Geek Punditry #166: The Hype Machine

March 13, 2026March 12, 2026 blakemp Geek Punditry Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk, Firefly, Gina Torres, How I Met Your Mother, Hype, Jewel Staite, Kill Bill, Lost, Morena Baccarin, Nathan Fillion, Once We Were Spacemen, Quentin Tarantino, Sean Maher, Summer Glau

Social Media, for all its faults, occasionally has moments that get people genuinely, legitimately excited, and fans of the TV series Firefly have been experiencing such a moment for the past few weeks. Two of the show’s stars, Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk, host a podcast called Once We Were Spacemen, and the social media feeds for the podcast have been teasing us like Bettie Page visiting an aircraft carrier. The feed has been sharing videos, one every few days, of Fillion visiting one of his Firefly co-stars, and every time they have essentially the same conversation:

CO-STAR: Oh, it’s you.

FILLION: Yes it is.

CO-STAR: Does this mean it’s time to do the thing?

FILLION: Yes. It’s time to do the thing.

If “The Thing” turns out to be an MLM, we riot.

And then the video ends, usually with the two of them doing a sort of ironically “creepy” nod at one another. Fillion has shared a video with each of the remaining regular Firefly cast members: Gina Torres, Morena Baccarin, Summer Glau, Sean Maher, Jewel Staite, Adam Baldwin, and finally, Tudyk himself. Only the late Ron Glass has been (sadly and inevitably) absent. And as you can imagine, the fandom is going WILD.

Even if you’ve never watched Firefly yourself, if you spend any time in geeky circles (and if you don’t, why the hell are you even reading this?) you’re probably aware that it has become the poster child of brilliant TV shows that got screwed by the network. Firefly got only one season of 13 episodes (aired out of order), plus a theatrical movie (Serenity) that ostensibly condensed the stories that had been planned for the never-made second season into a grand finale. Despite the show having the kind of brevity usually reserved for British television, and the fact that children who were not yet born when the finale movie came out will be old enough to vote this year, the fan base is loud and vocal. It is highly unlikely that anybody in the past 20 years has publicly asked the question “What’s a cancelled TV show that deserved another season?” without somebody – probably multiple somebodies – saying it should have been Firefly. It has lived on through the sheer power of the fans and their love, not to mention a healthy (but not obscene) amount of toys, merch, novels, and comic book continuations of the universe.

Until now, this is as official as it got.

And that fanbase, which has been crawling up the walls since 2005, is now on pins and needles, DESPERATE to know what the hell Once We Were Spacemen is hyping up.

The podcasters have promised that an announcement will come this Sunday, March 15th. They have also debunked a few of the more prominent theories: it’s not a convention appearance, a podcast, or any sort of crossover episode. (This last theory seems mostly based on the fact that Fillion and Baccarin, who are both currently the stars of cop dramas, made a joke about that fact in the video they made together.) So if none of that…what is it?

Obviously, the wish of fans everywhere is a full-scale revival of the series in some form. Firefly was owned by 20th Century Fox, which means it was part of the gargantuan IP package absorbed by the Walt Disney Entertainment Conglomerate and Shadow Government and Dried Plantain Concern back when they acquired the Fox assets a few years ago, so any such revival would most likely be on Disney+. People are asking if there will be a new movie, a miniseries, an animated series with the original cast providing the voices…frankly any of those would be welcome. The question is whether Disney would actually devote the resources to produce such a thing. Disney – especially in the content produced exclusively for their streaming service – has been kind of scattershot over the last few years, with shows and movies given the greenlight, produced, killed, buried, and occasionally becoming successful against all odds, with little rhyme or reason to any of it. Would they see Firefly as a valuable enough property to bring back in one of these forms?

It’s not impossible, but I don’t think it’s a slam-dunk either.

Remember, these are the people that smothered the *Willow* revival in its sleep.

So if it’s not that, and it’s none of the theories that have been debunked so far, what could it possibly be? More toys? Books? Comics? A Doctor Who-style audio drama? The thing is, fans would enjoy any of those things, but would they really be worthy of the amount of buildup that we’ve been given over the last few weeks?

This is what I’m concerned about, frankly. The whole purpose of the OWWS videos has been to build up hype and excitement, and clearly it has worked. Browncoats (the term for Firefly fans, similar to Trekkies) have been buzzing at a level I haven’t seen in years, and people are flocking to Hulu to rewatch the original series. But with THIS level of excitement, if it DOESN’T turn out to be some sort of a revival, I’m really worried that the level of letdown will cause this shiny fandom ship to crash.

There are few things that will crush a fandom’s spirit more effectively than feeling like the payoff doesn’t match the buildup. A lot of fans of the TV show Lost, for example, abandoned their faith in the series because they felt as though the finale didn’t provide enough answers to the show’s many mysteries. I happen to disagree, by the way; I felt like the final season gave us all the answers we actually NEEDED, and those questions that remain unresolved are okay that way. But whether I felt letdown or not, it’s undeniable that a LOT of people did, and that hurt. The same goes for the highly divisive ending for the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, which ended in such a way that a lot of fans (I include myself this time) felt somewhat cheated, that the story we’d been told for nine seasons was not building up towards what we thought it was. Both of these shows do still have devoted fans, even all these years after they went off the air, but virtually any conversation about either of them will include somebody griping about the ending.

It’s like they made a bet as to whose finale could piss off the most people. They both won.

For a less soul-crushing example, let’s look at Quentin Tarantino’s film(s) Kill Bill. I’m going to give you a very minor spoiler here, but I can’t imagine anybody who is concerned about it hasn’t already seen the movie. Tarantino decided during production to release what was intended as one film in two volumes because of the length, and the first half built up the identity of Uma Thurman’s character, referred to simply as “The Bride,” as a secret. The character’s actual name was not revealed in volume one. Some characters called her “B,” which we took to be an initial, or perhaps a reference to her status as, naturally, “the Bride.” A few times she was referred to as “Kiddo,” as well, a simple nickname. The one time a character actually said her name out loud, it was bleeped out, a sound effect that is virtually unheard of in the profanity-laden universe of Quentin Tarantino.

So speculation started to build. What was her name? Why was it being played as such a secret? Was she going to be revealed as having a link to another character in Tarantino’s world? A historical figure? Someone from pop culture?

Nah. When the reveal finally came halfway through volume two, it fell flat on its face. Her name, as it turned out, was “Beatrix Kiddo.” Friends call her “Bea.”

Hey Quentin, if it’s one movie, why did I pay to see it twice?

It wasn’t enough to ruin the movie, mind you. All things considered, I still enjoy the film(s) quite a bit, although I still contend Tarantino demonstrated that he doesn’t understand Superman in the slightest. I just feel like it was a mistake to build up the secret that much for something that, in the end, turned out to be of absolutely zero consequence.

And that’s the fear I have for the big Firefly reveal. I want a revival, I can’t lie. I’m hoping that we’re going to get the news that there’s going to be a new movie or TV series that picks up on the adventures of the Serenity crew, and I really want there to be a good explanation for how Tudyk is involved, because…reasons.

If you want to punch me for including this screenshot, that’s how you know you’re a true Browncoat.

I would have welcomed a new comic book or an audio drama or any of the other possibilities. But after the way it’s been built up, I’m very worried that anything less than a revival will be met with a resounding “meh” from the fanbase and the project – whatever it is – will lose support it would have had otherwise.

Hype is kind of a necessary evil in the entertainment field. We’re not talking about food or clothing, or anything essential for life. Entertainment is, by its very nature, a luxury. So in order to get somebody to choose the entertainment that you have made as opposed to any of the other millions of possibilities out there requires you to get them interested, get them excited. Hype is a skill in and of itself – a skill that I, it should be mentioned, possess in roughly the same amount as my skill as a prima ballerina. But just because I suck at hype doesn’t mean I can’t recognize it, and recognize when it’s gone too far.

I really hope that it hasn’t gone too far in this case. I really hope that, when the announcement is made, the fans that are buzzing on the internet will explode in excitement rather than spiral in disappointment. Will it be a big damn heroes moment? Or will we be shot down like a leaf on the wind?

I guess we’ll all find out on Sunday.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He is, in fact, a leaf on the wind. Watch how he soars.

Geek Punditry #73: Playing Favorites With Summer Part One

May 24, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry, Playing Favorites Back to the Beach, Chef, jaws, Movies, National Lampoon's Vacation, Stand By Me, summer, Summer Glau, The Giver, The Great Gatsby, The Outsiders, The Sandlot, To Kill a Mockingbird

We are, my friends, on the cusp of one of the most storied times of the year: summer! Time to hit the beach, go out on vacation, pull the kids out of school and spend a lot of time with a good book in your hand, longing for the days when such an activity would reward you with a personal pan pizza. And with the new season before us, we here at Geek Punditry Global Headquarters and Corrugated Cardboard Museum have decided to spend a couple of weeks PLAYING FAVORITES with summertime. For newcomers, Playing Favorites is that occasional feature in which I throw out a topic and ask you, the hive mind of social media, to suggest categories related to that topic so that we can discuss some of the best of the best. Let’s take a look at what you guys suggested in part one of this feature.

Beach Movies

Lew Beitz cut right to the chase and asked me for some of my favorite summer beach movies. This is the kind of thing we all think about when summer rolls around, isn’t it? Not just going to the beach, but entertainment regarding the beach. In the 60s it was an entire subgenre all of its own, with approximately 17,000 such films made during this decade starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello alone, sporting subtle titles such as Beach Blanket Bingo or How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. To be honest, I don’t really have a great affinity for those movies – they were well before my time and I didn’t really grow up with them. On the other hand, I do have a great deal of affection for Back to the Beach, the 1987 vehicle starring those two as a pair of midwestern parents who wind up returning to the beach of their youth. I think part of my appreciation for this bizarre little movie can be attributed to my mother, who was a fan of the original films and saw to it that this movie was on rotation in our house when I was young. But beyond that, there’s an inexplicably entertaining element to this movie. It was meta before meta was cool, acting not only as a sequel to the ol’ Frankie and Annette films, but as a parody of them as well. On the other hand, the humor IS pretty dated, with a lot of it requiring an awareness of old pop culture that modern audiences just won’t have. There are a lot of cameos from TV and movie stars of the 60s, for instance, and the joke about Annette’s obsession with peanut butter will just be baffling to anybody too young to remember that she did a series of commercials for Skippy back in the day. On the other hand, the scene of Pee-Wee Herman performing “Surfin’ Bird” is pretty timeless.

If you don’t necessarily want your beach movies to be full of comedy, it’s hard to go wrong with Jaws. It seems sort of pointless to recap this movie – if you’ve seen it, you know that it’s great, and if you haven’t, no amount of pontificating from me is likely to change your mind. But the movie that made Steven Spielberg is practically a flawless film: tense, thrilling, and full of great characters and wonderful character moments. Even the things that may be technically flawed, such as the artificial nature of the shark, work to the movie’s advantage, as Spielberg was forced to minimize Bruce’s screen time and thereby making it far more effective than it possibly could have been if they put him on screen at every opportunity. It’s the film that made everybody afraid of the water! What better movie to get yourself into the mood for the beach?

These two movies should be all it takes to yet you to September.

Summer Reading

Rachel Ricks wants to know what I think are the best “summer reading books” for elementary, junior high, and high school. This is actually a tougher question than you would think, considering that I’m both a writer and a teacher, but the truth is I’m not 100 percent sure what it is the kids are reading these days. Not elementary or middle school, anyway. For my high schoolers, I see waves happen. There was a time where every kid was carrying a copy of Twilight, which gave way to The Fault in Our Stars, which in turn passed the torch to 13 Reasons Why. These days, the name I’m most likely to see from a kid who digs reading is Colleen Hoover. And the thing is, guys, while I am still a voracious reader (that streak I mentioned last week currently stands at 358 days) I haven’t made a huge effort to check out these particular books because…well…they just aren’t my type.

Anyway, the way Rachel phrased the question makes me think she’s speaking specifically about the sort of summer reading that is often required by schools: when a kid leaves at the beginning of summer with a list of books that they’re going to pretend to have read by the time they come back in the fall. Assigning a book to read is tough. You always know that a substantial portion of the class will do anything they possibly can to avoid actually having to crack the book open. And we’ve all heard those stories of people so discouraged by some required book that they give up on reading altogether. I can promise you, folks, that no teacher wants to assign a book that makes you never want to pick one up again.

I’m going to bow out of elementary school recommendations, as I have none. As far as middle school goes, you can’t go wrong with classics like The Giver or The Outsiders. And if you’re looking for a gateway drug to get a young reader into the world of Stephen King, I think that middle school is an appropriate age to introduce them to his fantasy (yes, fantasy) novel Eyes of the Dragon. I’m also a fan of a few more recent works for this age group, such as Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series or the other assorted spin-off series set in that same universe.

If you haven’t read at least ONE of these books, then either you didn’t go to school in the United States, or you’re the reason Cliff Notes is a thing.

For your high schoolers, you shouldn’t be surprised to see The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird or Grapes of Wrath show up in their reading lists. And these are all good books, fundamental pieces of American literature and well worth reading. That said, these are books for people who are deeply into books already, and aren’t exactly casual reads. Try to hook a modern reader with things like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, or Twinkle Twinkle, book one of the Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars trilogy, now available both in print and as an eBook from Amazon.com!

(You had to know I was going to work that in somewhere.)

Road Trip Movies

Tim Stevens wants to know what I think are some of the best summer road trip movies. The road trip is a classic subgenre, usually in comedy, although there are some great road trip dramas or dramadies (Little Miss Sunshine for example) as well. When you think of a summer road trip, though, the thing that comes to mind is vacation movies, and the king of them all is National Lampoon’s Vacation. While this 1983 Chevy Chase film has become heavily overshadowed by its Christmas-themed threequel, I think people forget how much fun the original is. Clark Griswold (Chase, of course) and his wife Ellen (the grossly underrated Beverly D’Angelo) load the family into a station wagon to take a road trip out to the legendary Wallyworld Theme Park, and all hell breaks loose along the way. It’s not the first road trip movie, of course, but I think it is the platonic ideal of the road trip as a slapstick comedy. A lot of the jokes are very 80s and may not land that well with modern audiences, but I still enjoy the movie. Honorable mention goes to the sequel, European Vacation, in which Clark and Ellen take two entirely different children with the same names as the previous pair to tour the continent on another wacky road trip.

Not as well known but highly entertaining is the 2014 movie Chef, which was written by, directed by, and starred Jon Favreau. Favruea plays Carl Casper, a famous chef (duh) who boils over at a food critic and loses his restaurant job. With his zest for life gone, Carl and his son Percy (Emjay Anthony) buy a food truck and set off across the country to try to infuse themselves with the savory parts of existence. Just thinking about movies for this list makes me realize it’s been way too long since I devoured Chef – it’s such a great movie. It has some of the same flavor as City Slickers and Hot Tub Time Machine, films about men who have been diced and minced by the world and inexplicably discover ways to relish life again. But the added ingredient of Casper’s relationship with his son helps to separate from those other films, baking up not only a road trip movie, but also a film about a family learning to love one another again.

To be honest, though, I don’t know that John Leguizamo was the best choice to take over the Beverly D’Angelo role.

Summer Glau Movies

Duane Hower asked me what my favorite Summer Glau movie is. I see what you did there, Duane, very funny. I bet you thought I wouldn’t entertain your joke suggestion, didn’t you? Well, the joke is on you, my friend, because we all know the right answer to this question. The best movie ever starring Summer Glau? Clearly.

Project ALF.

Can you imagine what Melmacian tanlines look like?

Summer Coming-Of-Age Movies

Duane also asked what the best summer coming-of-age movies are. (Jeffrey Lee, I should note, asked for summer “life lesson” movies, and I think that’s pretty much the same thing, so I’m going to combine those two suggestions.) Coming-of-age, like road trips, is kind of a subgenre all of its own, one that often (but not always) crosses over with summer movies in that ol’ venn diagram in our heads. And once again, I think the best example is also the obvious one. Stand By Me, the 1986 movie directed by Rob Reiner and based on the novella “The Body” by Stephen King, is one of those films that sort of codifies the trope for all films that come afterwards. Four young boys (River Phoenix, Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman, and Wil Wheaton) discover that a missing boy from a nearby town has been found dead near a railroad track, but the discoverers don’t want to report the body because they found it while in a stolen car. The boys decide to set out on a hike to find the body on their own, and along the way, face the treacherous precipice between staying a kid and becoming an adult. This is the second time I’ve mentioned Stephen King in this week’s column, and in neither case was I talking about horror, have you noticed that? I mean yeah, the macguffin in this movie is a dead body, but that’s as close to being a scary movie as it gets. Instead, it’s a deep, meaningful, and powerful character study about these four boys that gives us glimpses of the men they will grow up to be. Reportedly, after Stephen King watched this movie he broke down in tears and told Reiner it was the best movie that had ever been made based on his work. (Admittedly, this was before Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, or The Green Mile, but that doesn’t change the fact that Stand By Me is an incredible film.)

The other great summer-specific coming of age movie, which again is a film that will probably say more about my age and the era of movies that was fundamental to me than anything else, is the 1993 movie The Sandlot. New kid in town Scotty Smalls (Tom Guiry) befriends a group of young boys that play a perpetual baseball game in a nearby sandlot. Smalls joins the game and becomes a member of the group during a summer that really feels authentic. While not nearly as serious or deep as Stand By Me, The Sandlot is a fun movie that feeds the sort of nostalgia that summer triggers in a lot of us, reminding us of bygone days without real responsibilities or anxieties that seem to be the fundamental building blocks of adult life.

One of these movies features a ghastly, bloodthirsty dog that terrorizes the boys of a small town. The other is based on a Stephen King story.

Okay, friends, I think that’s about enough for part one. I’ve got a few suggestions banked for part two of this segment next week but there’s room for more! If you’ve got an idea for a summertime topic from the worlds of comic books, movies, television, or books, I would LOVE to hear it! Post it in the comments, on the socials where you found the link to this column, or you can email it to me at info@blakempetit.com. See you next week, where we continue playing favorites!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. His REAL favorite Summer Glau movie, of course, is Knights of Badassdom. He knows you all expected him to say Serenity, but Joe Lynch’s horror/comedy deserves more love.