My introduction to Felicia Day came when one of my favorite geeks, Wil Wheaton, posted the trailer for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog on his website and told me to watch it. I did. I even waited up with anticipation waiting for the final installment.

The Trailer:

It was (and is) easy to love Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. It’s a well-written, well-acted, well-produced 45 minutes of entertainment. It was also rather groundbreaking in the fact that it was independently produced by highly-respected professionals and proved that you don’t necessarily need the big studios to make something good or profitable.

Dr. Horrible also spawned a lot of discussion, most of it surrounding the character of Penny (played by Ms. Day), and the role she plays in the story.

(If you haven’t seen all three parts of Dr. Horrible yet, you should be warned: there will be spoilers.)

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I’ll admit it – I’m a sucker for SyFy original movies.  The wild plots, hyper-hyperbole, and fantastically noticeable CGI crack me up and hook me at the same time.  Two of my personal favorites include Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus and High Plains Invaders (which happened to star Buffy’s James Marsters as a wild-west sharpshooter killing giant alien-insect-robots in shoot’em ups).  But I’m willing to argue that their recent Alice in Wonderland tribute was actually pretty good, and not just for laughing at.

I’ve always loved Alice in Wonderland. Alice is typically portrayed (and pretty accurately to the book) as a little girl whose adventures in Wonderland primarily consist of her allowing things to happen to her or eating and drinking strange items simply because their labels tell her to.  At worst, this makes her appear foolish and as though she needs a protector, at best this makes her a compliant little girl.  But something about the fantasy and adventure and the fact that Alice is rarely shaken by her experience has always appealed to me.

SyFy’s Alice takes it to a new level.  Alice is now a young adult teaching karate classes and navigating the dating world.  When her new boyfriend Jack gives her a special family ring, she finds herself falling through the looking glass into Wonderland.  Here she sets out (with the help of the Hatter) to rescue Jack and escape back to her world.  Although Hatter really wants to be Alice’s hero, she often ends up using her karate skills to help them escape and really holds her own throughout the movie.  Hatter just wants to save Alice, but Alice is set on saving Jack (a nice twist on the “damsel in distress” trope). Spoilers, more analysis and a little bit of romance after the jump.

After a year(+) long boycott of all this Twilight hoopla, I caved and rented the first flim (for research purposes, of course).  In the interest of full disclosure, Twilight was fighting an uphill battle with me from the moment the dvd hit the player.  As a lifelong Buffy fanatic, Edward’s chances weren’t looking good.  In fact, they were kind of looking like this:

Okay, that was a bit gratuitous and for my own enjoyment.  Back to Twilight.

From what I could put together (not having read the books), Twilight was a head-over-heels love story about a girl who fell in love with her creepy stalker, and then gave up everyone and everything that mattered to her in order to be with said psycho.  I’m still not convinced that I was that far off, and I can’t get that radiohead song out of my head… (You know the one.)

Take the following for example…