I’m thinkin’ we’ll rise again.
If you’re a Browncoat, you probably know already that there’s only one thing everybody’s talking about right now, and it’s the biggest news to come out of the ‘verse in over twenty years.
On Sunday morning, March 15, Nathan Fillion officially broke the news that plans are in the works to bring back Firefly in the form of an animated series. The announcement was made at Awesome Con in Washington, DC, with all remaining cast members of the original series in attendance save for Adam Baldwin.
I am not being hyperbolic when I say that for us Browncoats, this is the equivalent of a Beatles reunion!
Here is what we know so far (via Deadline and Nathan Fillion’s own posts on social media):
• The entire cast that played the crew of Serenity on the original series is on board for the project. (If you still haven’t seen the humorous recruitment videos that Nathan Fillion posted on his Instagram page, they are very much worth watching.) There is no word as to whether another voice actor will take over the role of Shepherd Book in place of Ron Glass, whom we sadly lost in 2016.
• The animated series is being developed through Nathan Fillion’s production banner Collision33 in partnership with 20th Television Animation, which still controls the underlying rights to the franchise.
• Marc Guggenheim (Arrow, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow) and Tara Butters (Agent Carter, Reaper) are attached to serve as showrunners, and a script has already been completed.
• Joss Whedon, who created and wrote/directed much of the original series, is not involved in the new animated project, but Nathan Fillion confirmed that he did get Joss’ blessing to pursue it.
• The proposed series will be set in the time between the original 2002 Firefly television series and its 2005 feature-film continuation Serenity, expanding the ‘verse while still preserving continuity with the established lore. This is significant for two reasons. The first is that it means that Wash (and potentially even Book) can be in play as a character, and the second is that since everything that happens in the animated series has to lead to what we’ve already seen in the feature film, there is very little chance that the plot will make any radical (and potentially ridiculous) changes to the characters or the ‘verse like we recently saw in the Firefly comics that were published by Boom! Studios. It’s also worth noting that this same concept has worked very successfully for the series of Firefly novels published by Titan Books.
• Early concept art has already been developed in collaboration with the Oscar- and Emmy-award-winning animation studio ShadowMachine. The fully assembled package is expected to be taken out to buyers shortly.
• While the show is being pitched, it has not officially been green lit. Nathan Fillion is asking Browncoats to show their support for the project on social media to help convince the powers that be to give it the green light to break atmo.
Browncoats groups across the country are already conjuring an organized campaign to help show our support for the cast’s efforts to bring us more Firefly stories. As soon as we have any details, I’ll be sure to share them with you here.
In the meantime, if you haven’t been listening to the podcast that Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk have been doing since last November called Once We Were Spacemen, it’s a shiny way to reminisce and get revved up for the new series while learning lots of things you never knew about the cast. They have already had Summer Glau, Sean Maher, Jewel Staite and Gina Torres on as guests, as well as guests from other projects the two of them have worked on over the years. The episodes are engaging, funny and always entertaining. The podcast is available for free on platforms like Spotify, with additional content available via subscription on Patreon.
So, it looks like Mal finally pounded that red button, and they all came back. As unlikely as it may have seemed not all that long ago, we’re about to go back out to the Black. I guess it turns out Mr. Universe was right after all. You really can’t stop the signal.
As soon as I have some word of what we can do so our love helps keep this project in the air, I’ll be sure to pass it along. Until then, as Wash said in Firefly’s pilot episode, “Everybody hold onto something.”
And keep flyin’.
-Chris