I Wanna Be Jayne!

I wanted to blog this morning, since I've been sick and out of it for a while, but alas nothing inspired. But then, suddenly(as things in print are oft wont to happen) one of the online comics I read dedicated a strip to a soon to be MMORPG based on Firefly. Firefly is something of a phenomenon in the Science Fiction Television world. It was a very short lived series created by Buffy and Angel scribe Joss Whedon and was half Western, 1/4 Starship Troopers, and 1/4 Star Trek. I never saw it when it originally ran, and it only got one season before getting the axe. Then the SciFi Channel reran the series in preparation for the big screen film Serenity. We watched the first episode and were not impressed, and since we already knew the series was doomed we didn't see the need to watch any further. But then several of my friends, and you know who you are, beat me verbally about the head and shoulders for not partaking of this televisory gem. So I was strapped into a recliner, ala Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, and forced to watch several episodes of this stellar(hee hee) series. It takes a few eps to grow on you. For me the hardest part was reconciling all the frontier talk with blasters and starships, but once you're hooked, you're hooked. The characters and relationships are somewhat reminiscent of Angel, but once you accept that and forget it the show soars. I can understand, with ever growing disgust, why it got canned. It is all things anathema to demographers and studio execs: intelligent, thought provoking, well scripted, well acted, and thoroughly non-prurient. Fans clamored, to no avail, upon it's death nell, and Whedon managed to get a movie made, but that was, for all intents and purposes, the end of the good ship Serenity. Or was it?
A company called Multiverse has reached an agreement with Fox to turn the show into a massively multiplayer online role playing game in the same vein as World of Warcraft or City of Heroes. They acknowledge that they have a tough road ahead, as Firefly fans are even more rabid and picky than us Trek nerds, but then they only have 14 episodes and one movie to memorize. It should be interesting, although I can find no mention of what Mr. Whedon has to say about it. They hope to release it sometime in 2008.

And now, more coffee.

Adios, Partners!
Marius