by Currie Jean

Created on: August 13, 2008   Last Updated: August 15, 2008

Initially released only on its official website*, and now only available on iTunes, Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog is in part a response to the 2007-2008 Writer's Guild of America strike. Writers everywhere could no longer write as they had been for television, radio and the movies, and they were bored. Joss Whedon, the mind behind such classic series as Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was especially bored. He was bored enough to do something on his own.

Rounding up family members, friends, and entertainment industry contacts, and on a budget pulled entirely from his own pocket (giving him total freedom to produce as he pleased), Whedon brought an idea to fruition: a comedic, tragic musical about a supervillian, his love interest, and a huge jerk of a superhero bent on bullying the supervillain as much as possible.

The official teaser trailer was released to the web on June 25, 2008, and nearly a month passed before the first fifteen-minute episode of the three-part series was released. Whedon's personal bet - upwards of $100,000 - paid off: the site, despite being prepared for high traffic, suffered downtime due to bandwidth overload. At one point, the site crashed when a thousand different people tried to access it at the exact same time.

The three episodes were released successively, on July 15th, July 17th, and July 19th, respectively. Thousands watched, but many more soon found themselves out of luck: at the peak of the hype surrounding them, all three episodes were swiftly removed on July 20th. They're now available for about $2 per episode on iTunes - a top seller - and a DVD with many extra features is slated for release "sometime later." Hopefully it'll be out by Christmas.

If this venture manages to make Whedon some money (which it likely already has), his approach may spell "revolution" for media distribution: although not everyone starts out with thousands of dollars and a stellar reputation with a matching fanbase behind them, it shows that big media companies can (at least in theory) be circumvented in a big way by artists acting independently. This could mean more freedom in producing more varied and creative arts for distrubution, and it could mean getting commercials out of the way in entertainment. In other words, it could open up the monopoly, removing the barriers that Big Media Business can create between producers and consumers. Thank you, Internet.

Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog is weird fun: a playful yet intelligent (and at times hilarious)

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