Giant Fire Breathing Robot

Can’t Stop the Serenity 2010: San Francisco

This past Saturday, a chunk of the Robot crew was able to hang out with the San Francisco Browncoats at their annual event, “Can’t Stop the Serenity”. This nation-wide event is a showing of Joss Whedon’s opus film Serenity, with the proceeds going to charity. Read on after the jump to hear about the fun.

The evening featured a raffle of Whedon-themed prizes, a mini concert by Shawn Tutt, a costume contest, and a showing of both Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and Serenity. The Browncoats were out in full force, and the theater they’d rented for the evening was relatively full. At $12 a head, that probably means some good money brought in for the evening’s charity, Equality Now.

The “Sing-Along” in the title of Dr. Horrible was always a bit of a joke to me, but after this event, I can say I’ve seen it in action. The crowd knew most of the words to the songs, and there was quite a bit of singing going on. The costume contest had only one Dr. Horrible, so it was easy to draw a winner for that category (though the costume was good enough to win against any other Dr. Horrible costume I’ve seen):

The Browncoats were not to be outdone though, and the Serenity costumes were pretty well done, too, and it was a close contest. In the end, it came down to a Kaylee in a fancy dress, and a Captain Mal Reynolds. The crowd’s applause for each was dead even, so a tie was happily declared and they both walked away winners.

The raffle was a gigantic disappointment. No, I’m not just saying that because I didn’t win, why would you ask that? In all seriousness, the raffle had a lot of really great prizes. I was really pretty amazed at the quality of items being given away, there were several Quantum Mechanix Serenity items, and those ain’t cheap. Way to go, Browncoats!

Shawn Tutt did indeed rock the house, look for a review of his new album No Audible Dialog coming to the site soon.

To top it off, there was even a group shot of everybody in the crowd wearing a Jayne “cunning hat”.

I definitely recommend getting to this one next year if you didn’t go this year, it’s a great time with great folks. We’ll have a follow-up post later this week with the evening’s MC, John Jeremi, sharing some more info with us, so stay tuned!