It opens with an evil cackle. Dr. Horrible stares menacingly into the camera. After a pause, he says, "So that's coming along. I'm working with a vocal coach."
The Doctor may have a Ph.D. in horribleness, but he's still struggling to get his dream job, a place in the Evil League of Evil. While he works on his application, he videoblogs from his hole-in-the-wall apartment about his latest exploits, regularly gets pummeled by local hero Captain Hammer, and boils with shyness as he tries to approach his laundromat crush, Penny. When emotions run high, all three characters break into song.
That's just the beginning of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, an internet-exclusive show by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Aside from the singing and Whedon's trademark nerdy, dry humor, what makes Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog unique is its distribution: The film never ran on TV or had a theatrical release, but was instead posted on the official Dr. Horrible Web site where it could be viewed for free and without commercials for a limited time. Now the film is available on Hulu.com, a site that legally streams copyrighted videos with the addition of commercials, but soon the complete series of three installations will be released on DVD.
Joss Whedon has an entrepreneurial imagination and a never-say-die attitude toward his stories, often crossing over media lines to keep his ideas alive after they go off the air. During last year's writers' guild strike he collaborated with his brother Jed Whedon, a composer, to write Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, a short musical about a wannabe super villain. Joss funded the project himself "in the low six figures," and shot the three-act, 40-minute film under the aegis of his production company, Mutant Enemy, with a cast of actors from his previous TV shows, featuring cameos by former Buffy writers and producers. The title role is filled by Neil Patrick Harris, while Captain Hammer is played by Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day is Penny.
Dr. Horrible is a typical Whedon combination of unabashedly geeky inspiration, self-deprecating humor and an overblown, histrionic story played out by ordinary people. Most of Whedon's stories are fatalistic, but that's easy to overlook in the scope of his imagination and the sympathetic insight he has into the minds and hearts of nerds, wallflowers, blustery teens and childish adults. Despite Dr. Horrible's grandiose ideas about destroying the status quo and salvaging mankind with anarchy, the would-be villain really wants to rule the world because he's too awkward to ask a girl out or stand up to a bully. And Whedon's wry voice permeates the script: "Wow, sarcasm, that's original," Dr. Horrible deadpans to his webcam in response to viewer mail, totally unaware of the irony. When Dr. Horrible tries to convince Penny that Captain Hammer isn't as great as she thinks he is, he explains, "Sometimes people have a third, even deeper layer, and that one is the same as the top surface one. Like with pie."
The musical is sometimes over-earnest, but in general, it strikes a good balance between taking itself seriously and openly mocking its own conventions, always with a surprisingly gentle attitude toward characters with social inhibitions. Part of the joke upon which the musical is premised is the stereotype of the loser/failure video-blogging to make himself feel important, defensively responding to viewer mail and stammeringly trying to be cool and sarcastic. Whedon also uses the visual idiom of the video blog in a way that is creative and fresh - making the blog like an invisible character with whom Dr. Horrible interacts. But even while he skewers Dr. Horrible, Whedon uses the satire to reveal the quietly repressed loneliness of his character, who does have friends and is even moderately successful, but doesn't know how to feel good about it.
Dr. Horrible managed to attract a sizable Internet viewership from the wide base of Whedonites, fans devoted to his previous creations, Buffy, its spin-off Angel, and the sci-fi cult hit Firefly. From the highly Internet-active Whedonites, word spread about the quasi-homemade, geek-chic musical as it was hyped by fans on blogs, Facebook and even Wikipedia.
But maybe what made Dr. Horrible such a hit, aside from a fan base's eagerness to snatch up everything Whedon tosses out to them, is the story behind its creation, the idea that a few creative people can collaborate on something spontaneous and semi-homemade and still reach a broad audience on the Internet.
Whedon isn't new to taking matters into his own hands, or taking a story into different or experimental media. He has written comic-book continuations of all his television series, and even released an online comic to promote Dr. Horrible. Whedon's stories often seem to have a life of their own that allows them to cross from television to comics to viral video while their creator finds new ways to keep them alive. The permutations of Whedon's 2002 television show, Firefly, illustrate his flexibility and ingenuity, a kind of preview of the media creativity that would result in Dr. Horrible.
While he was still supervising the concurrent runs of Buffy and Angel, Whedon premiered Firefly, a futuristic sci-fi western about smugglers and fugitives on their beloved spaceship, Serenity. Firefly was creative and cleverly written, but its original run suffered from broadcasting gaffes and lukewarm promotion, and it was cancelled after only 14 episodes were completed. It eventually accrued a devoted fan base, but only after it went off the air and started circulating on pirated formats, becoming so popular that Fox released an official DVD set.
Firefly's fans didn't manage to bring new episodes back on the air, but the SciFi Channel bought the rerun rights, and Whedon kept trying to continue the story in other ways. First, he wrote a comic book sequel about the passengers and crew of the Serenity; Then, when he snagged a movie deal that allowed him to make a feature-length continuation of the adventure, he shot and released an internet video to hype Firefly/Serenity's return in 2005.
The creepy, grainy video, about 10 minutes long, was circulated online on an otherwise blank webpage. Fans of the show recognized the character from Firefly, and word spread as the video was passed around, snagging curiosity and setting the tone for the movie, which was darker and scarier than the television show. Whedon's show was a relatively unknown underground hit, and the viral promotion was aimed primarily at existing fans, but a similar advertising technique was used more successfully to hype director Matt Reeve's 2008 sci-fi disaster film Cloverfield. Producers released a faux "home video" online depicting a farewell party interrupted by a terrifying and mysterious catastrophe.
Like Whedon's viral video, part of its fascination was its opacity - the film's title wasn't even released until the video had become widely circulated, and later anxious horror fans were disgruntled to hear that the film they'd anticipated so long had a sissy name like Cloverfield.
"Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" purports to be the most downloaded video on the Web. Now advertised on MSN's television Web site, it practically has the viewership of a regular TV show - without the TV. But just as fascinating is the way it bends not only distribution conventions but film conventions, making a show that could only work on the Web, with brief episodes and a premise tailored specifically for Web broadcast - the frame story of Dr. Horrible's blog.
By the way, the songs are catchy, too.
