Serenity Chronicles I: Firefly

I requested this a few years under the promise I would write a review. Now, I had watched this (and the second edit) with a friend who had never seen the original series. He loved this edit. Both of them, so you have his approval in addition to mine. In fact, when I gave it a second viewing he was disappointed that I rewatched it without him.

What I particularly enjoyed about this edit is that it brings Reynolds loss of faith closer to the surface, using it as his arc in this edit. The first film is very much his origin story. Full disclosure though, I haven't watched this in a while so the memory of both edits is not fresh on my mind. However, from what I do I recall is that this edit was much tighter. It could've easily served as a TV movie with its tight plot and pacing.

The second is a bit more non-traditional in its plot and is more set-up for what happens in the Serenity film. I remember it bounced its focus between four characters: Reynolds, Jayne, River, and, to a lesser extent, Wash. The first has a strong focus on a singular protagonist. Still good, but IIRC it lacks the tightness of this first edit. I don't blame the editor for this as it had to set-up the drama of the cinematic feature, and putting a little attention and development on Wash is not a bad idea before jumping into that film.

There are minor to medium drops in quality when MusicEd921 uses deleted scenes to add some character development to the plots he's trying to craft. However, they're infrequent and easy to ignore. The vast majority of the edit is quite good and I didn't notice any issues. The video quality is what you can expect from a mid-2000's TV DVD box-set. A bit grainy and rough, but this is an issue with the source and not the edit.

An excellent pair of edits. And with an endorsement from someone who'd never seen the original source material, I can hope that is encouraging to MusicEd921's work on these edits.

This was a damn fine fanedit. I was never really a fan of "Firefly" and it took me a while to finally watch everything. But I do love the "Serenity" movie.

This is a fairly simple edit of the pilot episode, with some excellent deleted scenes added and a few trims. An excellent primer for anybody who's never watched "Firefly" and a fun way of revisiting the show for the hardcore fans.

Love what was done... A fresh taste of firefly.. Me and my son are watching them and both are really enjoying them. If one could Monday morning quarterback this series you would wonder if fox would have gave up on it so fast knowing the following that it has.. But i applaud the edit here, way to keep it alive... thanks again

I'm going to use the same review for all three parts of the Serenity Chronicles, because in my opinion, they need to be viewed as a complete package for maximum effect.

MusicEd921 does an outstanding job of tying together the entire series, plus the feature film Serenity, and condensing the essence of the show into 3 feature length DVDs. When I originally contacted MusicEd921 regarding these edits, I mentioned that I was planning a weekend binge-watch of the entire series plus Serenity, something that I do every year or so...

From now on, I'll be binging on these DVDs instead--they're THAT good.

I give a 9 rating on A/V quality solely because of the quality of some of the deleted scenes that were incorporated into the edits. As mentioned previously in other reviews, the quality of these scenes was lower simply because they were not remastered for the DVD release. Not MusicEd921's fault at all.

If you are a Firefly fan, you need to see these edits. :)

I love FIREFLY, and I love its first episode "Serenity." Strangely enough, though, I know a lot of people who just couldn't get into that pilot episode. Many found it inaccessible.

Maybe if they had been able to start with Musiced's wonderful edit, they would have liked it better.

Musiced wisely puts the flashbacks from the episode "Out of Gas" near the beginning of the story, in their proper place in the timeline. These flashbacks do a great job of establishing the characters and setting up the world in which they live.

The episodes are edited together as a feature-length movie, and Musiced makes the transitions pretty flawless. I knew where the commercial breaks originally came from having watched the original episode many times, but Musiced seamlessly makes the scenes flow. There was a slightly lower audio/video quality in some of the deleted scenes that were added in, but as he explains in the opening, the scenes were not restored for the DVD release. The scenes were very worthwhile; they answered how Mal and Zoe finally got out of Serenity Valley, and why Mal would name his ship after the place where he and the others lost the war.

There was one moment at about 1 hour and 5 minutes in where the audio transition seemed a bit abrupt, but other than that, the audio was handled flawlessly.

I enjoyed the rearranging of the scenes so much that I almost wish that the Simon/River flashbacks from later episodes and the movie were also moved forward into the timeline here. But for new viewers, the connection of these scenes to the overall story would have been baffling, and the surprise reveal of who these two turned out to be would have been ruined if they had been put in the aforementioned order. Musiced made the right call.

A couple of very small, nitpicky things: The scene where Wash plays with the dinosaurs (a hilarious scene that's one of my favorites in the series) no longer feels right when placed in the middle of the movie. It's clearly an intro scene when Wash has already been introduced. (And, as Zoe notes, he *is* kind of annoying when that's the first time we meet him.) And the Mal/Inara flashback loses a joke through the reordering of the material (Mal promises not to call Inara a certain nasty name ever again, which is funny in a later episode when we know that he constantly calls her that. But the gag doesn't work anymore by putting this scene first).

Mind you, I love the dinosaur scene so much myself, I don't know if I could bring myself to cut it either. And I don't have a solution for the Mal/Inara scene; it pretty much has to be placed where it is. I talk about these minor niggling points because so much else works about this edit that it leaves me with little to say.

The use of the theme (for the first time in this version of the story) over the end credits is beautifully handled.

A large portion of this edit is simply the "Serenity" pilot episode running in a straightforward fashion (as it should be). I imagine that the third part will be mainly the 2005 SERENITY feature film running in a fairly straightforward fashion. But what I really look forward to is seeing how Musiced sums up the middle section of the story in the one movie that comes in between them! That will probably require the most inventiveness and repurposing of footage on this part.

But after seeing this edit, I know that he's got the skills to pull it off. :)