Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog: A Nice Surprise

Let me begin this review by way of discussing the element of surprise. As your narrator writes this, he is convalescing from a bit of minor, but temporarily disabling, surgery. Being housebound, or, more accurately, pc-bound as a result, he found himself noodling among the Netflix thing's inventory of streaming video's, of which Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is an example.

Denied, once again ,the opportunity to do another practice marathon run (as I seem to have been for the past 23,725+ days, come to think of it), I decided to fritter away a little time (under an hour) by watching this short film on my Netflix. As a fritterer of time, the enterprise was a total failure, but it did succeed-and more than a little bit-as an afternoon's entertainment. That's where the surprise comes in.

One of the other things that gave me the notion to stream this video, in addition to the intriguing title, was the actor who played the title character: Neil Patrick Harris. I have seen Harris in a number of things, including Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (an excellent film in its own right, by the way) and several episodes of the TV sitcom, How I Met Your Mother. He also turned in an excellent guest appearance in an episode of Glee. It was the latter credit that showed us he can sing with the best of them, which would come in handy in his role as Dr. Horrible.

Someone I did not know was a singer was Nathan Fillion, former captain of the airship Serenity, from Fox TV's abruptly-cancelled series, Firefly. Fillion plays the role of Horrible's nemesis and has a song in the third act (Again, don't worry, the whole show is about 45 minutes, so you'll still have time to get in your 18 holes of drilling.), "Everyone's a Hero," that turns out to be the outstanding number in a really excellent score.

The music, written by Jed and Joss Whedon, who co-wrote the show along with their brother Zack and Maurissa Tancharoen, features very clever lyrics throughout, as well as some ambitious scoring, including two sets of songs sung in tandem, as Irving Berlin was noted for on a few occasions, and which, as I am sure you can imagine, is a difficult thing to pull off successfully. The Whedon brothers do pull it off, no doubt about it.

In terms of the acting, Harris is superb in a sort of Jekyll-Hyde role as the evil-but-inept Dr. Horrible and the painfully shy Billy, the "laundry buddy" to a girl named Penny, whom he had only known from their use of the same Laundromat. This young lady, played by Felicia Day, has a nice voice and plays her role in an understated, but effective way. Once again, Fillion provides the surprise. While he was suitably humble and quietly heroic in the Firefly series, he is, in this story, even more arrogant than Dr. Horrible himself, if such a thing can be imagined.

Apparently, the creators of this piece wrote and composed it during the WGA writers' strike of 2007-2008, as a way to kill time between their paid gigs. When they got their project done, they decided to release it straight to video, where it sits, to this very day.

As I said at the beginning, I found Dr. Horrible'sSing-Along Blog in my Netflix queue, so I know it is there, for sure. I do not know if other similar services carry it, but, if they do, or, if you are a Netflix member, then surely you can block out 45 minutes of an upcoming day to take in this very entertaining tale.

Sources

Netflix, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Wikipedia