Firefly

I downloaded a free episode of Firefly from iTunes Music Store and watched it last week. I heard about the show when it first came out several years ago but didn't watch any of it. It turned out to be quite good so I found and downloaded all the episodes and the movie Serenity, which was based on the series. So far, I've watched three more episodes plus the movie and I'm hooked. The downloads are a bit dark and small so I'm planning on buying the DVD set from Amazon.



Too bad the series was cancelled after only 10+ episodes by FOX. With all the other crap shows they have, I'm not sure why Firefly got cancelled mid-season. One thing I'm ambivalent about is the use of Chinese in the dialog, almost exclusively curse/swear words. The story takes place ~50 years in the future where China and the U.S. have joined to form the Alliance, so there are a lot of Asian elements in the series. Quite often, the characters would say something in Mandarin as part of the dialog and there would be no subtitles. That's pretty cool! Since all the main characters are non-Chinese, the downside is that the pronounciation is so bad that you can't tell what they're saying unless you're paying very close attention. Maybe this is a good thing since there's a lot of swearing. There's no way they would be able to air this on FOX if they did all that swearing in English.

你他媽的。天下所有的人都該死。
渾蛋！
哎呀。我們完了。
This is some of the Chinese dialog in the pilot show that I downloaded from iTunes. Of course, I didn't get any of it watching the first time. Even knowing what they're supposed to say, it was still hard to understand. They should have hired some Chinese actors to do the swearing.