Today I am on a Joss Whedon Fanboy kick. I just think the guy is awesome. And he just doesn’t come up with all of his stuff finely crafted over hours of writing. He truly is a funny guy who thinks quick on his feet and scores.
This interview at Gawker.com had me in stitches:
Q. Nathan Fillion and Neil Patrick Harris in an Internet musical in which the lovable loser baddy is kind of the good guy, and the good guy is kind of a dick—and it’s a musical?! Um, how? Wha? How on earth did this develop?
A. Who is to say who is the villain and who is the hero? Probably the dictionary. But I know that people who grow up identifying with outsiders are the people I are. Plus singing is the universal language, along with being on fire.
Q. Is there some reason that we can have a woman or a girl be the main action hero on TV but not in movies?
A. Movies are from the Devil. Also, it’s only recently women got to be action heroes on TV. Progress is slow, and often non-existent. There’s plenty of cool comics with female characters… But all it takes is one Catwoman to set the cause back a decade.
Q. No matter where in the world you live nowadays, the monkeys—especially the terrible, terrible spider monkeys—are encroaching with hateful motives. What do you intend to do about this?
A. Until you take Monkey into your heart, you will never be allowed into the Jungle of Heaven.
Run over to Gawker.com to read the whole interview.
I think he isn’t so much talking about females in lead roles but actually having females playing the STRONG lead of a show. Lucy was still a second rate citizen always fearing the wrath of Ricky if her stay at home housewife roles were interupted by her antics.
Mary Tyler Moore was certainly a strong female lead, but she was still presented carefully as a second rate citizen because of her gender. She worked at a TV station and was in a secretarial role, while a man ran the show with a male anchor on TV. Sure she was independent, but still was limited as to what she could do.
Joss doesn’t claim to be a trailblazer, but he is doing his part making females in strong leadership roles.
I like a lot of what Whedon says, but the TV comment makes no sense. Mary Tyler Moore had arguably the most popular sitcom of the ’70s. And isn’t the Lucy Show the most important sitcom ever? That was in the ’50s. For at least the last 40 years the “father” figure of sitcoms has been the most maligned for story purposes (everything from the bumblings of Homer Simpson back to the ignorance of Archie Bunker). I don’t see where women on TV have gotten the short end of the stick (ba-dum-dum). Maybe Whedon wants to make himself out to be some kind of a pioneer with Buffy or something. Since he based the character on how Kitty Pryde was portrayed in X-Men comics from the ’70s, I don’t see Whedon as a trailblazer.
“There’s plenty of cool comics with female characters… But all it takes is one Catwoman to set the cause back a decade.”
Brilliant.