(via io9)
Because I enjoyed it, is why. Although Garry Wills, IIRC, explained many years ago that the Western ‘estranged hero who leads his people to a paradise he can’t enter’ trope goes back at least as far as Moses in the Old Testament…
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Frankensteinbeck
Mixing Science Fiction and Westerns is a long and traditional genre combination. I thought adding zombie horror was cute, albeit also awkward.
frosty aka Bro Shotgun etc etc
Indeed it is a traditional combination. Many years ago I read a short story compilation (might have been one of Groff Conklin’s) and one series of stories was grouped under the heading “Horses in the Starship Hold”.
ETA: Just looked it up. Galactic Empires Volume One ed. Brian W. Aldiss.
lamh36
Ugh…I’m going to bed now. Good night…I’ve had enough for the day.
Never Forget… #SandraBland #BlackLivesMatter #SayHerName
Even before this, but more so now, I notice whenever any type of law enforcement vehicle is anywhere near me and I admit, my heart races until they either pass me or I let them pass.
Even though I’m sure, I did nothing wrong…but always think “wait, did I use my signal light”…did I complete to a completely there… Hell, I have a new car, and I even think…”hmm I don’t think my tail light is out”..
I do not suffer from depression or whatever mental issues Sandra Bland had, but I do imagine how I’d feel if I was ever in that situation, so yeah, I’m wary when I see a LEO vehicle anywhere near me while I’m driving while Black.
I am definitely more wary than I’ve ever been before.
Frankensteinbeck
@lamh36:
Jesus Christ, I’m glad I’m not black, and it sucks horribly that we live in an America where I have reason to feel that way.
Matt McIrvin
Galaxy magazine was making fun of science-fiction stories that were really Westerns in its back-cover advertising as far back as 1950 (“You’ll never see it in Galaxy!“) The little parody in the ad was about a character named Bat Durston, so you’ll sometimes see older SF fans describing such stories as Bat Durstons.
Most of them weren’t quite as unabashed about it as Firefly/Serenity, but the Western heritage could still be pretty obvious. The whole first act of Star Wars is a Bat Durston; the saloon fight makes it pretty evident. Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek as “Wagon Train to the Stars”, though that wasn’t actually a Western every week.
Darkrose
@lamh36: Yeah, I’m kind of glad I’m not doing my commute to Davis any more.
Mike J
See also Outland, where Sean Connery plays a marshal in an off planet mining colony.
TaMara (BHF)
Yes, but did they do it while wearing tight pants and looking as hot as Nathan Fillion. I bet not.
Darkrose
I never watched Firefly, mostly because I was uncomfortable with a show where everyone spoke Chinese but there were zero Asian actors in the main cast. Uncomfortable, but not surprised; Joss Whedon has serious issues with race and representation in his work.
Anoniminous
@lamh36:
I’m over the moon angry and frustrated with what is coming down.
As well you should be. Cops have a license to kill and they are using it.
Chris
@Darkrose:
I watched and liked it, but I definitely noticed that too. I think it’s the first sci-fi series I watched where that kind of thing really bothered me, though I don’t know if that’s something inherent to Firefly or just me getting old enough to notice/care (Star Trek could stand a little more diversity, too). I’ve heard the explanation suggested that the outer planets where we spent the most time are the “Anglo” part of the verse and the inner planets are the “Sino” part, so that’s why the lack of Asians. But that explanation doesn’t fly; no, we don’t see much of the inner planets, but we do get enough glimpses (the crews of Alliance ships, the population of the hospital they break into, the agents like the Operative or the Hands of Blue) that we’d have noticed if the was a Chinese influence there. The Chinese are just pretty much absent, like the critics say.
The other thing that kind of weirded me out by the end of the season was how literally they took the “space western” thing. I mean, Han Solo might’ve been a gunslinger out of an old western, but he didn’t carry a Civil War era pistol that still fired slugs – the fact that Star Wars borrows liberally from so many genres helps to create the feel of its own unique universe. Firefly feels a lot more like they literally transplanted an old western into outer space.
PurpleGirl
@TaMara (BHF): You beat me to it. I was going say something about Captain Mal’s nickname — Captain Tight Pants.
dianethuntress
Why is the paging arrow to go back to earlier pages of the blog not working? Ie., pages 1,2,3,and 4 are all page 1 duplicates. How does one who has been out sick catch up on earlier stuff???!!
Omnes Omnibus
@Chris: I never saw the series, so my only experience is the movie and that never entered into it.
SoupCatcher
One of the most important lessons I learned through Serenity was that internet hype doesn’t necessarily translate into reality.
I was a member of an online community that started when the show was airing, experienced growth when the boxed set was released, and was a beehive of activity leading up to the release of the movie. We were working, through various guerrilla marketing methods, to try and make the movie successful enough to hopefully restart the television show. Living and breathing in that community, there was no doubt in my mind that there was enough demand to make the movie commercially successful. It was a hard pill to swallow when the movie didn’t even win its opening weekend – losing to a Jodie Foster movie in its second week – and earned less than a quarter of what it needed to.
What I took away was that hundreds, even thousands, of people can make what looks like a lot of noise but you need orders of magnitude greater than that to make a difference. It’s something I remind myself of, on a regular basis, when online.
Omnes Omnibus
@SoupCatcher: As a positive, try applying that to Trump’s alleged popularity.
redshirt
By my pretty floral bonnet, I will end you.
SoupCatcher
@Omnes Omnibus: I’d like to think that.
I hope Trump is more Perot than Reagan. Being eight at the time, I wasn’t politically aware when Reagan was running in 1980, so I don’t know if Trump is on a similar trajectory. In 1992, I was working for a general contractor and it seemed like every “self made man” in that world was for Perot. It wasn’t a trivial percentage, but it wasn’t enough.
*edited to fix faulty memory of year
Chris
@SoupCatcher:
I think this is the Ron/Rand Paul phenomenon in a nutshell. Loud and dedicated fanbase, zero appeal outside of it, and the fanbase is much smaller than it thinks.
gwangung
@Chris: That applies to a lot of loud segments on the internet.
*cough* Progressives.
PeakVT
There are some (East) Asians in Firefly/Serenity, but they are mostly part of some rather generic “exotic future urban menagerie” backdrops in the pilot and and near the middle of Serenity. But there are also not a lot of South Asians, non-westernized Africans, West Asians (Arabs, Iranians, Turks, etc.) or Latinos (apart from the physical presence of Morena Baccarin, whose character is predominantly East Asian) in the series either, if you want to score the series against the world’s current diversity. Doing that strikes me as kind of silly, though, because in Whedon’s future “‘Verse” those groups might not have made it from Earth-That-Was for unknown but easily imagined dystopian reasons that wouldn’t be out of place in a lot of sci-fi. After all, the opening of Serenity does explicitly say that it was not a voluntary migration to the new solar system. And as I think we should all know by now, crises don’t exactly foster inter-cultural friendship.
Anyway, it’s Whedon’s ‘Verse, just like it was Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Whether they created their universes the way they did because they are/were bigots will only be known by them.
thundermonkey
Who killed Sandra Bland?
How come she died and what’s the reason for?
Pete Seeger at Carnegie Hall
redshirt
Well, the Tams were supposed to be of Chinese background.
Marmot
Looks like your taste in sci-fi has more overlap with mine than I thought! Whew.
burnspbesq
@thundermonkey:
We are fairly certain we know who killed her. That’s not the same thing as proving every element of the offense beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury in East Bumfuck County, Texas, where the DA is an elected official who would presumably like to be re-relected.
This is what institutional racism looks like. The outcome is hard-wired into the system.
burnspbesq
What? The? Hell?
Rashi
IMO this site needs more texture and color, especially the main posts. Never heard of Serenity but I did see Room last night which was very good with some really poignant moments. (Someone pass me a hanky ASAP dammit!) The kid actor was truly fantastic and probably deserves an Oscar. See it if ya can.
Will this country really elect a candidate for prez who makes fun of someone’s disability? It’s still arguable that Trump is a Dem plant or punking the GOP.
Villago Delenda Est
Star Trek was pitched to the idiots in suits at NBC as “Wagon Train to the Stars”.
redshirt
@Villago Delenda Est: And that’s exactly the jumping off point of Firefly.
But the pro-Confederacy questions are hard to answer.
Goblue72
@SoupCatcher: There is no comparison.
Ronald Reagan was a two term Governor of California – he possibly could have been elected for a third if he decided to. He defeated Jesse Unruh fur his second term – a powerful state Democrat and Speaker of the State Assembly.
Reagan opted not to run for a third term and instead then ran for the GOP Presidential nomination in 1976 against a SITTING President of his own party. In spite of that, he came within a whisper of knocking off Ford. Final delegate count – Ford – 1187, Reagan – 1070. He’d come back four years later and win the primaries handily over Bush. Coming out of the primaries, Reagan held a a large polling lead over Carter. It would narrow, but he’d always be in the lead. Aggregate polling data shows that Reagan lead Carter from June onward. His late surge in the final month of the election wasn’t coming from behind – it just padded his lead.
Trump, on the other hand, is an amateur.
Progressives like to tell themselves Reagan was an old fool. Makes them feel better to losing to Reagan three times. (Bush didn’t win because he was Bush. He won because he was Regan’s VP)
He wasn’t a fool. He was a crafty, nasty piece of work and a smart politician who seized on a cultural change in the country centered on racial resentment amongst white voters. Everyone likes to remember Lee Atwater as the Willie Horton ad guy from the 1988 election. They forget Atwater worked for Reagan and oversaw Reagan’s strategy to sweep the South during the 1980 primaries.
SoupCatcher
@efgoldman:
@Goblue72:
That’s very reassuring to hear. Thank you.
Mike J
@redshirt: They’re dead easy to answer. The rebels in Firefly were not pro Confederate. They were against the government, but there was never any indication that it had to do with slavery. The entire point of the Confederacy was slavery. Get rid of that, and there’s no “pro-Confederacy” question.
mclaren
@gwangung:
Provably false.
Look at Pew and Gallup polls of all Americans on public policy. They skew 60%-plus for policies that identify as progressive.
It’s even true for Trump supporters. Overwhelmingly in favor of expanding social security + medicare, against endless foreign wars, for Wall Street regulation.
Those are signature progressive positions.
mclaren
@Goblue72:
Reagan was a vicious sociopath who played on & misdirected working peoples’ rage at the destruction of the middle class — while causing it. Reagan signed bills that exploded the deficit, then gave speeches condemning the deficit and blaming “tax and spend” liberals. Pure Nixonism, but with a friendly folksy genial face. Incredibly dangerous.
In 1970 Reagan gave a speech about Vietnam anti war protesters: “If it takes a bloodbath, let’s get it over with.” Reagan compared the CA teachers union to the Nazi party. He called out the National Guard because UC Berkeley students printed “fvck” in the student newspaper. And older voters loved it. Reagan played off the generation gap in ways no longer possible today.
Reagan was stupid — but also a sociopath in the right place at the right time to do tremendous damage…like Sirhan Sirhan.
Steeplejack (phone)
@dianethuntress:
You can use the date in a URL, say:
www.balloon-juice.com/2015/12/18
Matt McIrvin
@Goblue72: What people remember is Reagan with the effects of encroaching Alzheimer’s disease, maybe exacerbated or triggered by the physical trauma of an attempted assassination. I sometimes wonder if we even could have survived eight years of pre-Alzheimer’s Reagan.
ET
@Chris: I was always under the impression that the reason Chinese was the language chosen was more about the real world now rising influence of China and the waiting influence of the U. S. . English overtook French as the international language of commerce and in the movie Chinese overtakes English.
The Other Chuck
@Matt McIrvin: The opening act (after the starship scene) of Star Wars is a straight-up homage to Akira Kurosawa, who was rather a fan of the genre mashup himself. The paralells to The Hidden Fortress are as obvious as they get once you see both.
Paul in KY
@lamh36: Jesus, what a drag. I’m very sorry any non-criminal has to experience that feeling.
Actual criminals, hope they experience it all the time.
opiejeanne
@Goblue72: Please, the past tense of “to lead” is “led”.
Good comment.