Ever since Joss Whedon’s Firefly series was cancelled back in 2002, fans have been doing everything they could to try and get the show back on the air. We’re talking online petitions, rallies, etcetera -nothing short of sexual favors, mind you- and yet, still Fox won’t return any of their geeky phone calls.
Well, skip ahead to a recent interview with, former Firefly lead, Nathan Fillion, in which he responded to the question of whether or not he’d participate if Fox came crawling back and offered more episodes of the show, saying:
Yes. Yes. I would examine very closely Fox’s reasoning — I’m a little gun-shy. If I got $300 million from the California Lottery, the first thing I would do is buy the rights to Firefly, make it on my own, and distribute it on the Internet.
After reading the interview, several cast and crew members from the show took to their online devices and basically said that they’d have Fillion’s back if the show ever did consider reviving itself. Quick to jump the gun, fans heard news of Fillion’s wishful thinking and that’s all the momentum they needed to start their engines; within days of the original interview, fans had set up the site Help Nathan Buy Firefly -an online community of Firefly fans attempting to help raise the $300 million that Fillion had mentioned he’d need to purchase the show. Everything was up and running, all going according to plan, until Joss Whedon’s sister-in-law, Maurissa Tancharoen, decided to take a big steaming crap across every Firefly fans face via her Twitter feed:
Soon after, Tancharoen clarified her statement adding that:
… I wasn’t trying to bash dreams, by all means come together and show your love for Firefly. But when money is involved (and pledges are meant to become real $ at some point, yes?) things get tricky… I wasn’t going to say anything else on the subject as I didn’t want to further fuel the already out of control fire, but unkind things have been said. And honestly, I’m afraid that I’ve grown afraid of the internet.
Um, thanks for that Maurissa, everyone really appreciates how supportive you are of the fans. I, of course, am lying my face off here. She could have easily been a trillion times less of a butthole in her delivery of the news.
Inevitably, a short while after the bombshell from Tancharoen, the organizers of the Help Nathan Buy Firefly site shared the unfortunate news that the project had lost steam and would soon be shut down completely.
According to Joss’s sister-in-law, no one from the Whedon clan endorses the idea of a fan-funded organization trying to help. So, that’s a wrap. We’ll keep the site open as a memory for a bit and if any Whedons need to reach us, hit the button.
So what have we all learned here today? Well, I mean, aside from the fact that Joss Whedon’s sister-in-law drinks blood from the skulls of innocents? That’s right, nothing.
Special thanks to blastr.com for the tip. Banner pic via.