i was there, gandalf...

[rivendellrose]

Popped by YouTube for something dumb and easy to watch while I knitted, and for some reason the algorithm decided to suggest Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog for me.

Oh, my sweet summer child. You don't need to suggest that nonsense to me. I was there the first time around. I remember it very well.

I also remember not too terribly long ago, when someone on Tumblr (I think?), referred to it as "Joss Whedon's If I Did It," which is another reference that one has to be above a certain age to get, but let's be real, this is Dreamwidth, we're pretty much all that age to begin with. And yes. It definitely is.

Comments

[muccamukk]

God, just thinking about that stupid thing pisses me off. Absolutely his "If I Did It." And it felt like better than half of LJ ate it with a spoon.

[rivendellrose]

Oh, more than half, I bet. I did! It arrived in a period of time when I had realized that Firefly had huge issues but hadn't yet reevaluated Buffy, and as a fan of musical theater and Sondheim it was pretty much lab-designed to appeal to me back in the days before I fully twigged to... everything about Joss Whedon, basically. Alas.

[muccamukk]

I'm trying to remember where I was. This was a writer's strike thing, right. So was Joss scabbing by today's rules? I guess he must not have been by the rules then, but it did feel a bit odd to me that he had a project while everyone was one strike. We're talking Summer 2008.

ANYWAY. It came out, I loved the first episode, was excited. I thought the premise for Dollhouse was a bit *wobbly hand gesture* and wasn't planning to watch it, and had Concerns about Firefly and Angel especially. (Buffy I was mostly annoyed about how Season 6 had gone, and never did watch season 7).

The third episode came out the same week I watched The Dark Knight, which was Nolan at his fridgiest, and I hit an incandescent feminist rage that lifted me into the stratosphere.

[rivendellrose]

It's funny, I tried to find something in my journal archive about my initial reactions to Dr. Horrible, and I can't turn anything up. I'm pretty sure I watched it when it first came out, but it turns out that summer I was having some weird health stuff that necessitated heart monitors and radiology and all kinds of weird crap, and around the same time Hellboy II came out and I fell head over heels for that, so Dr. Horrible was probably a relative blip on my radar.

I was also watching Torchwood at that time, so my tolerance for utter stupidity on TV was at an all-time high. So... yeah.

[muccamukk]

I think this was my main response to it: https://muccamukk.dreamwidth.org/2008/07/19/

I'd already bailed on Torchwood because of all the date rape in the first few episodes.

[rivendellrose]

Yeah, that pretty much covers it.

The thing with Torchwood, for me, was that it worked while I was watching it with my BFF, typically while drinking and shouting at the TV about how stupid everyone was. But as soon as I was watching it alone or with anyone else it no longer worked in the slightest. We treated it as a truly horrible camp comedy, and it worked as that for a while. We had a very high tolerance for stupid and problematic in those days, though.

[muccamukk]

There's more a couple days forward. I was apparently mad at it for a solid two weeks.

ANYWAY.

That way of watching TW sounds really fun, actually. I'd have stuck with it longer if I'd done that.

[ruuger]

Yeah, it was his writer's strike project, and now that you mention it, it does feel a bit odd. But I'm guessing it didn't count as scabbing because it was an indie production?

[muccamukk]

They might not have covered that kind of streaming, either. Anyway, probably the least of that show's problems.

[ruuger]

I was just thinking recently about how Dr. Horrible has probably aged worst of all of Joss' works because it's him at his skeeviest, but was so beloved when it came out (unlike Dollhouse, which was equally skeevy but people generally blamed the network for its failures). I'm now actually kinda curious if there are any Youtube reactors who've watched it, to see how a current audience might react to it...

(I was also already firmly in my disillusionment phase with Joss when it came out, so my main memories about it is getting into arguments with people on Whedonesque over it)

[muccamukk]

I was about 60% down my disillusionment phase, and this one made me hit 100% (I briefly thawed for the Avengers film, but it was never the same).

I think I mostly kept my mouth shut. I probably posted here, but I don't think I saw much point in trying to deJoss people.

[rivendellrose]

Yeeeeaahhhhhh. We all kind of recognized Dollhouse was a problem from the get-go, I think, but Dr. Horrible had a lot of the kind of problems that slipped under a lot of radars at the time, I think (though I cannot for the life of me find my own initial reactions to it, so I'm stuck with uncertain memory). I feel sure I remember being like "WTF was up with that ending?!" but I don't remember whether I had the vocabulary or context yet to be anything more than vaguely appalled.

Ugh, yeah. You put up with a lot of bs on that forum.