Joss Whedon Talks "Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog" Sequel

Joss Whedon thinks like you do: “Slightly left-of-center.” His midlife crisis had songs in it. And he’s (rightfully) taking credit for Glee.

Those are just a few of the highlights from Whedon’s chat with The New York Times about the upcoming three-year anniversary of his hit web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

The Buffy mastermind was humble when asked if Glee would have happened were it not for "Once More, With Feeling," the musical episode.

“No, but boy am I going to tell people that now,” he told Arts Beat. “I’m going to run that theory up a flagpole. There’s other things like High School Musical that were more influential. However, let’s just say I invented television and leave it at that.”

Addressing rumors three years in the works about a sequel to the Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and Nathan Fillion musical, Whedon said he and family members/fellow writers Maurissa Tancharoen, Jed Whedon, Zack Whedon have done a lot of work on it and would rather go that route than develop Dr. Horrible for Broadway.

“We’ve got several songs near completion and we’ve got a very specific structure,” he said. “We’ve just all got jobs. And it’s not like Neil, Nathan and Felicia ain’t busy either. We get together at Christmas and family occasions, and then play each other our partial songs and go, ‘Yup, that’s still exactly as it was the last time we played it. We’re great.’ It’s bad.”

And its title? "Dr. Horrible and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," he joked.

While we’re biding our time for the sequel, there’s always Titan’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog — The Book, which is now available on Amazon. The 160-page softcover includes all things Horrible: the full script and lyrics to all the songs, sheet music as well as a roundtable discussion about the three-part web series with the cast and crew. Other highlights include essays from Day and co-star Simon Helberg (Moist) about how they landed their parts and an afterword from Harris.

But the greatest part? The “Horrible Haiku” from Fillion:

Six days to film it
Immortalized as a d--k
Then Neil stole my pants.

Writer Zack Whedon told the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy that the book collection was a thank you for fans who have asked for the sheet music and created Rocky Horror Picture Show-style singalongs to Dr. Horrible.

“Many people wanted to see those things for various reasons and I think that’s the biggest draw of the book,” he said. “We also wanted to make sure that if people were buying the book they were getting their money’s worth so we packed it with as many little extras as we could think of. That is how we approached the DVD as well. We don’t want people paying for the same thing over and over. We want to give them something new so they don’t hate us.”

And as for the sequel, Zack noted that the comics have provided a way to fill out the Dr. Horrible world and hold fans over.

“We’ve had extensive conversations about the sequel so I knew what things to cover [in the comic books] and which to stay away from,” he said.

“The sequel is in the intermediate-planning-tentative-outline-brainstorming phase, or IPTOP,” he joked. “We’ve talked about it a lot. We’re very excited about the idea. We are all very busy. The time will come when it works for all of us and I have no idea when that will be. That said, we all want it to happen so we’ll bend over backwards to make it happen even if the scheduling is wildly difficult.”

Anyone else sing this while they’re doing laundry? Just me?