Giant Freakin Robot

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of fan support for short-lived TV series finding new life. There was the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign to fund a feature film, the upcoming return of Arrested Development on Netflix, and the rumored return of Heroes on MSN. It’s no wonder that it’s all sparked new buzz of whether Joss Whedon’s beloved Firefly could possibly return in some fashion. If you were holding out hopes for Firefly to rise from its ashes on Netflix, prepare to be disappointed.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, Netflix Chief Content officer Ted Sarandos explains why he thinks a potential Firefly return wouldn’t be as successful as Arrested Development‘s. Please keep in mind: Sarandos is trying to promote the return of Arrested Development on May 26th, so take this with a grain of salt. Here’s Sarandos’ rationale:

Let me give you one broad statement about these recovery shows. In almost every case the cult around the show gets more intense and smaller as time goes by. Arrested Development was the rarest of birds in that the audience of the show grew larger than the original broadcast audience because people came to discover it years after it was cancelled.

The Firefly fan is still the Firefly fan from when it was on TV and there’s fewer of them and they’re more passionate every year. Whereas with Arrested Development we’re going to be serving a multiple of the original audience. Any of the other shows we could bring back would be a fraction of the original audience.

Burn the land and boil the sea. You can’t take the…the uhh…What was I singing? Was I singing? I thought I was singing.

Evolution exists both in science and in science fiction, friends, as the famed Jayne hats from Joss Whedon’s Firefly — or should I call it Fox’s Firefly, as to not offend anyone? — have appeared in tag-team mode, to make up what I have to assume is the most comfortable bra in the world. And since I’m a guy who can only appreciate the aesthetic value, I’m letting everyone know there isn’t an application process to hug me while wearing this bra. To brush aside any dangling modifiers in that last sentence, you are the one wearing this bra.

Let’s rehash the recent events that presumably led to this creation. Fox recently teamed up with a company called Ripple Junction to make licensed Jayne hats, presumably because they saw how well the fan-made hats were selling. They sent out cease and desists to put a stop to the sales of the Jayne hats. Or rather, the unlicensed sale of hats that are actually called Jayne hats. If you listen to Adam Baldwin tell it, they’re simply called “Adam Baldwin hats.”

Then one fan in particular got savvy with her sales, and she is far from alone. I’m sure if every third person in America started selling Jayne hats, Fox’s legal team wouldn’t be able to keep up. But it works out better for some people when they leave the hat part out altogether. Although this bra might look even better if whoever is wearing it put it on as a hat really quickly.

Last week we told you about the huge hullabaloo kicked off when Fox decided to start sending out cease-and-desist notices to the various folks on the internet who were making and selling “Jayne hats,” based on the chapeau sported by Jayne Cobb (Adam Baldwin) in Firefly. See, an outfit called Ripple Junction recently purchased the licensing rights to make “official” Jayne hats, so Fox went and got legal on all the crafty who had been selling homemade versions of the cap for years now. Sure, Fox and Ripple Junction are certainly within their legal rights, but given that Fox also aired Firefly out of order and then canceled it, many Browncoats are more than a little disdainful of the studio’s sudden interest in the property. Thankfully, Broancoats are a cunning lot, so some are already trying to find gaps in Fox’s legal armor.

Take Amanda Harris-Matthews of Griffith, Indiana. Sadly, she has no Jayne’s hat to sell you. But she does have this other hat, see? It’s a controversial hat, this hat, one with a very interesting backstory involving a simple girl named Jane, and a cruel and malicious fox. Here, I’ll let her tell the story below:

One night, Jane and her father heard the farm animals getting restless. Jane watched as her father grabbed a big stick and went out to see what was going on.

Jane waited. She could hear the animals getting more restless. Then, she heard her father scream.

Not knowing what else to do, not even thinking, Jane ran out the door. She was mere feet from the door when what she saw made her stop on her tracks.

Her father laid on the ground, bloody, unmoving, dead. The thing that had killed him was still there, still hitting them with the big stick, the big stick it had taken from her father’s own hands.

It was a fox. Somehow, a fox was holding the big stick in its paws and bashing her dead father with it.

“STOP PLEASE STOP FOX YOU’VE ALREADY KILLED HIM!”

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal! Browncoats the world over got their dander up yesterday when word broke that Fox was sending cease-and-desists to Firefly fans who had been knitting and selling replicas of Jayne’s stylish hat on ETSY and similar sites. See, Ripple Junction just bought the licensing rights to sell the hat, so they’ve been trying to stamp out the unlicensed versions out there. That move has been met with irritation and outrage by some die-hard Firefly fans. Now a couple of the folks involved with the beloved series have addressed the issue via Twitter.

First up was the improbably named Shawna Trpcic, the Firefly costume who actually created the “Jayne hat” in the first place. While she didn’t directly address the controversey herself, she did retweet the following not once, but twice:

RT @unfettered_muse: Does FOX want to go to the special hell, tinyurl.com/bts6kfa? No fan makes big $ #Jaynehats twitter.com/trpcic/status/…

— shawna (@trpcic) April 10, 2013