Birth of a 'Horrible' Fandom

WCityMike — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:32:11 -0800

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.

Doogie Howzaboutdat?

WolfDaddy — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 19:35:00 -0800

Doogie comes out of the closet. While this probably falls under the category "yeah, like we didn't know that already," it's nice to see younger male celebrities finally admit publicly what everyone gossips about privately.

will — Tue, 30 Jul 2002 13:19:10 -0800

The Vancouver Company that created ReBoot will be making a CGI Spider-Man cartoon for MTV. Neil Patrick Harris as Spidey, Lisa Loeb as Mary Jane and Ian Ziering as Harry Osborn will inhabit a "seemingly realistic neon lit city of the immediate future". Will this show set a new standard of production for cartoons based on comics? Will MJ wear glasses?

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Birth of a 'Horrible' Fandom

Doogie Howzaboutdat?