Evil Anniversary Of Evil
One year ago this Friday, I launched the Evil League of Evil website for the folks behind Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.
At their Comic-Con panel session in July 2008, Team Horrible announced that they would be conducting a contest. Would-be members of the E.L.E. would be invited to submit video applications, and the ten best would be selected for inclusion on the then-forthcoming DVD release.
Not long after Dr. Horrible first went up online, I had registered a number of domains I thought they themselves should have registered but didn’t. Amongst those was one for the E.L.E., and after the announcement at their Comic-Con panel, I offered it up to them for the contest.
For most of August, before any of that actually moved forward, a placeholder fansite was accessible (you can see a screenshot in this Tubefilter article) and included a hidden email link which generated an auto reply purporting to be from Bad Horse himself.
The Evil League of Evil soon will be accepting applications for membership. Please stand by.
– Bad Horse
P.S. Please forgive the absence of song. The Bad Horse Chorus currently is recovering from a Horrible hang-over.
It wasn’t until a September flurry of emails that the actual contest version of the site finally went up, and they began taking applications. Team Horrible, of course, provided the contest rules and the E.L.E. logo, while I put the admittedly-rudimentary (but perfectly serviceable for its purpose) site together. I also ginned up some of the site copy, including the footnote jokes.
Two weeks later, the contest came to a close, and my work was done. They began culling its massive collection of submitted applications. Two months after that, the print-on-demand DVD had its release, revealing the ten winners of the contest. Since then, a number of the applicants — winners and not alike — have continued their evil exploits.
In honor of all of the above, I present here — for the first time anywhere — the full list of links to all the applications submitted during the contest period. There might still be some duplicates between the Vimeo and YouTube lists, and I can’t guarantee all of them are still available.
Read Full Entry →
I Do, Still
An addendum of sorts to my earlier unspoilery thoughts on this coming Friday’s season premiere of Dollhouse, “Vows”.
- Everything you might have heard elsewhere about Amy Acker’s performance is correct. If you think “hype” is a word that indicates false praise, then what you’re hearing isn’t hype.
- I’m still unsure just how much of a rough cut this is, so I hope one thing that survives is how long Whedon lets various characters just talk to each other. Real, character-driven conversations that proceed at an organic pace. Remember how the Paul Ballard conversation with Joel Mynor was allowed to just unfold? In a sense, there’s more of that sort of thing. Please let it stay.
- He’s gotten some mention along with Acker, and it’s deserved. Fran Kranz gives another top performance on the heels of being pushed pretty far in “Epitaph One”. Some people had problems watching Topher last season. Regardless of whether or not you like Topher as a person, after this you won’t be able to (wrongly) blame Kranz’ performance.
Meanwhile, this site will let you know every day this week whether or not Dollhouse is back yet.
The Godless Document
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Powells)
by Susan Jacoby
… The real cause of America’s fratricidal conflict, many religious leaders asserted, was the failure of the founders to enshrine God in the Constitution. The war was nothing more — or less — than the fulfillment of the Reverend John Mason’s 1793 prediction that the godless document would one day impel the Divinity to “crush us to atoms in the wreck.” The only way to stop the destruction was to amend the Constitution’s preamble and finally acknowledge not only God but Jesus Christ as the source of all governmental power. In 1863, the “nondenominational,” albeit entirely Protestant, National Reform Association was founded for the specific purpose of lobbying Congress to put God into the Constitution. Today’s Christian conservatives frequently use the slogan “Let’s put God back into the Constitution,” thereby implying that “secular humanists” have managed to overturn what was originally intended to be a marriage of church and state. Nineteenth-century clerics knew better and were honest about their desire to reverse what they regarded as the founders’ erroneous decision to separate church and state. At an 1864 convention in Pittsburgh, the National Reform delegates were in a dither about how to word the proposed amendment before presenting it to President Lincoln and the Congress, so as not to offend any orthodox Protestant denomination. They were not worried about offending Jews, Catholics, or dissident Protestant sects like the Hicksite Quakers, who were appalled by the idea of tampering with the Constitution in order to blur the distinction between church and state. After rejecting acknowledgment of “Almighty God” and “His revealed will” as too imprecise, the ministers finally agreed on a rewording of the preamble that would replace “We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…” with “Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ as the Governor among nations, His revealed will as the supreme order of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government…”
End of excerpt.
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