The Geeks of Doom were recently invited to participate in a press conference call with Heroes creator and executive producer, Tim Kring, and star Masi Oka, who plays fan favorite Hiro. Kring, Oka, and the rest of the cast are currently filming Season Two of the NBC hit series, but took some time out to talk about the show, giving a few tidbits on what to expect in the upcoming season, and promote to the DVD release of Season One, which will hit store shelves on August 28, 2007.
Summer Vacation
The cast and crew of Heroes have been extremely busy this summer. In addition to starting production on Season Two, most of the cast appeared at Comic-Con in San Diego at the end of July. They made a big splash there last year when they screened the original pilot episode to excited fans. In fact, Kring credits those fans and the word of mouth that started at last year’s convention as being a large part of the show’s early success, which is why he wanted to make sure they showed their appreciation this year. “We looked at Comic-Con this year as a giant thank you,” said Kring. “We were very committed to the idea of bringing everybody that we could from the show down to show our appreciation to the fans, who I am convinced were very instrumental in making the show a hit last year.”
Of this year’s Comic-Con homecoming, Oka said, “It was absolutely amazing. It’s kind of like winning the Super Bowl and going back to your home city. It was a celebration of a great phenomenon that we have all created together: the fans, the writers, and the cast.”
In the end, the pilot shown at the convention last year was drastically cut from a 2-hour premiere to the 1-hour premiere shown last Fall. To this day, the lucky few in last year’s Comic-Con audience are the only people to have seen Kring’s original pilot. Until August 28, that is, since the original 73-minute pilot will be included in the Season One DVD, along with commentary from Kring.
Although Kring appreciates us geeks and our contribution to the show’s success, he confesses that he does not count himself among us: “I did not come from a comic book background…I was not a Star Trek fan, either. I saw the original Star Wars, but none of the other ones after that. So I have very little knowledge of the sci-fi world and almost none of the comic book world. My influences came from the idea of basic storytelling and character development. I chose to approach this material almost entirely from the idea of who these characters were. I created the powers to reflect who the characters were and not the other way around. So I didn’t start off saying I wanted a guy who can teleport, I started off by saying I wanted a guy who felt trapped in a life that was not his dream and what could be a power that would be most wish-fulfilling for that character. And that was the ability to transport out of that life.”
For his part, Oka flies his geek flag proudly. In addition to being an avowed manga fan since childhood, he is delighted at the following Hiro has developed and what he means to geeks around the world: “If I can represent the geeks, I [feel] very fortunate to be able to do that. For me, the notion of a geek has always been someone who is very passionate about something. Whether it’s computers or ant farms or musicals or storytelling or paperweights or whatever it is. It’s that you’re passionate about something and that’s what makes us human, it defines us as individuals, it gives us our uniqueness… It’s more commendable to be a geek and be passionate about something than to be apathetic about everything.”
Hiro isn’t just a fan favorite, he also seems to be one of Kring’s favorite characters on the show. In the original script, Kring says, “there were a number of characters who felt that these powers were an affliction. The cumulative affect of it at the end of reading this first draft was that it was kind of a downer, nobody seemed to have any fun with it. [Hiro] was really created to lighten up the initial script… I felt that I needed one character who embraced it in a very enthusiastic way.”
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