Salomé is basically insane–spoiled and mad with lust, and she’ll do anything to get what she wants. She doesn’t care whether she’s preying on the fatal love of the young Syrian or the hubris of Herod, who here is a petty, approval-driven man, willing to bow to his desires in some things, like taking his brother’s wife, but not all. He can’t get past his own bruised sense of propriety to the state of unbridled, unresistant acquiescence to temptation where Salomé lives. She has no filter, and no boundaries.

Wilde references the moon a lot, especially how it looks–invariably like a woman obsessed with death, looking for dead things. The play feels decadent and grotesque, melodramatic and extravagant; very much like the Art Nouveau in style at the time. I felt Wilde’s addition to the Biblical story, at the very end, was unnecessary, and didn’t quite fit with Herod’s shrinking, hand-washing character throughout the play.

Read the text for free, in French, English or both, side by side. Also worth noting: Aubrey Beardsley drew a series of illustrations for this play, of which this is a good example.

More than musically expounding on the glory of ultra-villainous horses, they tried something bold while top-heavy studios are lamenting their own obsolescence. Whedon explains his reasoning on the Dr. Horrible site:

The idea was to make it on the fly, on the cheap – but to make it. To turn out a really thrilling, professionalish piece of entertainment specifically for the internet. To show how much could be done with very little. To show the world there is another way. To give the public (and in particular you guys) something for all your support and patience. And to make a lot of silly jokes. Actually, that sentence probably should have come first.

Punk rock!  Reminds me of the stirring exhortation Ralph Bakshi gave at Comicon (not that I was there…) in response to a question about how to weather scary changes in animation (my paraphrase).  Skip to :40 if you don’t want “going up the elevator” footage. (video thanks to ASIFA). After hearing that, I wanted to go out and write a movie, and hey–I have Flash, maybe animate it myself too. So if anybody wants to make a movie, let me know. I have other stories to write in the meantime.

I am inspired. Seeing people make things like this, for relatively cheap, makes me want to go out and do likewise. In the ever-inspiring words of Captain Hammer, the arch-nemesis of Dr. Horrible (who has a doctorate in horribleness), “It’s not enough to bash it heads, you have to bash in minds.”