Favorite Whedon TV Show Meme

[shadowkat]

I can't remember what Whedon tv shows my readership favors. So perhaps you can help? My current guess is that you rank them as follows:

1. Buffy
2. Angel (with about 25-45% preferring Angel to Buffy for various reasons)
3. Firefly
4. Dollhouse (with 65% squicked by the series and finding it unwatchable)


Only 5% read the comics and liked them. Everyone liked Dr. Horrible. Few read the X-men comics by Whedon or stuck with them. So comics Whedon - not a fav. Also few appear interested in the current films, Much Ado, Cabin in the Woods, or Avengers. Am I right?
Here's a poll to find out, assuming people participate. As all mathematicians and staticians know...polls are repsentative of the sampling. If only 20 people take the poll?
You guess based on those 20. So...I have approximately 150 who have friended me, of the 150, about 50 probably read on a daily basis, of the 50, 30% are into polls. So..I have no way of knowing, do I? The only way I can know is if everyone who reads my journal and likes or ever liked Whedon shows takes the poll. And that's well impossible. So this is ...far from an exact exercise. (A lesson to the people out there who do a lot of surveys for sociology, psychology and marketing classes - people? They aren't that reliable. You know that right? IF not, just read the internet - it will prove it to you. There's a reason that sociology, psychology and marketing are considering inexact sciences or soft. They rely on inexact data that can't be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Lawyers love to poke holes in statistical data.)

That said, for a bit of fun, take the poll and see if you can prove me wrong? Feel free to link, since a lot of readers seem to be through links at times.

[Poll #1831422]

[Note: Won't be able to respond until late on Thursday or Friday, since I can no longer access personal blogs via my workplace. So can only access at home. PS: I reposted this poll fifteen minutes after first posting, because I screwed up on the last question and had to fix it. Now it should be fine. If you responded to the deleted post, please respond again. Thanks.]

[ETA: Read the comments. Fascinating.]

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

When I watch Firefly, I can't get this background out of my head. I realize that the rebellion there didn't necessarily bear any resemblance to our Civil War. Nonetheless it resonates with themes that I find personally obnoxious and I can't really enjoy it.

I have exactly the same problem. Well put. Whedon based it on the non-fiction best seller - The Killer Angels, which looks at the Civil War through the Confederacy's eyes. My Dad, who got his Master's in Social History, read the book and was fairly critical of it, told me that it had a fictional slant and romanticized segments here and there. He liked it, but,
had read better. Whedon fell in love with it - seeing it no doubt through the lense of the Western films that he'd studied. (He was a film major.)
Having studied the exact same films Whedon did and at the same time (he's about three to four years older than me...hee, almost 50!) I can say that they were a bit slanted towards the "South". The outlaws of the Old West were mainly disenfranchized Confederate soldiers with no homes to return to.
Jesse James, Billy the Kid, The Wild Bunch...all fell into that category to some degree. Okay maybe not Billy the Kid. And we all know what a great historian Whedon is, also how detail-oriented. (Neither. The man pulls stuff out of his hat and sucks at research.)

At any rate...if you don't analyze Firefly at all...it's sort of fun. If you do analyze it...it is highly offensive. Particularly if you are not a fan of Ayn Rand.

As I told a friend below who loves Firefly..
I'm of two minds about it. It's either a weird homage to Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged or a fun take on Han Solo's adventures as a smuggler under the Evil Empire.

[sophist.livejournal.com]

I grew up with Westerns and loved them as a kid. Once I got old enough to understand the Civil War, I grew to hate the glorification of the South that pervades all too many of them. (I also detest GWTW; it's a despicable film.)

Good point about Ayn Rand. From what I see on line, it's her fans who really got into Firefly. Just makes me dislike it more.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I grew up with Westerns and loved them as a kid. Once I got old enough to understand the Civil War, I grew to hate the glorification of the South that pervades all too many of them. (I also detest GWTW; it's a despicable film.)

Well...genre, particularly pulp genre, tends to be..shall we say, not exactly politically correct.

There are some really good subversive Westerns out there that question the entire trope. Notably John Ford and Howard Hawkes, also Peckinpah
and Sergio Leon. The pure B-Movie ones...not so much.

I studied the genre in school, and my parents loved it - huge fans of Gunsmoke and in some ways Firefly reminds me of Gunsmoke by way of Star Wars. With Mal as a sort of twisted version of Marshall Dillion, and Inara as Miss Kitty, and Wash in the Dennis Weaver Role.

The good Westerns...Red River, The Searchers, Little Big Man, Unforgiven, The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly, My Name is Nobody, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, True Grit, Once Upon a Time in the West (later remade as The Quick and the Dead - which was mainly notable for its cast and a woman being cast in the Charles Bronsan role)... and of course The Wild Bunch all shed an uneasy light on the genre, depicting the grittiness and abuse of power.

Even Gone with the Wind is a fascinating social commentary on the South. Racist? Yes, but consider the pov. The film adheres closely to the best-selling novel upon which it was based. While tempting to dismiss it as just a romance novel, it was anything but. Mitchell was taking a rather critical and hard look at her beloved South - in the 1930s. A South that had never quite been able to handle the changes enforced on it by the industrial revolution. And romanticised it's less than glorious past. If you watch GWTD carefully - you'll see it.
The soft colors, how pretty and perfect Scarlette O'Hara's Tara is.
Scarlette is the South. Ashely Wilkes, Melanie, Mammy, Papa O'Hara are her beloved South...stain-free in her head. And Scarlette is a self-absorbed, self-important, romantic fool. But she's also resourceful, manipulative, and cunning. And fiercely loyal to the false image. Scarlette is an anti-hero. There really is nothing redeemable about her - outside of her love for the South. It's all about Scarlette. Mitchell didn't intend for you to like her necessarily.

Rhett Butler represents the North, change, as does Belle. Rhett comes in and he attempts to get stubborn Scarlett to see him - to stop clinging to weak wispy Ashely and the past...which she's idealized and never quite existed as she believed. Note, Ashely marries his own cousin. And Melanie is equally weak. Both idealized visions of the old South and its grandeur.

Even the Persons of Color are to a degree idealized in Mitchell's novel, they are shown in a light that makes the Southerners feel better about slavery, and not feel guilty. The evil, wicked north is the villain. We are seeing the Old South and the Civil War through the rose colored glasses of those who fought the War and still think they should have won. It's their pov.

To see it...makes it easier to counter it. I remember having a fascinating discussion with a Southerner after seeing GWTW in the theater - during college. This was when they remastered it. And it was an insightful discussion. Then later with a friend who loved the movie and book and didn't understand why her two friends in high school (who were black) had issues with her. I pointed out - uh, GWTW is racist, you know that right? She didn't. She saw the film as just a great romance. Another friend...hates that film for much the same reasons you do.

I think it's fascinating, because much like Flannery O'Connor's fiction it depicts a racist pov, gets us inside their heads. As a friend of mine pointed out - who is African-American and whose family hails from the South - these films and books provide her with a way of understanding where that comes from, how that person sees her, so she can better fight it.

[sophist.livejournal.com]

The Gunsmoke analogy for Firefly is a good one. The Westerns you listed are all ones I like, because they don't romaticize the Confederacy. In fact The Searchers (which I consider the best of the Westerns), completely subverts the genre in that respect.

What particularly bugs me about GWTW are two things: (a) I can't see it as a romance because Scarlett is so awful; and (b) Margaret Mitchell was a devotee of the "Lost Cause" mythos and was deliberately selling that myth in the novel. Not to put too fine a point on it, I hate that myth because it's both historically false and hateful.

Not that I have strong feelings about this or anything. :)

But if seeing it helps someone fight it better, I'm all for that.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I'm more or less in agreement.

GWTW is a difficult film. I like two scenes in the movie. I was never able to read the book - Scarlett is actually worse in the book. Talk about anti-hero characters. Personally I just found her to be incessantly whiny.

The two- three scenes that I liked: Rhett Butler kissing Scarlett while Atlanta Burns. And two, Rhett Butler kissing her, picking her up and taking her up the stairs. And oh...the final scene : "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

But I agree - Mitchell's Lost Cause Mythos didn't work for me either.

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Atlas shrugged is a terrible book populated by even more terrible people.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Eh...it's not that bad. I've read worse. It is a bit preachy. Ayn Rand really hates socialism and big government.

Have you read all of Atlas Shrugged? I gave up somewhere around page 600, skipped ahead, realized it was not going to get any better, just more grating,
and decided that my old high school English Prof was right - if you want to read Rand? Read Anthem - it's 100 pages and pretty much tells you all you ever want to know. Plus far more interesting.

Anthem is a sci-fi thriller about two people trying to escape a fascist government. (Rand apparently had escaped from Eastern Europe during Stalin's rule.)