I was looking on the internet tonight to learn a little more about Firefly and I came upon some interesting information that makes me understand the show a little more so I thought I would share what I found.
Apparently Joss Whedon wrote Firefly after reading a book about Gettysburg and the Civil War. Whedon wanted the show to be about people on the losing side of the battle and living their lives as pioneers after the war. He wanted his characters to be people on the outskirts of society and describe life in a more physical and difficult way.
I also learned that the name of the show signifies power and movement which was Whedon's intention. He created the ship to resemble a firefly as well. I was confused as to why the show was named Firefly but this makes sense.
Apparently the reason for the strong Oriental element in the culture is because the only two national powers left are the United States and China. The two countries came together to form one government in the world called the Alliance.
The ship set was built full scale to shoot the episodes.
There were originally five main characters, but Whedon thought he needed more perspectives so he added a few to give us the nine main characters we saw. Each of these characters were purposely made to be very different from the one another to show the different outlooks on surviving the pioneer lifestyle.
4 comments:
Wow, really nice post Michelle. I didn't want to look up too much on Firefly so as not to spoil it (I'm going to watch the whole thing this weekend), so you really filled in a lot of blanks. I still feel like the Oriental thing is something that should be mentioned in the episode, but maybe I missed it.
Some great facts in this post, Michelle. The ship itself is so interesting to me--it is such a clear demonstration of the remarkable imaginations at work behind the show.
I hope we'll have time in class to discuss the idea about how the losers in a war go on afterwards. That's clearly an important theme.
The Chinese stuff makes perfect sense to me if you just think it out, so to speak. In 500 years, there's a pretty good chance that English and Chinese might be the biggest, most important languages. I actually like the fact that the show doesn't feel the need to explain that--it just counts on us to figure it out.
After I read about the China and USA domination fact, it made sense to me. Why wouldn't China be dominate, they're huge!
As for the ship, imagine how much fun the actors had working in a full size space ship everyday.
I also appreciated this post. As another new viewer to Firefly, this made the pilot episode make more sense to me. The mere fact that Whedon wanted to show the "losers" of a war in the future intrigues me because I feel that it's something an audience rarely gets to see.
Just from seeing one episode, I do think this series was extremely creative, and I'm already finding myself sad that it didn't get a longer run.
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