I can still hear her anguished cry echoing across my living room (which is reasonably big so there was sort of a kind of echo … anyway it was dramatic trust me!).
After talking talking non-stop for months on end about the brilliance of Joss Whedon‘s epic space opera series Firefly, and how she needed to watch it if she was to have truly enjoyed television in any way, shape or form, my friend Tracy had just discovered that the show had been cancelled well before its time, leaving just 13 previous episodes and one movie, Serenity, in existence.
“YOU … DIDN’T … TELL … ME … THERE … WERE … JUST … 13 … EPISODES!” she cried as whacked me, Elaine Benes-style, with the understandable fury of newly-enthused fan crushingly disappointed.
Her pain and despair – not too strong a word when you consider how brilliantly written, acted and executed the show is, a gem that Fox roughly assumed was a rock not a diamond because of lower than expected ratings – has been echoed down through the years as the Browncoats, as Firefly fans call themselves, mourned the loss of a show that should have had many seasons, countless movies, and a torrent of pop culture manifestations to its name.
This trenchant, passionate and enduring devotion, long after the series finished its run in early 2003 – only 11 of the 14 episodes were aired on Fox – did have the desired effect of keeping the memory of the show lustrously and extravagantly alive, and rippling through pop culture, long after it had let slip its mortal TV coils.
And now it has given birth to one of the eagerly-greeted online game announcements in history with Firefly Online, which sees the cast reuniting to give life to their characters in a strategic online role playing game being announced as a real, existing, if still in development thing, at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con, along with the following trailer …
According to Gamespot, everyone is going to be back for this much-desired re-incarnation of Joss Whedon’s classic:
“In a post to the game’s official Facebook page, they explained that Fillion, Alan Tudyk (“Wash”), Adam Baldwin (Jayne Cobb), Sean Maher (Dr. Simon Tam), and Ron Glass (Shepherd Book) have already recorded their parts, and that Jewel Staite (Kaylee Frye), Gina Torres (Zoë Washburne), and Summer Glau (River Tam) will soon.
The game will cast players in the role of a captain of a customizable ship who must recruit a crew and complete jobs in a universe populated by characters from the show and other players.”
But don’t rush to your computer to play it just yet.
“If there is a downside to all this shiny is we have A LOT more work to do. There are many hours’ worth of new material we’re adding to the game, about 20 actors we need to turn into 3-D models and literally dozens of new scenes that must be blocked and animated.”
The good thing is that all that devotion (and yes Tracy, that anguish) was well worth it making this the golden age in which to be a Browncoat and proving once and for all that “you can’t take the sky from me”!