Joss Whedon just confirmed here on his Comic-Con panel that he plans to do at least another episode of Dr. Horrible. His relevant quotes after the jump; more details once the panel wraps.

Updates: Below the jump, details on the Dr. Horrible DVD…

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Choices, choices. Download the three-part web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog over the next few days, or wait for the DVD release? Maybe both.

Dr. Horrible is Joss “man with the Midas touch” Whedon’s experimental comedy/sci-fi musical. If the trailer above doesn’t lie, the whole shoestring production will shine like B-grade gold.

The story: Neil Patrick Harris (Doogie Howser, MD) is Dr. Horrible, too shy to talk to his crush (Felicia Day from The Guild) and struggling to prove himself to the Evil Group of Evil. The doctor’s arch-enemy Captain Hammer is played by Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Slither), the coolest poor man’s action star around.

Dr. Horrible is like an awkward, flamboyant grandson of Vincent Price’s character in The Abominable Dr. Phibes. (By the way, that demented, carnival-esque revenge tragedy must have inspired Max Fisher to do a copycat crime in Rushmore. Remember the bees released into Mr. Bloom’s hotel room?)

A guy like Joss Whedon doesn’t need to experiment to get people to watch his stuff, which only increases my respect for him and my excitement for this project. I hope Dr. Horrible is a success mostly because it looks really, really cool, but also because it’ll show other bigwigs there’s a fanbase for freewheeling, unashamed, genre fun.

At the time of this writing the location of the first installment was switching servers, but hopefully it’ll start streaming for free again.

I was definitely a little hard on Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay in my review. But I’ll admit, though I kind of already did there, that it is a pretty funny movie. And as with any movie that I know will be popular despite anything I write negatively about it, I wanted to raise a discussion, here specifically of the racial issues the comedy deals with. Fortunately, I was able to do so with the filmmakers and actors, themselves, during a “roundtable” interview at Austin’s InterContinental Stephen F Austin Hotel on Saturday afternoon.

Of course, I realized by the end of the talks, which came in two parts — first with co-writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, then with co-stars John Cho, Kal Penn and Neil Patrick Harris — that by simply bringing up the “issue”, I was encouraging and continuing a racist perspective of addressing ethnicity as an issue, which is certainly more a part of the problem than I mean it to be. Basically, I should have been more celebratory of the sequel, like I have always been with the original, because overall I should be thankful Cho and Penn were again allowed to star in their own movie. I just hope this isn’t the best Hollywood can do for them or other Asian-American actors trying to find non-typecast work in the movies.

My first indication that I was taking Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay too seriously was earlier in the day, during the SXSW panel actually titled “Race, Politics and Drugs: a Harold & Kumar Panel,” where Hurwitz and Schlossberg flat out said they have no bigger agenda with these movies than to be a showcase for vagina jokes. Yet ever the one to press matters, I later asked the pair about their decision to deal more with race in the sequel.

Check out the conversations with both groups after the jump.

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One of the things I love about Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is the way it treats its two stars, John Cho (as Harold, or “Rold”) and Kal Penn (as Kumar). The plot could have been played with any hot young dudes in Hollywood in the roles – you’d maybe expect two white guys, one with blonde hair, one with brown – but instead the characters are a Korean-American and an Indian-American. And it isn’t a big deal. Aside from a few derogatory, stereotypical comments made by unfavorable guys the duo meets on their adventure to find a White Castle, race isn’t an issue and doesn’t really come into play story wise.

However, the sequel, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, turns the color of their skin into the impetus of the story, which revolves around them being mistaken for terrorists (“North Korea and Al-Qaeda working together”). Almost disguised as a smarter, more politically satirical follow-up, Guantanamo Bay, which was directed by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, who wrote this movie and the original, is basically just an adaptation of a Truly Tasteless Jokes book — if every other page of that book were annotated with updates, apologies, corrections and clarifications. It’s a movie that wants to have its offensively stereotypical cake and eat it, too – using a kind of utensil we’re not accustomed to seeing used for such a meal. What I mean is that each joke is a play on a socially recognized stereotype. Easily stereotyped characters are set up as clichés (dumb white-trash hick from Alabama) only to be revealed as the opposite (he has a classy home with refined interior decorating and accoutrements), yet ultimately they’re also exposed as being a part of that stereotype (he’s married to his sister and they have an inbred cyclops child in the basement).

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