So now the third installment of Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog (http://www.drhorrible.com) has posted, in theory to be up until Sunday in this mystical experiment. Along with friends from his TV adventures, Joss has created a musical superhero/villain show and his MySpace blog shows how this will be an experimental vision of independence. It will disappear into the mist on Sunday, never to return until DVD…or so they had originally said.

And yet, it is using a Hulu player (which it didn’t need to do as this caused complications for international viewing) and is selling on iTunes. And glitches abounded as he didn’t plan on that much viewing so quickly. Or did he really need a middleman/middleperson/middleentity to make this happen more smoothly? Or should it already have been launched on Hulu (where I assume it is going from the player, though it can’t be readily found on the Hulu site so far, even searched for and linked to the Hulu player on the site).

Twitter feed, Facebook profile, TV Guide sneak that wasn’t as much seen as a searchable tease — the best way to have done this? It helped build the base…

Twitter feed (http://www.twitter.com/drhorrible) — 4,081 followers (with one of them me).
MySpace friends: http://www.myspace.com/wonderflonium had 7,388 friends.
Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dr-Horribles-Sing-Along-Blog/51074710227 with 26,036 fans.

Dark Horse comics on MySpace spot for the Captain Hammer comic, which led the campaign July 2. Jinx t-shirts. Wikipedia entry. May 19 original comments posted on SciFi Wire to get people intrigued… Well established fansite at http://drhorrible.net. Even an IMDB entry already.

The big marketing? The impact of the loving traditional press about this launch and the crash of the website….
— USA Today
— LA Times
— Wired
— Trade mag Variety, as “Screenwriters Strike Back”
— Boston Globe
— Chicago Sun-Times
— San Francisco Chronicle
— Global and Mail (UK)
— E! Online, with 63 comments back on the show
— NPR

The interesting subtext — an interesting real or fake controversy (hard to tell, as it seems very tongue-in-cheek and giving up at the same time) about a Dr. Steel character being ripped off. This dominates the IMDB comments and some of the other comment sections, but most either seem comical, despairing, or disappointed.

My favorite part of the spin is this response video on YouTube:

We’ll see where this all goes. A new semi-professional launch strategy? Something that someone will nurture from TV auteurs in a space in Hulu?

Stay tuned for more adventures….