Inasmuch as authors are, by the act of creation, images of God, the idea of making a Buffy movie without Joss Whedon is blasphemy. Buffy was a character that sprang from the brain of Joss (rather like Athena from the side of Zeus) and into boot-kickin’ television glory only after she had been bought from Joss and mostly ruined by Hollywood in the original ‘92 feature film.

Even if you were to leave Joss, Buffy, and the idiot Hollywoodians out of it entirely, I can’t think of a much worse thing you could do to the show’s extremely loyal fans. Buffy has a still-growing fan base, years after its cancellation. A fan base which organizes Meetup groups, holds Buffy-watching marathons, or swamps theaters with hundreds of people descending for a showing of the musical episode, Once More, With Feeling. The fans dress up for cons, dish out for DVDs, and run exhaustive blogs documenting Joss’ every move. Yes, maybe you could draw new fans with a new Joss-less vision — but not without alienating the existing ones, and why on earth would you want to do that?

Imagine if, in a world with no existing Batman comics, Frank Miller had written Batman Begins,* and pitched it to the studios. They bought the idea, but then twisted his script and dumbed it down to campy Adam West Batman. Then they poured the shattered wreckage back into the original author’s hands and said, “Okay, I guess you can do a TV show with this, if you want.” With freedom, Frank had gone on to create his vision of the Dark Knight through seven glorious years of television. (Sure, some years of Buffy were more glorious than others… nonetheless, the show was, overall, great.)

Now it’s like those producers are saying, “Ooh, okay, we’re gonna make another Batman movie — but we don’t want Frank or his vision involved; we want Adam West back.”

We’ve had the Dark Knight for seven years. Adam West was fun, and we laugh at him… but why would we ever, ever want to regress there?

* Yeah, I know Miller didn’t write the movie, but he did write Year One, which is most of where the movie got its meat from the comic books.

That’s right, folks! I moved from the old Blogger-blog and have started exploring the mighty and worthy world of WordPress. Enough of this proprietary stuff, already! Go PHP, for freedom!

If you need something from the old blog, you’ll find it, still, at http://sarahmcmenomy.com/archive/homeblog/ — and I may re-post one or two things here, for general reference and, you know, friendliness.

Welcome, friends!

All this anti-homeschooling rot is depressing me. And it’s not just about the dissolution of educational freedoms, it’s also an example of religious oppression. “All sides agree the children have thrived with home school,” but “[the mother's] lessons also have a religious slant, which the judge said was the root of the problem.” Mainstream science has an atheistic slant (although it is entirely unnecessary). How is it the right of the courts, or the government, to dictate a child’s education?

Before you start blaming our new president for this trend on the basis of supposed socialist tendencies, consider that Obama has remained relatively silent on the issue of homeschooling, except in his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” where he acknowledges that the decision to homeschool should be left up to families, and should be honored.

Of course, this situation is more complicated than just The Courts vs. The Family: it is the father, during divorce proceedings, who is objecting to the children’s homeschooling. And I’m not saying that he should not have a say in his children’s education — but the judge should rule on the basis of what is best for the children, not on the basis of perceived religious slant. If the father wants them to be taught something else, he should homeschool the kids himself when he has them (if he has joint custody), or hire a tutor if he can’t do it. If the kids are really testing “two years above their grade levels,” then it seems clear that that is a system which is working better than the public schools would.

To those, in positions of authority, who are remaking educational policies in this country: flight from religious persecution is how this country got started in the first place. Now, with a failing economy, an overseas war, and a low-level civil war raging over the issue of abortion, we have enough challenges here already. We don’t need a Handicapper General.