Nobody on the Internet needs less hero worship than Joss Whedon. He has plenty. However, I have always been a day late and a dollar short to the Joss Whedon party, so there’s no reason to stop now.

Although I was a very early supporter of the (now generally reviled) Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, I didn’t start watching the most excellent tv show until season 4 or so, and I had to catch all the back episodes on reruns, as well as catching up on Angel. I even managed to be late to the Firefly party, despite watching the first couple of episodes as they aired. I thought the show was terrible and stopped watching. Later, people told me, “You have to watch this show Firefly, it’s awesome!” and I said, “Ha, nice try! I watched it on tv and it was awful.” Well, it turns out that there were some issues with the show when it was on tv, specifically that the episodes were aired out of order. When I was eventually convinced to watch the show in the correct order (way after everybody else), it was indeed a pretty good show. And I’ve never even seen Dollhouse.

So, compared to most of the rabid Whedon fans, I hardly even register on the meter. Therefore, how do I find myself writing a fanboy blog post?

There are two big reasons: Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and the musical episode of Buffy, Once More with Feeling. Here’s a guy who is a television writer/producer/what-have-you, and he’s written two distinct “musicals” that I would put up there with many of my favorite musicals. If you haven’t checked out the music from these, I would highly recommend it. Yes, you can tell they are a little more amature than a big budget production (especially in the case of Buffy, when the actors and actresses are not normally singers), but that makes them a little more endearing. And it also makes it all the more amazing that the songs are so catchy. (Heck, I started out hating the Serenity theme song, and even that eventually grew on me! Burn the land and boil the sea, but you can’t take the sky from me)

So lets give it up for a guy who has consistently provided smart, funny, quality entertainment since before I was out of high school, and who somehow managed to write a couple of pretty fantastic musicals along the way, with less to work with than a lot of people.