I wasn’t lying when I mentioned in the campaign that I’ve been thinking about making this show for years. It was perhaps but a wee seedling in the back of my mind in the summer of 2008, and since then it’s grown into what Ben and I want so much to make now.

Back in the summer of 2008, during the Hollywood writers’ strike, Joss Whedon gathered some fine folks and made a web short called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Starring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day, it’s a musical romp about a wannabe villain (Dr. Horrible, played by Harris) who’s in love with the girl from the laundromat (Penny, Day), and the doofus good guy who may or may not really be a total asshole (Captain Hammer, Fillion).

Whedon, et al., released the short in three parts, only online. It was a grand experiment at the time: a non-amateur production made exclusively for web distribution. And the experiment was a success – servers crashed, people got paid, there’s been talk of a sequel ever since.

During the publicity craze about the show, Whedon made a throw-away sarcastic remark to Wired about not getting much attention from a made-up crochet magazine, and at the time I was actually the editor of a crochet magazine and I was still running CrochetMe.com. And thus ensued the most fun I’ve ever had on the internet, as a few tweets and a blog post sparked great enthusiasm amongst other crafters to try to land an interview – about crafts, naturally – with Whedon.

The short story is that we did manage to get his attention, and in November of that year the dude who would eventually make that wee art flick The Avengers spent a half hour talking on the phone with little old me. And one of the things he told me when we were talking about Dr. Horrible and how it’s become (even more so now, four years later) possible for anyone with a crappy camera and a good idea to make a great show, was this:

It is no longer the time of sitting around and thinking about doing something.

Ok, yes. It’s taken me four years to stop sitting around on this idea. But that’s how long it took for me to meet Ben, and to find a few months when I’m not overwhelmed with other work. So let’s consider Taco Hat TV the gift that comes from a book I want to write not having found a publisher yet, and from Ben having some time this winter to shoot.

On the t-shirt I’m wearing in our Indiegogo campaign video is a quote from Dr. Horrible, and I wore that shirt on purpose both as a reminder to myself that we can do this thing right, even on a shoestring budget, and because now is the time to do it. And it’s going to be fun, and it’s going to be good.

PS Coincidentally, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog will air on network television for the first time tonight, on The CW at 9pm Eastern.