Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me
There’s no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can’t take the sky from me…
–Opening theme from Firefly
Writer Joss Whedon reportedly pitched his television series Firefly as “the anti-Star Trek,” so it’s interesting to note that the show has followed a similar path as that classic series: unloved by network executives and cancelled before its time, Firefly, like Star Trek before it, spawned a fanatically loyal cult following that clamored for the show’s return, which it did this weekend in the form of a Whedon-directed feature film, Serenity. The difference between Firefly and Star Trek, however, is that Trek ran three seasons in its original incarnation; it held a sizable presence in the collective pop-cultural memory even before years of syndication made it into a household name. Firefly, by contrast, lasted a mere ten episodes before it was canned, and only 14 episodes were actually filmed.
Think about that. Most series that fail to run a complete season (usually 22 episodes these days) vanish without a trace, quickly forgotten by a fickle viewing public. But this show, which didn’t even make it half a season, somehow garnered enough attention after its death to come back on the Big Screen. Even if you don’t give a womp-rat’s exhaust port about cultish science-fiction media properties, that’s got to impress you because it’s so mind-bogglingly unlikely.
