Mal and YoSaffBridge both wear jeans in “Trash.”
I don’t know if this is too obvious (or too usual in tv shows), but Heinlein’s stories often had a core group of very close, die-for-each-other people, very much like the Serenity crew. Lots of group sex (and taboo sex, like incest) in Heinlein’s worlds - not much of that on Serenity (that we knew about) but prostitution as a respected career is very Heinleinian.
As I said in the other thread, I can see River as a Valentine Smith-type - human but foreign, with many strange abilities. I agree with Shepherd Book as maybe an amalgam of a few Heinlein archetypes - definitely having a deep past, and also having unexpected abilities. I see Zoe as more of the Friday character, though.
Hear, hear.
It was a pretty weak episode, and Fox aired it instead of the pilot proper, which didn’t make much of an impression…and that one moment is what kept me around to watch the next episode. 
That’s a very good one - in Heinlein’s universe, prostitutes were often portrayed very much like Companions - ladies of high stature, very well educated, very proud of what it is that they do. I suppose Heinlein and Whedon could have independently taken that from the Geisha tradition, but I suspect the influence was more direct.
Could be. I don’t think there are any direct correlations, though. More of a similar tendency towards a certain type of portrayal of women, not a direct copying of a character.
Although I swear Inara shows up in “Time enough for Love”. Or her alternate-world twin, anyway.
You know, I kind of thought it bore some resemblance to Gunsmoke.
As far as science fiction having always been a western on TV, as mentioned in the other thread, you know what five words have to be said, right? “Wagon Train To The Stars.” That’s the elevator pitch for Star Trek.
A little of both.
Heinlein’s premise, one shared by Whedon and Minear, is that a frontier world is going to be undeveloped. It takes time to build infrastructure like power plants, sewage treatment plants, factories to build machinery, etc. So the colonists going to the frontier worlds are going to need tech that can be serviced easily, with less support. Ergo, as has been stated, horses and cows instead of tractors. Similarly, the open carrying of guns is two-fold. First, frontier worlds are more prone to natural threats, like large predators, venomous snakes, and their analogues. Firearms are still common on rural farms for precisely those reasons. The second reason is that law, legal systems, and police departments are types of infrastructure. Move away from the established society, and it is a long ways from help. Makes being a bad guy easier. So firearms are for defense against human predators as well.
So Whedon was interested in conveying a Western-like feel for the culture - rural, armed, less educated and more practical, low tech and hard working. Add to that the fact that most of the colonists we see tended to be American types - very few Chinese types. That was an odd condition given the premise of Chinese influence. But anyway, the rural colonists probably would draw upon historical cultural influences, and the American west would be a very good analogue.
Yeah, there were glimmers of what was to come, but it didn’t do the job of introducing the characters and why they were together, it did more talk than show, and it just didn’t connect. But that one scene was a doozy. Even though I like the sentiment of Mal, I just can’t see someone deliberately throwing a large piece of FOD into his engine. The emergency plane landing a couple weeks ago shows the reason why that is a dumb idea. But that one scene did give us a sense of Mal and his attitude, and that made it worthwhile.
One difference I can identify from my (admittedly weak) memory of Heinlein’s female characters and Firefly’s female characters is that I always got the impression, in Heinlein, that women who didn’t want to sleep with any male character that wanted them were somewhat denigrated.
I remember getting the feeling from reading Heinlein that a truly liberated woman would sleep with any male who expressed interest, and if she didn’t, it wasn’t that she was in charge of her own sexuality but that she was still wound up in old-fashioned mores. I see that a lot in the hippie/pagan community - if a woman doesn’t want to have orgies or rampant sex with anyone, she’s still “trapped in the mundane world” of sexual restrictions. Many of the members of that community are Heinlein fans.
Whereas in Firefly, it’s clear that Inara can and does decide who to sleep with and who she will NOT sleep with, and the other women also seem to be able to have control over their sexuality without being portrayed as old-fashioned or uptight. They can have sex, or not, without the “not” part being seen as less valuable.
Right. Look, I see nothing of Heinlein in Firefly. Not that you can’t find a bit of one book or the other and show a similarity, but you could do the same with Star trek.
And, it was the real BattleStar Galactica that “Wagon Train To The Stars.” was used as a pitch for.
Uhm. Deth? I, uh, hate to contradict someone about things geeky, but it was Star Trek. http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/news/article/3289.html
http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/R/htmlR/roddenberry/roddenberry.htm
Also, there’s a load and a half of RAH influence here. It’s certainly not Asimov, and it’s certainly not Clarke…
I see a good amount of The Rolling Stones, a good amount of the other juveniles, too. Not so much the Howards, though.