There are a number of podcasts out there based on the brilliant but wildly unsuccessful Firefly and Serenity TV series. One of them is Tales From The Verse. If you go to the shownotes you’ll see that ChinesePod is the official translator for the show!
Ken Carroll
Alas, neither the television show “Firefly” nor the resulting movie “Serenity” were “wildly successful”, Ken. “Critically successful” — yes, “wildly popular” — yes, but the show was so botched by the network, who not only gave it a terrible and somewhat roving timeslot, but also showed the series out of sequence (completely befuddling potential fans) that one has to conclude they wanted it to fail. Indeed, the “popularity” came only after the show was dropped. People picked up the DVD set and were blown away by the quality of the show. Indeed, it was the sale of those DVD sets (not the series ratings) that convinced the powers that be to bankroll a movie version.
It was a brilliant series, well-executed, well-acted, crisp dialog — which meant it didn’t have a chance in the current vapid atmosphere of “bad singing contests” and “dopey reality shows”.
Here, here
Will,
it was a cult thing for sure. How does one measure success?
Ken
OK, Will. I’ve changed the origianal text a bit…
Ken
Have you even seen the show/movie yet, Ken? Go ahead and watch the movie version; it’s based on the TV show but doesn’t presuppose that you’ve seen a single episode. The only drawback is that some of the events that unfolded naturally and logically over the course of an entire television season are abbreviated a bit (by necessity). That makes a few things seem contrived and forced when they really weren’t originally. But even with these drawbacks, Joss Whedon’s superlative writing does more than adequate justice to the material.
Fox did a similar thing to ‘Tru Calling’ another brilliant series which was cancelled halfway through season 2.
Ken, was Chinesepod really the official translator of the show? I have to say that I thought it was a lot of fun, and certainly promotes a future in which Chinese has equal importance with English…
tintin,
We’re the tranalstors fro the podcast Tales fro mthe Verse, not the original series.
Ken