Tubefilter News

Lots of chatter this week about live web series, but who says scripted series can’t have a little live streaming fun too? The Legend of Neil dropped its season 2 finale (above) yesterday and followed it up with a live chat last night on UStream with the cast that drew over 10,000 total viewers. First watch the episode to see if the show’s involuntary protagonist Neil/Link (Tony Janning) will ever get princess Zelda (Angie Hill) out of the hands of the evil Lord Gannon and his lackey Wizrobe.

Highlights from the live chat, which featured Janning and co-creator Sandeep Parikh and cast members Felicia Day, Angie Hill, Mike Rose and Eric Acosta will be posted on Atom later today.

Legend of Neil is clearly the online network’s biggest original series hit so far—check out the tagline under the Atom.com logo (right). The Comedy Central owned site is doing their part to market the series, at least in an online fashion, with a series of posts on the site giving fans some behind-the-scenes action like a two-part director’s commentary. An excerpt from Parikh, who also stars as Zaboo on The Guild, adds some color to the remarkably raunchy musical episode (below) starring Felicia Day as the Fairy.

So maybe you’re on summer vacay and skipped a few days of your Tubefilter fix this week. (Lucky you.) So it being Friday we’re once again recapping the top web series news of the week. Monday started off with the release of the highly anticipated Legend of Neil musical episode on Atom. It’s one of the only web series eps we’ve actually felt obliged to drop the NSFW warning on just to look out for our office-locked readers. The 9-minute episode (above) so far is coming in at over 138,000 views—not bad at all for week one of a mid-season.

There was also our unabridged roundtable discussion on just what the heck the oft-used ‘Branded Entertainment’ buzzword is all about. As brands dip more toes in the web video content pool, there’s no shortage of opinions about what this means. It’s a long one, but well worth bookmarking for some weekend reading.

And of course we can’t ignore the fact that The Guild launched season 3 on Xbox on Tuesday before its wider (MSN/Zune) launch next week on September 1. The popular series also quietly nabbed a retail DVD deal by the same company that put the Dr. Horrible DVD on the shelves earlier this year.

And finally, several examples of network TV turning to the web to find fans for their fall lineups, including a prequel web series for CW’s The Vampire Diaries and a web series/ARG for ABC’s FlashForward.

Online musicals are all the rage, and we probably have the Whedon clan to thank for that. Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog gets a lot of credit for pushing web video forward, and you can’t help but notice its inspiration in The Legend of Neil’s new season with the release of Episode 3 (above) today on Atom.com. (Warning, the video is potentially NSFW, well, depending on where you work.)

Neil creators Sandeep Parikh and Tony Janning, who stars as Neil in the series, gave a preview of the episode last month at a live screening. In what be the raunchiest appearance on screen to date by Felicia Day (The Guild, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog), Day returns as the fairy finding herself is a spot of trouble with Ganon (Scott Chernoff).

And as if it needed more of a Whedon/Dr. Horrible connection, we learned that Maurissa Tancharoen sings the voice of Zelda in the episode as actor Angie Hill lip syncs. From what we can tell, the composers Nigel Cordeiro and Robert Harrington, have no relations to the Wheodon clan.

Atom hosted a special preview screening Tuesday night of the first three episodes of The Legend of Neil season 2, revealing what had been rumored earlier this summer—the season does indeed contain a 9-minute musical episode. We’re talking a colorful set of original songs that make a not so subtle nod to the web’s musical gold standard, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.

Creators Sandeep Parikh (The Guild) and Tony Janning opened the evening with Neil star Janning acting out the show’s ignominious opening. Janning returns as underachieving everyman Neil, who faces a new set of life turds this time around. Good thing for his quantum space bending game console, as he’s right back as Link inside the world of Zelda once again. Also returning is Felicia Day who brings back her role as the pint-sized Fairy.

Following the screening, there was a brief Q&A with Parikh and the cast members Janning, Mike Rose, Scott Chernoff taking questions.