Dollhouse

OK, today my excuse is not that I’m hung over. It’s that it’s President’s Day. And I am honoring the, uh, presidents (is it the current president? presidency in general?) by not doing a proper blog post. Instead I will simply post a link to something I already did. How about this interview with Joss Whedon, apropos of Dollhouse, which got posted on Friday?

As usually happens the best part of the interview came late in the game, in garbage time, when I started asking inane, only marginally on-topic questions:

Did you have a dollhouse when you were little?

JW: The dolls I played with were all superhero dolls. I did not actually have a dollhouse. I was pretty much playing with Spider-Man and the Falcon. And I wasn’t putting Spider-Man on top of Falcon. No matter what you’ve heard.

Wait, who’s the Falcon?

JW: He was Captain America’s sidekick, for a while.

I thought that was — Billy? Bobby? What’s his name?

JW: Bucky! Bucky died in WWII, bra! He had to get a new sidekick.

So Spidey and the Falcon didn’t have a house? They were homeless?

JW: No. They didn’t have a house. Kind of sad, really.

Yeah. I’m really proud that I used Joss Whedon’s time for that.

This is as good an excuse as any to post a link to this conversation I once set up between Whedon and Neil Gaiman. Though it’s only four years old, it kind of dates from an earlier era in my journalistic career, when I didn’t really have any idea how to conduct an interview, and I was both arrogant and clueless enough to set up a very amateurish speakerphone conversation between two of the smartest people in America. I don’t think either of them had any clear idea who I was or what was going on — and as I recall I was even late because I ran out of batteries for my tape recorder — but they had to play along because they were doing press for Serenity and Mirrormask, respectively. And because they’re nice people.

Naturally they were super-gracious and funny anyway — Whedon made the best Timecop allusion ever. I waited till afterward to die of embarrassment.