x-poxted from Firefly spoilers (sorry if you had to see this twice) because it's so cool, and I just realized - spoiler free:

(part of a review from AICN):

It is so obvious that every scene in this movie was made with genuine passion for the material, that it makes me feel like my very minor complaints (which I'll go into in the spoiler section at the end) aren't even worth caring about.

Above all else, *that* is why I will tell you to see this movie. The passion. If you read this site, you're like me in some way. You love some aspect of fandom, you love some show, some comic, some movie, *something* enough to come here and read these reviews and flame each other in these talkbacks and speculate about casting decisions for movies that may never get made. You have felt this passion for something, and it's left its mark on you. And I'd bet that you've probably been let down at some point when something you felt so passionately about was handled badly. Whether it was a poorly-adapted novel, or a TV show that lost its way, or a promising concept that got focus-grouped apart and put through the wringer of the Hollywood process until the soul of it was bled dry and all that remained was the trappings of something you could have once loved. If you really care about the stuff that gets reported on this site, you probably know what that's like.

Well, that didn't happen here. There's a damn good reason why so many Firefly fans who've been to the preview screenings are raving about this movie. It's because this thing we feel so passionate about has been beaten down by the system and survived intact. The very existence of this movie is a big Fuck You to the shallow executives at Fox who tried to scuttle the series. It is a living testament to the power of fandom, an example of what can happen when word spreads and suddenly this thing that was written off by the people in power has a million advocates shouting its glories so loudly that they can't be ignored.

I suspect my Father would totally love Firefly.

However, its hard to get him to watch much of shows he actually knows he likes (24 is one show he loved the first few episodes of, but once he had missed a few he has never since bothered to catch up, despite regular DVD loan offers), nevermind something he has never seen.

I think I shall insist on taking him to see Serenity.

He can be an experment to see just how quickly he begs me for the DVDs after seeeing the movie, and also... a perfect "Non-Firefly" person on which to test the general appeal of the movie...

Another quote from a different review at AICN:

First, the Audience: I didn’t see any of the Universal people taking note of the gender distribution of the audience, but if they had, I think they would have been left scratching their heads and wondering if they were screening a sci-fi flick or a movie with the word Sisterhood in the title. The ratio was about 3-2 female (which for SF is basically unprecedented).

I didn't really note the gender balance at our screening, but I suppose it could have been 3-2 female. If that's the case, do you suppose it's because most Firefly fans came by way of Buffy and Angel?

eta: Also, is the reviewer right about this ratio being unprecendented for SF?

I didn't take note of gender ratio, but I'd guess at it being split pretty evenly. Very cool.

Also, is the reviewer right about this ratio being unprecendented for SF?

As far as I know, yes. Definitely.

SF geeks, and, in fact, geekdom in general, definitely skew towards the Y chromosome.

Yeah, but there must be some other SF fandom that has an equal or greater percentage of women to men.

I doubt it. I've been a member of a variety of fandoms and known people in an enough larger number, and out of all of them, my Joss fan friends are the only group who are more female than male. No one else even comes close to 1:1.

Farscape fandom online skews female, IIRC, but I don't know what the overall demo is.

I get another one! In this morning's e-mail:

Ok, thanks to you and A--- and S--- I am now a convert to the Firefly series. I have watched the 13 episode series (sob) and the trailer for the movie and I am so excited I am tempted to dig up my old Traveller books.

I have a lot of thougts and ideas I want to share about Firefly but I will just share some initial research I did after I was halfway through the series and thinking "where in the hell have I seen the captain and Book before?"... and no it wasn't Buffy.

So I get 1/3 of a toaster.

I can't think of any SF fandom that skews female overall. The online fandoms tend to, for some reason (women are chattier?), but other than the Jossverse the fandoms are mainly male.

Wait...most of the fans of the Vorkosigan books I know are women. But I'm not sure those count as sci-fi.

I think the sea-change towards more female involvment is partially because the content of the SF has changed, and partly because women are changing. I know the women around me when I was growing up thought both SF and fanship were big old wastes of time, not important stuff like getting married, having babies, cooking, and shoes.