I believe that I saw the first three seasons, on Hulu, a few years ago.
I wasn’t very impressed. Mostly, it made me think of tokusatsu superhero TV shows from Japan. Except, not as good. (Not to imply that those are great.) As with everything Whedon has done, I get the feeling that his fame is largely thanks to bringing anime and other Japanese entertainment to people who don’t like subtitles, not because he adds anything new or would otherwise have anything interesting to offer.
I did like Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, but otherwise I’ve found his material to be enjoyable and forgettable. There’s better stuff out there (with subtitles). Of the tokusatsu stuff that I’ve seen, Kamen Rider Ryuki is the one I would recommend.
Buffy starts with the conceit that it takes place in the “Real world” and all the Magic and monsters are a hidden secret that no almost one knows about but as the Seasons go on it changes to essentially a parallel world where Magic and monsters just exist along side the normal world. Angel was especially blatant in this change more so than Buffy.
In, I think, the first or second episode of Season 3, there’s a nice lampshade moment when a football player comments that the Sunnydale High team will do great this year, if they don’t have too many mysterious deaths. Late in the year, Jonathan comments that their class had one of the lowest death rates in school history.
I don’t know many big Whedon fans who aren’t also big anime/manga fans. I also don’t know anyone who’s made a connection between Whedon’s work and Japanese fantasy media in general. I sure as heck don’t see much of an influence there.
That’s equivalent to saying that “Western cinema is a waste of resources”. I’d grant that 90% of it is, but…well, don’t watch that 90%. That’s why things have descriptions, people write reviews, the IMDB chronicles ratings, etc. If you watched a bunch of crappy stuff, well that’s too bad, I don’t know what you watched or had recommended to you, but there is and was better stuff out there than Buffy. If you want an American example, there’s Reaper. If you want a British example, there’s Doctor Who.
Now I’ll grant that it’s probable that Whedon also watched a bunch of the crap stuff that’s out there, like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and improved on it. But so did Quentin Tarantino and Tarantino produced works that brought something new to the table and are worth talking about and being culty over. I don’t care for most of Tarantino’s stuff, but I’ll grant that he has talent. Whedon, I think he just happened to be in the right place at the right time.
Now again, I think that he makes things which are good and entertaining. I’ll gladly sit down and watch Buffy or Firefly or Dollhouse, and think they’re perfectly good popcorn fare. But that would be the same for Carnivale, Leverage, Burn Notice, etc. They’re perfectly reasonable, entertaining shows. But there’s better.
But you aren’t going into a thread on anime & manga to express your opinion. (In fact, you’d probably just skip the thread & post elsewhere.) Because that would be threadshitting.
Thread battle? This doesn’t even rise to the level of a thread hiccup, grasshopper. Real thread battles result in bannings, thread lockings, multiple warnings and at least three threads in ATMB. This is just a couple of posters arguing (not very strongly) that their favorite whatever is better than someone elses. Which is why we are here - to passionately defend the indefensible and trivial!
Wait for it. As you post binge updates, a lot of us will start rewatching and tossing around comments. People will dust off their old shipper affiliations and blood will flow, and the cries of “Bangle!” and “Spuffy!” fill the air, the carnage pausing only when both groups gang-up on and mercilessly exterminate the few “Riffy” adherents who dare poke their noses out from under their rocks.
I’m a huge Whedon fan and have watched very little anime… some Studio Ghibli (if that even counts).
Obviously people’s tastes are their own, but the suggestion that Whedon is just a second-rate recycler strikes me as pretty ridiculous… unless somehow the idea of having intelligent shows with witty dialog and fun fantastical plots which also contain real truths about the human condition is “copying”.
semi-abandoned subplot with the government using hellmouth creatures like what happened with the invisible girl. I say semi-abandoned because it came back in spirit in Season 4
I agree with you as far as BtVS and Angel go, which seems to be the point Sage Rat was trying to make. However, comparisons of Firefly with Cowboy Bebop are pretty common.
Yes to #1. Sorta to #2, kinda. But #1 was what I was thinking of. Joss is notorious for plotting way in advance. Look at what they did with VampWillow for example.
To be fair, he was playing two sides and hedging his bets on that one
[spoiler]He knew one of Xander or Willow would be gay, so he dropped hints for both of them (the two he usually mentions are of course Vamp Willow and the episode where Xander has one of the jocks come out to him and insinuate Xander is gay too).
The deciding factor on which one was, more or less, Seth Green wanted to leave the show.[/spoiler]
