July 14, 2008

Hey Buffy Fans: Joss Whedon Back with Online Special

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mojo-photo-horrible.jpgIt turns out some people put their down time during the recent writers’ strike to good use: Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon got around the TV- or film-writing prohibition by penning a musical for the intertubes. Because that’s what you do, right? The result is “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog,” a 75-minute superhero spoof starring Neil Patrick Harris (!) as a maniacal supervillain, or at least someone who wishes he was a maniacal supervillain. The miniseries was produced on the cheap, using affordable (and sometimes real) locations, and Whedon fans will be pleased to know it features some old Buffy, Angel, Serenity and Firefly cast and crew. You’ll be able to watch it for free at the Dr. Horrible web site, but the schedule is a little tricky: Act One debuts tomorrow (Tuesday, 7/15), Act Two starts Thursday, July 17th, and Act Three will be posted Saturday, July 19th. The videos will stay up on the site for free viewing through Sunday, July 20th, at which time Whedon promises they will “vanish into the night like a phantom.” Or, maybe they’ll be available on DVD or something.

[Update: Well, it turns out “Dr. Horrible” is pretty terrible at javascript too, or something, since there have been a ton of problems since the first episode went live at midnight. International viewers can’t seem to use the site’s Hulu player, the promised iTunes download apparently doesn’t work, and overwhelming traffic crashed the main website, drhorrible.com, this morning. As of 3:30pm Pacific time, the site is still down. Boy, remember when you’d turn on this box across from your couch and shows would just be there? Those were the days…]

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At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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