Whedon’s Web Musical Fanboy-tastic!

The wonderfully nerdy fruits of the writers guild strike are starting to ripen. Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon started writing a three-part musical Internet series during the strike with his brothers and the result, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, is coming to soon to a computer near you. The teaser trailer just “leaked” yesterday and is full of fanboy fodder.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog

Dr. Horrible has high production values and an allstar cast including Niel Patrick Harris as the low-budget villain, The Guild’s Felicia Day as my his love interest and Nathan Fillion of Whedon’s Firefly as the “superhero who’s kind of a dick,” as Fillion describes it. The film was one of the last projects shot on NBC Universal’s New York street set, which burned down earlier this month.

Whedon told Sci-Fi that they’re still trying to figure out how to make their money back on the novel series, but he anticipates it will first be distributed online followed by an iTunes and extras-laden DVD release. The Whedons are already hitting all the major social sites with pages on Facebook and MySpace and posted this trailer on Vimeo yesterday.

This thing has web success written all over. Our only concern is the whole “musical” part, only because we haven’t seen a lot of successful web musicals. But who knows, the “sing-along” portion could lend itself to tons of fan lip-dubs. No official release date has been given yet, but the film’s stars are supposed to be participating in a panel discussion at July’s Comic-Con.

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