The whole series is like 42 minutes long, so be prepared.
Description
"Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" is a three-part blog/miniseries/musical that chronicles the adventures of Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris), a supervillain and mad scientist who dreams to join the Evil League of Evil, a reputable supervillain organization. It's an obvious play on superhero/supervillain tales, and it has lots of funny references to things like "death rays," and it includes several outlandish villains, such as Horrible's roommate "Moist." The most interesting part of the series, I find, is the fact that the protagonist is an evil supervillain, rather than a hero, and in fact the hero, Captain Hammer, is really an overall jerk and a bad guy. The show begins with the Doctor's video blog, doing the usual thing of giving updates on his evil doings, answering emails, etc. The show then immediately breaks into the narrative of Dr. Horrible's everyday life as "Billy" washing his laundry at the laundromat. The socially awkward Doctor reveals, through song, that he has a crush on fellow "laundry person" Penny, and the story takes off from there, as the Doctor tries to juggle his evil aspirations, his nemesis Captain Hammer, and his "normal" life with Penny. The show is split up into three parts: the Doctor's blog, his exploits in real life with Penny and Captain Hammer, and musical numbers fitting to the situation. The musical parts are quite good, and the show is pretty funny. One interesting note is that the show is completely free and never aired on TV. It began as an experiment by its writers to make a free online TV series, and it's now available on iTunes for a nominal fee.
Analysis
"Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" really isn't a blog at all, but the fact that it plays on the idea of a blog is a very interesting one. Of course the blog aspects of it give it a real/surreal line it can cross, giving us the idea that there really could be a supervillain with a blog out there. The fact that blogs are rising in popularity obviously came to the minds of the writers when they were devising this show, and they most likely figured a blog would attract more viewers than a conventional show.
The musical parts are also quite interesting. It wouldn't seem like a sing-along would fit the supervillain idea at all, but it makes the show very interesting. Musicals seem to be quite popular these days, with movies like "High School Musical," and other such properties. Now, I not sure if they've been getting more or less popular, but that might be something interesting to look into.
Thirdly, the fact that it is completely free is an awesome idea to me. There is a whole description on their idea of a free show on the official website: http://drhorrible.com/. The show is published on a website called hulu.com. If you aren't already informed, allow me. Hulu is a free online video-streaming service, like YouTube, that lets you watch videos online for free. The difference between this and YouTube is that Hulu can show copyrighted shows like Family Guy, The Office, House, etc. I'm not sure how they can do this, it probably has something to do with the advertisements it shows before each video. Anyway, so Dr. Horrible was published to this website so everyone can watch it for free, or they can download it from iTunes or whatever. So the writers had the idea of this free show, so they got together with their buddies, and called up some friends, who called other friends, and brought this whole thing together for as little cost as possible and are selling it for as little as possible. It's their way of showing big TV businesses and all of internet humanity that it can be done. Who knows if this will start new waves of free internet shows, but already sites like abc, nbc, hulu, etc. have their syndicated shows online playable for free, so this idea is hardly a new one. This whole free TV business is really interesting and just plain awesome. So go do it, and um... I forgot what else I was going to say.
5 comments:
NPH and a BLOG!! what? I had no earthly idea Doogie Howser was doing stuff like this. The concept of it does seem appealing to a variety of audiences, the one thing that really caught me was the source u embedded it from. Up until this blog I had no idea what hulu was, and after taking a look at the website it seems pretty unique and the aspect of being able to watch full episodes makes it that much better. It would greatly help some people with movies since youtube basically just uses clips in 10 thousand seperated clips, but at least this compiles it all into one!, interesting blog and thanks for opening me up to HULU!
Awesome. Glad I could help. :)
Good lord, I absolutely love DHSB. An interesting fact you left out was that it was written by Joss Whedon (creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly,) during the writers' strike last year as more of something to do then anything else. It was done as an experiment to create something small and inexpensive, yet professionally done, in a way that would get around the issues that were being protested during the strike. Overall you described the show with great justice. Good job.
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