I'm kind of amused that all of the Firefly icons I have loaded right now are either Simon or Zoe (plus one Sean and one Nathan). Why no, I don't have favorites, why do you ask?

Quote of the Day, and a wee DVD Sale

From "Firefly vs. The Tick," by Don Debrandt, in Finding Serenity:


"I should mention that I'm extremely grateful for the appearance of Dinosaur Neil. He allows me to segue from facial hair to giant prehistoric lizards, a leap that would cause most works of prose to derail in the sort of horrifying spectacle that actually causes injuries in adjoining essays.

The scene that introduced Wash, Serenity's pilot, placed him at the ship's controls. He was not paying attention to them, and he did not have a mustache. He was, however, playing with two small plastic dinosaurs, which he pitted against each other in a scene fraught with betrayal, horror, and lots of evil laughter. He is obviously a very bad man, and we will talk of him no further.

It is worth mentioning, though, that when the captain and Zoe first met him, he did have a mustache, and Zoe didn't trust him. Six years went by, they got married, and the mustache disappeared.

Coincidence?

I think not."


Heeeee. I love this essay. It probably helps that I have been, at various points in my life, deeply obsessed with both Firefly and The Tick, but good god, this is fun. Don Debrandt is a nutball. He compares Mal to El Seed. El Seed! My favorite Tick baddie ever! And it's jam-packed with Tick quotes and compares the Reavers to the Heys, and you can't fight evil with a macaroni duck!, and it's a short little thing, you could probably read it in the bookstore. Except I find that really annoying, so don't get caught or hurt the book. Okay, one more summary quote:


"So, to sum up: the links between Firefly and The Tick are obvious. There's the hair data, the dinosaurs and the monkeys, stuff about Christmas and weird language and, uh, they're both funny as hell, and there's all this material about the color blue and cows and high school French I didn't have room for, and it adds up in a perfectly logical, not at all insane way..."


And Amazon is having another sale on first seasons of TV shows on DVD. It's a very short list, but I heartily recommend Dead Zone, and I've heard very good things about Boomtown. Sadly, the Providence set is a "Best of," and doesn't include Richard Burgi's (rather strange) episode.


"And so, may Evil beware and may Good dress warmly and eat lots of fresh vegetables."

Tonight's Joan: "Trial and Error"

One comment on tonight's Joan of Arcadia:

( Chop, chop )

I might, at some future point, comment more on characterization, plot twists and so forth. I'm sort of waiting for the end of the season at this point. For now, I'm sticking to my current comment. And I deleted one particular JoA icon and uploaded this one again. You bet I'm that petty.