“There’s a complete disconnect between the two worlds”
Felicia Day is a talented actress, writer, and producer, and gets it to boot:
Felicia Day, the creator of The Guild and star of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, talked today about how different the world of Hollywood and the web are. Speaking at the NewTeeVee Live conference she said there’s a complete disconnect between the two worlds and told aspiring webisode creators to make sure they understand the difference between the two mediums. For her, the web is about showing real life for real people, rather than the artifice and perfection shown by Hollywood.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog got a huge boost in buzz and interest because it was created by Joss Whedon (disclaimer: I’m an unabashed Whedon Worshipper) and starred Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Day. But it also got it, playing extremely comfortably within the online “webisodic” medium.
Beyond being a darkly comic sci-fi musical (how’s that for starters, by the way?), the content played with technology extremely comfortably and well. Dr. Horrible, played by Harris, videoblogging within the realm of the story about his evil intentions, announced that he was going to rob a bank. Cut to a later scene, and he’s shown battered and bruised because, well, the cops watched his videoblog on the Internet and therefore were waiting at the bank well ahead of time. A comic stretch to be sure, but it worked.
The business side of Dr. Horrible was also handled extremely well. It was released for free for a brief period of time, before going on sale exclusively at iTunes for a reasonable fee. (You can now also watch it for free on Hulu and on the official site.) As noted below, by Internet standards it was a huge hit.
And, for its efforts, Dr. Horrible was awarded as part of Time’s best inventions of 2008 under the heading of The Direct-to-Web Supervillain Musical:
It’s hard to imagine a studio green-lighting an idea as weird and ostensibly uncommercial as a 43-min., three-part online supervillain musical. But in a medium that rewards the unconventional — the Web — Dr. Horrible was a hit. After its July debut, the series reached No. 1 on iTunes’ video chart, with 2.2 million downloads a week.
Here’s a taste of Dr. Horrible if you’re not familiar:
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