Joss Whedon's Firefly was awesome, but its title sequence really didn't sell the show. What Firefly really needed was a kick-ass, old-school, synth-happy, guitar-solo, Yay Spaceships, 1980s-style intro credit sequence. And here it is. Joss, you can thank me later.
So here's our attempt at a tight-ass killer 1980s Firefly intro:
Poor Simon Tam. We had to leave him out of the credits because it was running too long. And also, because.
So why did we decide to create this video? Read on!
For every superlative graced upon Firefly — it's awesome, original, best scifi show ever, River is a PIECE!!! — there is an equal number of debatable reasons why the show, for lack of a better word, failed. The time slot was bad, they screwed up the order of the shows, FOX, the viewing public is brain dead slime unable to grasp something even remotely conceptually different, and so on... These are valid reasons to be sure, but in reality it all boils down to one simple element: the title sequence.
Firefly lost its mass audience within the first few minutes, thanks to its country fried, home town, soft hearted, sepia glowing, filk-tastic, credits sequence. It was, how you say, a little on the nose. Mind you, it's not terrible (Enterprise, I'm looking at you) it just... well, to quote my brother "Yeah, we get it Joss, it's a western in space."
Thinking back over the past 20 years, Westerns and Spaceship shows haven't exactly been ratings powerhouses so perhaps screaming to the mass audience from the get go that it was Cowboys in Space wasn't the best idea. FOX even did a Nielsen study to test the waters and the results weren't good.
Look at it this way... Street Hawk had 13 episodes aired before it was canned. That's two more than Firefly!!! Is it a better show? God no, it's terrible! But man, what an opening credits!
Thanks to Charlie Jane for realizing that Firefly needed something like this in the first place, then pulling all the clips, the most thankless job in the world. You rule!!!
This is Garrison Dean saying as always catch me here but if I may be so bold... feel free to follow along at the blog of the new media group I've begun with a small collection of talented people called Monocular ahem, ahem! hire us!!!