A brief look at the Big Bang birth of a fandom: the
explosion of
'Dr. Horrible' fandom in just 47 days.
Quite a lot of "more inside" follows.First, there's the fanfic videos that try to expand the universe. Such as
Dr. Horrible: the Early Years (
1 2 3 4 5), and
Dr. Dreadful's YouTube Riposte. There's applications for the Evil League of Evil as well, including
Average,
Yin and Yang,
Short Change, the
Allergen, the
Parasite, the
Horse Thief,
Custodious Rex,
Capt. Shrovewreaker (the Breakfast Pirate),
Mistress Paragon, and the
Death Giggle. (Ever wonder how
Dr. Horrible's
application was
received at the League?) There's Evil Horse's rival,
the Evil Germ-man; Dr. Horrible has
the Weapon gunning for him; the
Henchman's Union is recruiting; and catDWM's made a
musical application to be Dr. Horrible's sidekick (her competition is
puppetry).
Second, there's the fan creations that take the show and do something adorable or amazing or weird with it — always cute kid covers such as
Laundry Day (aw!) or
Bad Horse (Preschooler Mumbler Edition), not to mention a
few good covers by adults, too. (Speaking of adult covers, rickrolls are so passé ... have you been Bad Horse'd?
Felicia Day has. Although she wasn't
Bad Horse'd in German.) There's the guy who plays a duet with himself on
"My Eyes/On the Rise" — in character — as both the "Penny violin" and the "Dr. Horrible violin", playing his own piano backup as well. There's
ringtones,
limericks, HALO machinima (
1 2 3 4 5),
My Little Horrible Ponies (including
Capt. Hammer)
(which is almost as cute as a commercial L'il Kaylee), and
karaoke tracks (soon to be
officially touring as a singalong, although the show is already being
Rocky Horror-ed). (And there's LibraryThing doing
crowdsource research as to what's on Horrible's library shelf.)
And the world isn't lacking for official
Dr. Horrible material, either. There's Felicia Day, with her own
Twitter channel and her own
excellent fan production,
The Guild; she's caught "
twittering under the table", requests that someone post it on Vimeo, and comments there. She does a duet with Jonathan Coulton on "
Still Alive", and the
Penny Arcade guys
want to groom her. The Whedons aren't exactly naifs when it comes to an online presence either; they're
Twittering as well
(and even passed along this little off-topic gem to their followers) and the world now has a
Capt. Hammer comic and the official
Evil League of Evil website (
e-mail Bad Horse). (Not to mention presences on
MySpace and
Facebook.)
If you've not been over-
Horribled by now, you might want to sit down for the 53-minute Dr. Horrible ComicCon panel with Joss and the cast (
1 2 3 4 5), read
Entertainment Weekly's
oral history, read
Warren Ellis' comments on the musical, or muse upon what would happen if
Capt. Hammer and Mal met. If you're still not over-
Horribled, you could go to
WhedonFilter (er, Whedonesque, but running MeFi software, I believe) or
Wonderflonium (the latter of which was a great help with finding some of the videos), where there's a
great deal more
singing,
fan art, and
music videos.
All in just 47 days. That's
a lot of Wikipedias, I imagine.
posted by acro at 9:37 AM on August 31, 2008 [1 favorite]