Babylon 5 Direct-To-DVD Project In Production

ajs writes "As previously announced, 'Babylon 5: The Lost Tales' is a direct-to-DVD project based on the popular series from the mid-1990s. Lost Tales first DVD, titled 'Voices of the Dark' has now begun production. As usual, J. Michael Straczynski and Doug Netter will be running the show with Straczynski directing. The characters, President John Sheridan (Boxleitner), Captain Elizabeth Lochley (Scoggins) and the technomage Galen (Woodward) are returning. The Lost Tales is an anthology series of sorts with two movies (previously three) per DVD starting in 2007. Straczynski has commented on Usenet that a more CG-intensive installment is coming in the next batch, featuring the character of Michael Garibaldi (Doyle)."

Comments

Re:I never saw the appeal of this series

[Trespass]

Well, the acting was often terrible. Let's get that out of the way. That wasn't it.

For me, the big appeal was that things of significant scope actually happened and the story progressed and changed with time. At the point that Babylon 5 came out, I was really fed up with the Star Trek franchise: Good acting and effects, but a horribly pedestrian and smarmy humanism seemed to infest most of the writing. It also pulled far too many punches. B5 made the universe seem strange and mysterious again, even if the acting was strictly community theater sometimes. War seemed dangerous, instead of a stageset for some belabored morality tale. It's dumb to say it was better than Star Trek, but B5 really spoke better to the sorts of stories I wanted to hear at that time.

Re:I never saw the appeal of this series

[Hazrek]

The appeal of Bab5, in a nutshell, was a solid and engaging story with interesting characters. Too many of the Star Trek series devolve into episodic "interstellar anomaly" of the week doldrums, which in my opinion gets boring very quickly. While Bab5 did feature its share of one-off episodes that didn't advance the plot, in general it was a serial show that kept you watching to see what would happen next...

Much like the current crop of popular tv shows such as Lost, Heroes, Jericho, 24, Prison Break, etc.

That said, it DID start off really slow in the first season. But the later seasons were some of the finest sci-fi I've ever seen on television.

Best of breed.

[Trevelyan]

Some people don't like B5 because you can't drop into it. Unlike star trek with it's closed episodes, the B5 story spans 4 seasons (with some expansion in a fifth season).

I consider B5 to be one of the best sci-fi series ever made, and its long term story is one of the reasons for that.

I think that some other sci-fi series may have had a chance to come close to B5 (eg firefly) but never got the chance to last long enough.

Its a shame that it came to such a conclusion it was (would be) difficult to continue it. The creators do keep coming back to it, but never something quite so epic, and I had hoped that one of the spins offs (eg crusade) would have lived longer.

Anyway B5 will always remain as a definitive series for me.

Re:I never saw the appeal of this series

[SetarconeX]

Agreed, when B5 came out it was going head to head with Star Trek DS9 for the title of "best series about guys on a space station."

The thing was, the early seasons of D29 followed the old Star Trek formula of pressing the "reset" button after every episode, while B5 went off on its arc, with massive plot elements changing from episode to episode. After a few seasons, it was clear that B5 was going somewhere, while DS9 was still mostly about some guys hanging out in Quark's bar. Cheers in space. Fun, and I watched it, but not great stuff.

But then, in the later seasons, even DS9 made itself a nice little plot arc, which I always saw as a late admission that the Babylon 5 way had something going for it.

Re:I never saw the appeal of this series

[merikari]

The problem with the first season is that it is slow and it contains probably 40% of the worst episodes in the whole series, but you cannot skip it. There's just too much going on there in the background even in the early episodes. Even TKO, which was a steaming pile, has a lot of important character development for Ivanova (the death of her father). For someone with a low tolerance for the worst episodes, the first season can be a steep climb.

I would still say that any sci-fi fan who has not watched the first four seasons of the series has missed out on something unique. It is no longer the series that you have to measure up to, but it used to be, and many of the later and in many ways better sci-fi shows owe a lot to this series. Nowadays writers and their vision for a series is trusted more and maybe, for some part, B5 helped pave the way.

It's Like Citizen Kane

[Faizdog]

You know, just recently, within the last year, I finally watched Citizen Kane. When I saw it, I thought, meh, it's an ok movie, but I'm not sure why it's so highly regarded. Then I investigated and learned and how groundbreaking that movie was. In terms of camera angles, sets (first to show a room's ceiling for example) and plot. It didn't seem special because all the movies since have copied it.

It's the same with B5 and scifi on TV. Ignore firefly, stargate, lost, the new BSG, farscape, and any of the recent stuff. B5 was a defining sci fi TV series in soo many ways, technical, plot, scope, etc. It really set the stage. Besides that, it was just a damn good show.