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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)."
The first half of the first season is a bit slow. Keep in mind that B5 is basically a 5-season long story arc, so season 1 sets up for the meat of the series. There are a few key episodes in that season, particularly the finale, that are important to the plot. The rest could probably be skipped.
If it's good enough for Bab5, it's good enough for Firefly!
You can't take the sky from me!
It took a fair while to warm up, and it was arc heavy so it doesn't look good unless you stick with it for a while. Its worth the effort though.
Lets hope this will be as big of a success as one of Mr Straczynski's earlier projects, Captain Power and the soldiers of the Future.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
The rest could probably be skipped.
In particular, God kills a kitten every time someone watches TKO.
Babylon 5's time has come and gone. That's not to take anything away from it. It represented a age where only Star Trek existed. All of the Sci-Fi series that have started to get traction sense, in particular Firefly, Stargate and Firefly have benefited from it leading the way. Even some of the more mainstream series like LOST, which has the actress Mira Furlan who played Delenn on B5, are in it's footsteps to some degree.
But we have also moved past that story into new and interesting stories with much higher production values. I hope for the series, but I think that when you go back and look at B5, you have to appreciate what it did, rather then what it is now (which is dated, and a bit cliched).
Not that I won't buy it anyways I suppose.
B5 was one of the pivotal sci-fi series of my teenage life, because it was real drama and didn't treat me like a child (star trek, tut tut).
'the very long night of lono mollari' has to rate as one of the greatest and most evocative sci-fi episodes ever made.
I'm not sure if it's such a great idea to revive the series though, in any way. other opinions?
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
I can't pre-order on Amazon yet! This is truly good news for those fans who miss the show and wish it continued through to the end of JS's 5 year plan.
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.
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.
Now can we have direct-to-DVD Firefly?
Please?
Pretty please?
There's a hidden treasure in Python 3.x: __prepare__()
So I gather JMS has an issue with SFX magazine. What's that about?
v .babylon5.moderated/msg/88b1ea53e7879c63
This is the best I've found via google:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.t
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.
"Bargain buckets on standby"
"Aye aye, captain!"
They could give him some CGI hair. Maybe a mullet.
I guess they can't bring back Ivonova.
From her statements on the DVD set commentary, she plumped up like Jabba the Hut.
I can only assume that either she asked for too much money to return, or she ticked somebody off during her time on the show. After seeing a glimpse of her temper, and her almost insignificant parts on other shows since B5, I think I know the answer.
I am glad to see the series revived somewhat though, for it was a decent sci-fi show. I do not think they will regret the decision of producing the direct-to-DVD shows. It will do well, just as the past DVD releases have I'm sure.
"This is America... where the will of the few outweigh the outrage of the many..." - Unknown
I would also add that the second season was also very, very dark. I know some friends who had a hard time watching the series because of all of the bad things that happened in the second season, but I guarantee you, the payoff in seasons 3 and 4 are worth it. You certainly cannot stop watching before you get to Severed Dreams, the episode that forever hooked me to Babylon 5 never to recover. In order to truly enjoy the victory, you have to first taste the defeat.
I believe in de-evolution. God made the world perfect, man fell, and its been going downhill ever since!
Babylon 5 was the MacPlus that led the way for the Atari ST, the Amiga, NeXT, Windows, CDE, KDE, Gnome & Be.
It looks cheesey now only because everyone else followed behind and forged ahead building on the original.
A lot of groundbreaking stuff looks lame once everyone else joins in.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Crap. The one character I just HATED as painfully boring, stupid, empty, annoying, useless, etc. Is he maybe coming back so he can be killed in the first 5 minutes like a Police Squad Cameo?
Can anyone point me to articles where this is discussed, especially with an eye towards small productions? All of us filmmaker wannabes are dying to know.
...are we scared yet?
I think the other problem was that B5 was largely presented in the "classical tradgedy" style, with lots of melodrama, exposition, soliloquies and "comic relief" (or, on occasions "comic" relief!). There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this (especially when half your plot lines are "inspired" by Macbeth, Lord of the Rings and Lensmen) - its the same style as Star Trek - but it was already falling out of favour c.f. the pseudo-naturalistic fly-on-the-wall style of other TV and hasn't aged gracefully.
OK, there was some duff acting as well. I have a theory that some good actors give great auditions and then turn into a two-by-four as soon as they walk onto a spaceship set. This seems to be the only explanation of some of the acting in otherwise great TV SF (SciFi channel's Dune, anyone?) and would explain the Bujold/Janeway incident in ST Voyager.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It took a fair while to warm up, and it was arc heavy so it doesn't look good unless you stick with it for a while. Its worth the effort though.
Arc heavy is an understatement, and most of all it never ever gave anyone a chance to catch up. It has NO "previously on Babylon 5" or other helpers at all, and when I first tried to watch it sometime in the second season I gave up. I managed to start watching in the middle of the 3rd season (Alliance vs Vorlons vs Shadows was understandable) which is probably the only entry point except starting at episode 1. It's great for back-to-back DVD viewing, it feels like a long film flowing with different arches, but pick out any one episode and you're completely lost. Granted, you're a bit lost in many series but at least they give you a few flashes in the beginning of the episode so you don't sit like a huge question mark. Because that's what I did after watching a loose episode or two, like what was that all about?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
"Isn't that the sweetest little well-balanced undergraduate-level philosophy of life."
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
You didn't give it a chance. Which isn't surprising. It required quite a lot of commitment. The dialogue was ropey, the acting from many of the actors was wooden, and a lot of the individual earlier episodes were a little uneventful out of context with the big picture.
But there was a very strong backstory, a lot of really quite clever political stuff, and was generally a lot more daring than other shows - especially science fiction shows - of the time. Characters developed. There was no big plot reset button. There was often no right or wrong answer. A lot of the episode conclusions were far from ideal.
It would look *stunning* in purple.
I hope they further explore that mystery that every civilized species has a form of 'Swedish Meatballs'. That can't be a coincidence!
"and the technomage Galen (Woodward) are returning"
Oh, nevermind then.
I liked the series Babylon 5. I really liked it. But the franchise took a nosedive since the end of the series, and between Crusade and the post-series TV movies, the only change is that the fall has accelerated.
I'm about ready to put B5 in the same category as Star Wars, the one labelled "Should have known when to stop writing."
Drop the D&D/Kung Fu in space, drop the "technomage" and give me back my Garibaldi, Bester and Vir.
Much like the current crop of popular tv shows such as Lost, Heroes, Jericho, 24, Prison Break, etc.
I agree, but B5 was probably more like the current Battlestar Gallactica in terms of the balance between arc and episodic storylines. But the key thing was that JMS promised us that the main story would be told in no more than 5 seasons, which was almost cut short to 4 seasons. That sort of finiteness really gave a sense to the story that it was more than just leading us along to milk the audience for all it was worth. B5 was in effect the antidote to the original Battlestar Gallactica. A show based on an overarching story which we knew would come to some resolution. Something that I don't necessarily feel is the case with the current crop of soap opera-ish arc focused series.
When a television show asks its viewers to invest years of their lives watching a show and following the story arc over many episodes and seasons, then it helps to have a sense that there will be some point to the story arc. There is a difference between leaving a few loose ends open for dramatic effect and screwing over your audience by having no resolution to the plot. I think an entire generation of television watchers could be treading down the path to disappointment if most of the current crop of shows don't follow through on their main storyline arcs.
From the BABYLON 5 FAQ:
In the Captain Power episode "Final Stand," Tank mentions that he's from the
Babylon 5 Genetic Engineering Colony.
...but does god kill said kitten using the sacred alient art of MU-TAI?!
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
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.
My other SIG is a Sauer.
Mostly, the DS9 change was two things.
1. The writers wanted arcs, they knew the fans wanted arcs, but the syndication partners wanted bottle shows so they could show them in any damned order they liked, so Paramount forced them to limit the number and depth of multi-episode arcs.
2. There were changes in the production staff, including bringing Ron Moore onboard in the second season, and promoting him to co-executive producer for the last few seaons. As in Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore.
However, I wouldn't dismiss the idea that JMS's talks with the Star Trek junta before DS9 came out had a lot to do with the inspiration of that series, and may have had a lot to do with the development of the arc-heavy later seasons; or the idea that B5's minor success helped to prove that bottle shows weren't the only way to go.
It's worth noting that Enterprise was very much a bottle show for its first two seasons - and it was terrible. In the third seaon, they tried to do a big, large-scale arc, but it simply didn't work out well - I think they were doing *too much* service to an arc that wasn't well thought out (or very good); and I don't think they had the chops for it. When Manny Coto took over, they went to multi-episode arcs that were rooted in the original idea for the series, and it was much better, albeit much too late.
It took a fair while to warm up, and it was arc heavy so it doesn't look good unless you stick with it for a while. Its worth the effort though./i.
I second that, and my wife thirds it. A friend of mine got me into B5, but my wife thought it looked like a bad sci-fi show with crappy acting and crappier sets. Some nights when we were watching B5, she sat there while we watched it, on her computer. Somewhere in Season 2, she stopped making fun of it. A few episodes later, she was sucked in and was the one asking me if we were going to watch B5 that night. It can take a while, but it is totally worth it. By season 3 you will most certainly thank me. Not to say that it takes that long before it's watchable, but that's when the pay-off starts to return.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
The evocative episode names were what got me hooked. It seems daft, but that someone went to the trouble to preface the production with a title that was metaphorical and intriguing showed that there was a hell of a lot more ambition behind the show than previous brain-damaged sci-fi efforts. And that it had a finite plot helped - you could see there was a definite story to tell. It wasn't an unsatisfying soap opera like Dallas (or, let's face facts, Lost).
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
Well said. A setting in which heroes fail, and are even vanquished. A setting where the enemy is hidden and it's power unknown but horrible. The fog of war palpable. Allies plot against one another. The human condition mirrored in alien races and species. Other alien species with no correspondence to humans. This is true drama and suspense. This was not the setting of any TV show besides B5.
Slashdot: Where nerds gather to pool their ignorance
I don't think it took all that long to warm up to... at least not by today's standards. I was halfway through the first season before I knew I was hooked on B5. It was (aptly enough) Signs and Portents in the middle of the first season that knocked my socks off. I was halfway through the episode when I said, "wow, that was great... can't wait to see the next one!" When the person I was watching it with pointed out that it was only half over, I couldn't believe it. More happens in that one episode than anything I had ever seen on TV... but that didn't last. Chrysalis, the season finale for the first season did the same thing all over again, but seemed to pack even more into one episode. The Coming of Shadows and The Fall of Night in the second season served the same roles, and in the third season there was Severed Dreams which I got to see in LA at a tiny con where JMS presented it 10 minutes before the sat. uplink.
Some (I'm no longer recalling which) of these episodes earned awards, but I always thought that they existed on a level above simple annual awards. These were episodes that moved the bar in terms of TV show-writing. They made the episodic noise coming from the Star Trek folks seem rather dull and uninteresting (though I will note that even through the terrible filter of the Star Trek machine, Ron Moore's work on DS9 shown through).
Sit down and watch B5 in small chunks (1-2 episodes at a time, with a day or two between at least). Talk to people about the episodes you've seen. Invariably, people who "marathon" the seasons don't enjoy them nearly as much... I think that, much as there is an arc, there is a pacing that's uniquely aimed at serial viewing with plenty of time between to think about what's going on, and what the last episode did to the story. Once you get to Signs, if you still think the series takes a while to warm up to (compared to something like BSG which I was still iffy about up to the end of season 1, and into season 2, but now love), then I guess you and I just appreciate different things in our SF, and cheers to you.
Battlestar Galactica is awesome, but it's not like Ron Moore wasn't a heavy-weight in the Star Trek universe before the second season of DS9. He was a producer in TNG and have you seen the list of Ron Moore-written TNG episodes?:
The above isn't an exhaustive list. And it doesn't count episodes where he has credit as "Story Editor" which includes Best of Both Worlds. Honestly, I have no idea how much a "story editor" is really responsible for the story, so I won't argue for that. Either way, he's responsible for some of the best of TNG.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Ditto... It took my wife a little while to get into it (I had to keep begging her to watch the shows). After we got into Season 2, she started wanting to watch them. By Season 3, she was hooked like me. "Sleeping in Light" made her cry (heh, and I always seem to get something in my eye when I watch that episode as well). It's now a standing joke between us that anytime she says she's bored, I suggest watching "Sleeping in Light", which she always refuses.
Well, maybe what really happened went over your head. He didn't just say go away. He created an alliance of worlds that said to the Vorlons and Shadows that they would no longer be their puppets, so there was absolutely NO point for the Vorlons or the Shadows to stick around. Once you pull aside the curtain, the Wizard of Oz has no more power. If the Vorlons or Shadows had continued to fight they would have had to annihilate all the other races; which means both the Vorlons and Shadows would lose, because they would have no one left to carry on their philosophy. It was lose-lose scenario for them, so they left.
I'm currently re-watching it, as I initially caught it very late at night on C4 in the UK, and I think I meandered in some time in season two, and started really paying attention in season three.
Anyway, I think anyone wanting to see what all the fuss is about should watch 2x14: And Now for a Word". It's a classic Bringing In the Newbies episode, has a good mix of all the elements that go into the show (political machinations, space battles, dark humour in places), showcases most of the characters pretty well (especially the late great Andreas Katsulas as G'Kar) and will give you a pretty good idea whether you like the show or not.
Personally, this season is blowing me away.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
On the other hand, B5 did make much of its name by breaking out of the box so it might have been helpful to have them, but I didn't really get into the series until the end of the 2nd season. Even still, I thought it so well done that I stuck through the parts that didn't make sense and eventually the pieces fell into place. Watching the re-runs eventually helped and made me appreciate the first 2 seasons even more, since I knew what they were foreshadowing.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Nothing. Bad acting, worse writing.
I'll say one thing, though; Babylon 5 is the best argument for BitTorrent as a 'try before you buy' there ever was. Downloaded five seasons. Got three episodes in before my eyes and ears started to bleed. Deleted the whole crop. Try returning DVDs like that.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Hey Warner Bros, this will/would undoubtedly sell well on iTunes. It would sell even better if you sell it on iTunes in High Def.
Hey Apple, selling this on iTunes in HD would be a great way to pioneer and promote mass distribution of HD content and would also work well at selling/promoting your new set-top box (the iTV thingy). So please convince Warner Home Video that you both stand to make a lot of money with this, not to mention the amount of buzz (read, free publicity) that this would create.
Thanks.
In case anyone didn't know, this style was intentional. The series was meant to feel more like a play on a stage than a television show. Personally, I don't have all of these huge problems with the acting that other people seem to have. It wasn't perfect, but I think it fit the style of the series pretty well.
It was my understanding that B5 was pitched to all the major studios even before TNG came out. I liked both shows but it was clear that DS9 and Voyager were taking whole plot points from B5 towards the end. Not that I minded, I felt it really helped DS9 to have inter-galactic war arcs.
That thinks B5 is more a religious and philisophical experience than simply watching a "show" ? But then again the "Thief" video game series is also a religious and philisophical experience than simply playing a "game" to me.
Downloaded five seasons was trying before buying? Pull the other one, that was blatant theft, if you were trying why would you download that much? And I highly doubt you would have suddenly rushed out and bought all five seasons had you actually liked the show.
This is a disgraceful attitude. I'm all for using bittorrent to try out new shows before buying them, but this is just the kind of abuse of a wonderful technology that could be beneficial for users and studios. It's no wonder they're cracking down on it. It's clear here your motivation was "try because I'm too cheap to buy". I have no sympathy for you.
The more you watch, the better it gets.
When I saw the first season in reruns after having seen the rest of the series, I could have sworn the acting and writing had improved between the first showing and the rerun. Knowing the context made that much difference. Dialog that seems unimportant the first time around becomes poignant or prophetic in hindsight.
It's a great nerd show. Little things are done right, like space fighters that fire thrusters when they turn instead of swooping like airplanes. Then the overall structure is a single intricate unit, with a coherence and scale that could compete with some of the classics of the software world.
The characters are fully realized people but it takes a while to see them defined.
Straczynski summarized the series as being about "choices and consequences". That's invisible at the scale of a single episode.
It's worth putting on your Netflix list.
>Well, the acting was often terrible.
And often not. Some of that Eastern European talent was first rate.
Some of what looked like terrible acting wasn't. Sinclair seemed aimless, wooden, forced -- and that was a precise and workmanlike portrayal of the character, a purposeless man who wasn't sure why he was alive, was numbed by PTSD and survivor guilt, and pushing himself through the motions of being a diplomat. G'Kar didn't seem like much in the first season, but when the character grew enough to give Andreas Katsulas scope for his ability, he shone.
You probably just didn't give it enough time. B5 had this whole "Blade Runner" vibe going. The future is a dark, often dangerous place. Yet, it was also an exciting, technologicaly advanced place. The appeal for me was that the future was presented in a more realistic approach. The station was often dark, even in open, friendly places. It just had this "edge" to it. This wasn't a nice clean Star Trek set. There was a seedy underbelly with lurkers and areas of the station pretty much abandoned. But at the heart of it all were humans, still being humans. Curious, courageous, loving, brutal, sadistic and often times wise. The aliens looked like aliens. You had compelling species and interstellar diplomacy. You had lots of political intrigue. An emperor falling in love with the wrong woman could send shockwaves throughout the galaxy. You never really get this "grand scale" with other sci-fi.
B5 just seemed to play on a grander stage. Other sci-fi is concerned with a small group, and the "powers they be" are often abstracted. How much do we know about the United Federation of Planets anyway? What are the member worlds? Who are their representatives? What are their meetings like? Do you often time have conflicts among member worlds? What about Starfleet Academy? Who runs it? How did they get that job? What are their motives? This were all questions that B5 jumped right into.
There are two resources with this information:
a) Lurker's guide to B5 coverage, http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/misc/cc-leave.html
b) Google groups archive of rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, a search for all words, Claudia Christian contract, in that group gives a nice selection.
To set the stage... the fifth season was totally up in the air. Previously, B5 had aired on in syndication via an entity called PTEN, but by the end of season 4, the syndication market was drying up as previously independent stations were vacuumed up by Fox, WB, and UPN. All of the talent had contracts with some sort of a drop-dead date for WB (the production arm, not the network) to pick up their option for a fifth season. As the drop-dead date approached, somehow or another they got negotiations going with TNT to pick up season 5 (as well as IIRC reruns), but there was no arrangement in time for the lapsing of the talent's contracts.
To buy more time, WB asked for short extensions from the talent, and got them from everyone but CC. Consequently, she was out of contract, and a new contract would have to be arranged prior to the start of production. I'm not sure to what extent there was ongoing negotation to try to get her back under contract, but the long and short of it is, at the point where they absolutely had to know whether she was in or out, there was no contract, so she got written out of the story.
There was some speculation during the days when this was playing out that there was a lapse in communication or CC's agent tried to play hardball without fully consulting her. However, subsequent statements from jms about the interactions of he and cast members with CC make it pretty clear that she was aware of the situation and the deadlines, although possibly she didn't fully realize that the final deadline was nonnegotiable (due to the production schedule requirements for when scripts would be written). I believe she tried to claim at one point that WB or jms didn't want her back, and has since backpedaled from that position.
Based on subsequent statements, it seems fairly likely that a movie deal got in the way. It's not as clear what the sticking point was. jms has stated that CC's reps wanted her to be paid for 22 episodes while only working 18, and WB was understandably not willing to go along with that (not least because previously, Stephen Furst had worked a reduced schedule due to an outside TV commitment and was only paid for episodes worked). There was some talk about her wanting availability for specific dates contractually, with jms saying that he could give a personal assurance of that but it couldn't be contracted; I don't know whether one side or the other was taking an extraordinary position there, or whether that was ultimately the breaking point. Considering the number of parties involved (jms, CC, her agent, WB, whoever the outside movie deal was with), there may have been inadequate communication of the various sides positions. Also, CC (or her agent) may have overestimated how much she was "needed" by B5 (although there was already ample evidence that jms was willing and able to write anyone out of the story if circumstances dictated, see Talia Winters).
In the sense that the one story was about the Shadow war, you are right. It was told well to the point of climax, then all the rest of the stuff happened. Why? Because B5 was a collection of minor stories, overshadowed by the shadow war story. These sideshows always paled in comparison to the main event, and were never enough to build audience interest in subsequent seasons.
Har! B5's sole intention was to keep Straczynski employed for as long as possible. That's why after his failures with Crusade and Jeremiah, he's back flogging the B5 horse again. The guy is a great businessman and knows how to mine the last $ from his franchise.
That's accurate only for seasons 2 and 3. Season 1 had a clunky pace and except for a few key scenes, could be discarded. Seasons 4 and 5, the B5 movies and Crusade were sideshows. Extended denoument, really, and a search for the next big idea.
Keep in mind that at the time, the only other US Sci-fi competition was the Trek franchise, so I can see why B5 endeared itself to you. But have you stopped watching sci-fi TV?
B5 was a prototype that evolved as cheap green-screen CGI made space stories affordable to tell. Since then, however there have been several sci-fi stories from the same mold, with better writing and graphics. Lexx, Red Dwarf, Farscape, Firefly, and now BattleStar Galactica all have long story lines, and have managed to keep their dramatic climax very near the end of the tale, instead of dead center.
Firefly has been particularly successful by using its movie to deliver the climactic moment and the story resolution. That worked quite nicely.
You gotta hand it to Straczynski. He is a savvy businessman and deserves to wring every last buck from his fan base. His work methods have proved a useful model for others, who now have the luxury of focusing on the creative process because they can simply follow Straczynski's trailblazing work.
I think Straczynski might benefit from knocking out a few webisodes to whet the appetite for the DVDs. I bet he comes around to that eventually. BSG is blazing that path, sci-fi-wise.
You're an idiot. I've downloaded tonnes of shows and movies over BT, only to purchase the full series when they arrived on DVD. Just because you're a skinflint who'd rather stick with an illegal copy over the real thing, don't try and project that attitude on to everyone else. As to why he downloaded all 5 seasons, it was probably because the torrent contained all 5 seasons, and he just let it run.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I wasn't going to reply to this one but I just couldn't stop my fingers. Each series (ST & B5) has its good points and bad. I just got sick and tired of the reset button each week that ST still did with the Enterprise series. I don't think you should generalize who the people are that like B5. I loved B5 more that ST but I also liked ST as well. I'm a huge Sci-fi nut and never watched those day time soaps. It sounds like you did but knowing that a luke and laura were possibly getting married. I enjoyed the campy feel that B5 had and the special effects I thought were way better than ST. I also don't understand why people can't join the b5 series mid stream cause thats what I did and was able to figure out what was going on. I just went back and watched the ones I missed later.
DONE, 2,000 years ago - ANYTHING ELSE?
As to why he downloaded all 5 seasons, it was probably because the torrent contained all 5 seasons, and he just let it run.
The advantage of bittorrent is that you can select individual files to download. Clearly this guy is an idiot and doesn't know how to use that, wasting bandwidth, or he's a thief and thought he was getting himself 5 years of TV for free.
Also, please list in total all the shows you've ever downloaded, and also the number of shows you've bought on DVD, just for comparison. You sound like a saint, buying everything you've watched online. Just want to make sure, so I can send you your medal.
Yeah because after all, it's impossible for there ever to be more than one SF series set on a space station. Just like there could only be one series that ever was set on a spaceship.
Geez the JMS fanboyz need to get a clue - he didn't invent space stations. The backstory and universe-building around DS9 and B5 are quite different. Oh, they both had wars. Guess what, he didn't invent war stories nor war SF either.
I do believe most of the "serial" dramas of the 80s like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere to name two often had "Previously On..." intros. Or I'm just misremembering the decade.
Earlier this year I did some thinking about business models for D2DVD series. Then I did some actual number-crunching.
It's all a bit back-of-an-envelope, but it's a good starting point for discussion. What it boils down to is that I don't think you can make your money back if you're spending more than three-quarters of a million an episode. And according to this week's Variety, the current spend on a US primetime TV series is averaging about $2.75m an episode.
Mad Pulp Bastard Bill Cunningham is also a good person to watch for information about D2DVD financial models.
B5 is about the creation of a Leviathan, of speculation on future technology, on the role and forms of religion picking things from Mircea Eliade, and also a look into Wilsonian and Post WWII American Idealism, also dwelling on System/Community/Society views of organizing politics, a view on war in the world and social relations in America, the limitations and errors of men and women that abuse alcohol, do drugs, make mistakes, have doubts, and an attempt to question the times, while the wall had collapsed and everything seemed possible... ... and all of this and much more wrapped up in glorious CGI space battles (in this it was a pioneer) and funny looking camp space aliens, great soundtrack, with the plus of some great scenes by Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas, with a story arc that would put you on your toes week after week.
That's great television, a really wonderful series, but I have my doubts Straczynski can bring the magic back this time, another context, another time, we'll see.
Basically, the alliance Sheridan put together confronted the Vorlons and the Shadows with an unbeatable dilemma ("you can kill us, but you can't make us play your game any more").
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I don't want to even think what God does to a kitten if someone watches Grey 17 is Missing
Geez that is a bit too off topic isn't it?...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_Eliade
Yeah he was a political radical and quite nuts, if I might add. He had moved on by the time he was invited to the states, although he continued to be a nationalist and an essentialist. His Treaty on the History of Religions is still one of the more fascinating books that anyone can read though, helps anyone that reads it to get new and thought provoking perspectives on religion , and the sacred in general.
Did I mention that, er, he was completely nuts though?
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.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
Actually it was "Get the Hell out of our Galaxy!"
Had to appreciate the realistic dialogue, showed that Sheridan was at heart a normal guy, not an Oxford scholar that also happens to know how to captain a space ship (I'm looking at you Picard)
I love Star Trek, but it is a little grating when you KNOW that a word of dialogue was written for no other reasons than to make the character seem "advanced" and to impress the writer's contemporaries (using "ennui" instead of boredom for example.)
Seconded. I really enjoyed the longer story arc, and the fact that characters disagreed on principle, not on plot points. It was breaking new ground in television storytelling, because it was a multi-season show with a definite beginning, middle, and end.
However, the writing of each individual episode (on a dialog level) was sometimes downright painful, even during the best seasons of the show, and the poor acting didn't make it any better.
I like to say that the writing was just like the special effects: the farther back you stood, the better it looked.
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
... the thing that hooked me was the illustrations of how media fools the population. Those fake news shows were spot on perfect - maybe even a bit better, more professional, than any of our current newscasts.
It was prophetic. If our government were to ever go evil, this is how we should expect our broadcasters to cover for it. Just as they have these recent years.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Last week I re-bought Babylon 5 - all 5 seasons - on DVD. I have them on VHS tapes which I'll be giving away.
Season 1 must have put off a lot of people. Actors were finding their feet, and the plots weren't nearly as good as later seasons. Some of the acting, as the seasons progressed was awful to the point of being embarrassing (especially when the humour in the writing failed) but some of it was absolutely fantastic. Mira Furlan (as Delen) and Bruce Boxleitner (Sheridan) certainly had their moments, but so did the supporting cast. Peter Jurasik (Londo), Andreas Katsulas (G'Kar) Stephen Furst (Vir) and Walter Koenig (Bester aka Chekov from Star Trek) put in some incredible standout performances. Andrea Thompson (Talia), Claudia Christian (Ivanova) and Patricia Tallman (Lyta) also put in some good performances and were easy on the eyes. Many of the other character were likeable and well acted. The characters were flawed and many faceted.
The story was also incredible. The whole Sheridan down the rabbit hole coming back as Jesus thing was a bit much - and there were certainly other mistakes and deficiencies, but on the whole you couldn't watch 3 consecutive episodes of the show from seasons 2 through 4 and not get a good or even great plot in one.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If you go to Z'ha'dum you will die!
The build up over many episodes to the simultaneous torture and fucking of Gaius Baltar...
You missed: ...while arguing systematic theology and theodicy with a robot (who looks just a tiny bit like Xena).
...and you are right. BSG wins.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
And how long would such an alliance last? It's completely unstable and a completely unbelievable outcome. All the Shadows, say, would have to do, is wait for the next major conflict, and everyone would forget about this alliance.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Sorry, but if it was good, I'd have hardly stuck with the VCR transcodes I was able to find. I had worse copies of Lexx, but at least I bought the DVDs after realizing, 'yeah, this is funny'.
As for "try 'cos I'm too cheap to buy", without downloading the whole five seasons, I wouldn't have been able to sample the show across its lifetime, picking from episodes others thought were good. The three I watched sucked hard, and they were the 'good' ones.
Meanwhile, I would submit that your attitude's disgraceful of itself. What if I were too strapped to buy? What if it were something for which DVDs aren't available? Should I defer my enjoyment until I can afford it? Shall I wait with bated breath for the studios to release DVDs?
I'll bet you consider my weekly download of the latest episode of "Torchwood" theft, even though I can't otherwise watch it here in the states. I suppose you'd suggest I wait for Sci Fi to pick it up (hardly guaranteed), or wait for the DVDs.
Yeah. No. There's no technical reason for me to wait. When the DVDs come out, I'll buy them (as I did with Dr. Who 2005, and will with '06). In the meanwhile, I'm getting my 'try' on.
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FYI. I downloaded all five seasons for two reasons: 1) it gave me the freedom to check out anything I was suggested. 2) Some asshat had the torrent wrapped around a RAR file. Why do people do that shit on BT? Especially on video; you get no extra compression.
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Every time I see this argument, and I've seen it often over the years, it is obvious that the person saying it didn't get B5. I mean no disrespect with this comment, but I believe it to be true.
I think what many people miss is that B5 is one big coming of age story. The scope and stage it is played out on is larger than many other such stories, but that's ultimately what it is.
Every human being, excepting those that grow up in broken homes and other atypical environments (although, sadly, they aren't as atypical as they used to be or should be) goes through a rebelious stage where they are fighting their parents for their own independance. They have to find their place in the world, figure out for themselves what their purpose is, what they're going to make of themselves. And at some point, the parents, who have been guiding them all their lives towards these answers, have to step aside and let their child go and either sink or swim for themselves. It's a painfully difficult process on both sides.
Now imagine that completely normal situation when the two parents have vastly different ideas about how their children should develop. Do you think that makes things easier? F**K no! It makes infinitely more difficult. That's the dilema B5 presented, and the coming of age of the younger races is the underlying story being told. It's the exact same story you yourself probably played out, just in a grander scale.
Sheridan forcing his "parents", so to speak, in the Vorlons and Shadows, was the tipping point. It was the point at which the younger races declared they are ready to stand on their own, for better or worse. This is akin to a 16 or 17-year old beginning to take on responsibility for their own life and actions. Now, the Shadows and Vorlons had to be forced a bit to see the inevitability of this, had to be forced to step aside and let the natural course of evolution occur, just as a teenagers' parents have to begin to step aside and let their child fend for themselves largely.
No, the way the Shadow war ended wasn't stupid, wasn't cheap, wasn't a disappointment... it was the ONLY WAY THE STORY COULD POSSIBLY HAVE ENDED without being stupid. Forget that fact that we all know the Shadow and Vorlons could have cleaned up against the entire alliance. That's obvious. So a military victory would have been dumb, no matter how clever. No, Sheridan's declaration was about as perfect as it could get... continuing the analogy between the alliance and a teenager, that's just the way a teen would say it too!
I remember when I first saw Into The Fire, the episode the war is resolved in, and I felt cheated too for a while. That's because I didn't get it. I think I really got it when I had my first kid. He's only 7 now, but I can definitely envision the future, definitely understand all the things my parents told me and continue to tell me. I see it now, and I see why the resolution of the war was spot on.
If you think otherwise, you don't get it, plan and simple. It's nothing to be ashamed of, I think you haev to have certain life experiences to TRULY get it (you can understand, but there's a difference... sort of like in White Men Can't Jump when Sidney says you can listen to Hendrix, but you can't HEAR Hendrix... or something to that effect).
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
You said that you didn't believe he'd buy the series if he liked it; you accused him of being a thief, just because it was your opinion that he wouldn't do what he said. You had no real basis for that comment. You said that if someone downloaded the full series, then there's no reason for them to buy it, and they are therefore a thief. Since this is your attitude, I extrapolate that you see no difference between the series downloaded from bittorrent, and the series bought from a store. For some, however, there is a difference between the two, not just of quality/packaging/extras, but in the satisfaction of owning a legitimate copy.
The advantage of bittorrent is that you can select individual files to download. Clearly this guy is an idiot and doesn't know how to use that, wasting bandwidth, or he's a thief and thought he was getting himself 5 years of TV for free.
AFAIK, you can't do that using the basic client (although it's been a while since I used it). So, he might just be using the vanilla client. Or he might have wanted to see the whole series before he bought it (a lot of stuff is mostly good, but has a really crappy ending that lets the whole thing down - I generally don't buy a series unless I've watched it through).
As for the list:
Buffy (All 7 Seasons)
Firefly
Stargate (Currently own first 3 seasons, working on the rest)
Scrapped Princess
Full Metal Panic
Vision of Escaflowne
Angelic Layer
Mai Hime (only partially released in Aus)
Planetes (only partially released in Aus)
Whisper of the Heart
10 Things I Hate About You
The Dark Crystal
Fight Club
Finding Neverland
Knight's Tale
Lord of the Rings (all 3)
The Matrix
Neverending Story
Shrek 1 & 2
They're all things I've downloaded, and later bought. I'm not going to list every DVD I own, as I've got more than 200. Currently, the stuff I've still got on my HD:
Hikaru no Go (Unreleased in Aus)
Gakuen Alice (Unreleased in Aus)
The Snow Queen (Unreleased in Aus)
Ocean Waves (Unreleased in Aus)
Mysterious Cities of Gold (Unreleased in Aus)
There are other movies I've downloaded and not bought, and later deleted. Can't remember all of them, but they included Highlander, Existenz, bunch of others. Can't remember them because I wasn't too impressed with them. Also a whole bunch of anime in here that I can't particularly recall either: Kiddy Grade, Witch Hunter Robin, few others.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Grey 17 really isn't that bad. Sure, it had a crappy looking monster, but it had a good B-story.
Wait... So you just watched three episodes from somewhere in the middle of the series? That's like picking up a book, opening it to the middle and reading. Seriously, do yourself a favour, watch the show in order until at least episode 8 (And The Sky Full Of Stars), or even better, episode 13 (Signs and Portents). By that stage, you'll either be interested, or you'll find that its not for you. With B5, you really can't get a taste of the series by just watching a few episodes at random, and if this is all you've done, then its completely understandable that you didn't enjoy it.
That's the real problem with Grey 17. They A plot is really dire (not just a naff monster, but bullets acting in ways firmly outside the laws of physics, and other problems), but the B plot is really quite good. So you can't just jettison the entire episode, like you can with TKO.
Korvar the Fox!! www.korvar.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk
Wow.
You hear about people with no imagination, no real dramatic urge, no understanding of motivations beyond the purely physical but you never really expect to meet them.
And then you post.
Not only did you fail to actually understand what you were watching, you tell everyone that you just don't have a clue.
Here's one for you - the alliance forced the Shadows and the Vorlons to actually look at their actions for a moment. The presence of the ancient races plus Lorien (most importantly, as they respected Lorien above all others) highlighted their pettiness. They were giants in the playground, kicking sand in the faces of babies. Finally they saw that and realised that they'd stayed long past their time. Throughout the previous few series there were many hints that both races had stayed around to guide and help the younger races, that they could have gone beyond the veil long ago.
But you took the pivotal moment ("Get the hell out of our galaxy"), completely misunderstood it and posted how you thought it was, like, so lamerz.
Maybe they should've fought for the Universe, like Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. Oh - that's right! Luke managed to turn Vader using only words and his pain. The violence was a sideshow to the story. Perhaps they should've fought to the end like Ender and the Buggers in Ender's Game. Except... yes! Ender felt guilty for killing the race and that was a source of great drama in the book, setting the stage for the later and more complex books. Maybe they should've battled like... well, you might be starting to see the outline of a point here, your lack of subtlety notwithstanding.
A fight to the end was utterly pointless. If you can't see that, then all the subtlety and plot will forever be lost on you. Just watch more episodes of Dragonball Z and you'll get your violence fix without having to engage your brain or any emotive function whatsoever.
Unfair? Rude? Damn right! I'm ten years past tired of bozos who look for the fight against the big boss dude at the end of a film, who were raised on Doom and Duke Nukem and use that as a benchmark for character development. You post how disappointed you were, but clearly you *fundamentally* missed the point. After watching four years worth of the series, that's just sad. It's not that I'm a B5 fan-boy who feels personally attacked by your post, but that you seem like someone who would listen to Mozart and say "too many notes" or would read the sonnets of Shakespeare and ask why they didn't rhyme on every second line like a real song.
Unfair? Rude? Damn right! I'm tired of people who miss the most obvious of points, the ones that take literally four *years* to hammer home.
Feel free to flame me and mod me down to -5000.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
Yeah because after all, it's impossible for there ever to be more than one SF series set on a space station.
I think the reason people make the comments the do about DS9 and B5 is that IIRC, before either was made, JMS took the B5 concept to Paramount and was turned down. Paramount then went on to make DS9 a few years later, and it had a suspiciously similar concept.
Of course, one of my personal theories is that JMS got a good chunk of his inspiration (and an actor or three) from the B-grade film Arena, so he's not entirely innocent either.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
One day someone will have the guts to write science fiction about aliens that are actually interesting and different from humans. Aliens that are like your proverbial giants kicking around babies and yet are intelligent and don't give a shit about some pathetic human crying "but what about the children?". The Borg came close, but then the Star Trek writers immediately trashed the concept because they couldn't sustain the idea.
You've displayed very nicely to me your complete inability to reocgnise one of the most reused science fiction cliches of all and mistake it for something profound and subtle and lecture me on the same. That's funny.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I think the enduring quality of B5 is not in the production values, which for the time were outstanding, but in the telling of a coherent story arc spread out over 5 seasons. And from that perspective I think B5 has all Star Trek series, Firefly, Stargate and any other long running Sci-Fi series I can recall beat. If you view all five seaons and then go back and look at pretty much any main story line episode in B5 you see how well it maintains canon. And the story is a good one too. So for my money, I'll be first in line to pre-order the new Direct-To-DVD productions of B5. Go MJS!!!!!!!!!!!
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
You didn't watch enough episodes.
Babylon 5 is not like most sci-fi shows that came before it or even after it. It is not a bunch of daily stand on their own stories. It is one contiguous story.
The reasons fans love it so much is because this is not as clear in the beginning but as you later progress thru the series it becomes more so. As fans discover seemingly innoculous episodes in the first season or two were in fact significant plot preps and more come seasons 3,4, & 5. Seasons 3 & 4 are by far the strongest. 5 was weakened by doubt of financing.
Prattlestar Galactica is one of the few sci-fi series that has really tried to take the epic story arc approach. However, I feel that most of the episodes really lack much substance. Often I walk away feeling like there was only 15 minutes of story. And I am left wondering if the Prattlerstar Galactica writers even know where they are going.
Babylon 5 weaves those layers deep. It doesn't need numerous flashbacks to fill in what wasn't before because it was thought out ahead of time. Even with a few major character changes, things were in place so that alternative flows could be implemented in case of the lost of a major or minor character.
Watch the first two seasons of Babylon 5 (in sequence)...if you have a mind you'll likely find yourself hooked. By season 3 & 4...drooling.
Three episodes and you canned it...
On a series where every thread where people have criticized it has said you need to watch it into season 2.
Well you got what you deserved. Go enjoy Prattlestar Galactica. I mean, I've watched 3 seasons and I swear the whole story could be fit into about 3 hours and not have lost much substance. Oh wait, they fit the first two seasons into an hour long episode "The Story So Far".
*lol*
Look, B5 is not your normal sci-fi show where the twists are added at the end. They're in the beginning. But you can't see that until the end.
It's the same reason so many liked the film "The Sixth Sense".
JMS had gone to Paramount first with B5. They told him they were not interested. He then went to Warner Brothers. Paramount then happened to launch a series about a station, including a conquered race that had only recently regained it's freedom, it even had a shapeshifter (a character in JMS' original story design that was later dropped before production).
There was so much similarity that there is little doubt that Paramount is guilty of idea theft.
Thanks, I had forgotten some of those stories were Ron Moore's. Well put. I had "refreshed" my memory by looking at IMDB but didn't see a "story editor" credit. Story editors tend to be the folks who shoehorn the stories that other writers have written into the series' milieu. He'd be responsible for anything from mere continuity to basically rewriting everything that came in the door, depending upon how active he was. To give you some idea, D C Fontana was a story editor on the original Star Trek series, and Douglas Adams was a story editor (or script editor, which I believe is the same thing) on Doctor Who.
Ha- I could've written what you wrote verbatim! My wife, our friend and I all shed some tears while watching "Sleeping in Light," I've never been able to get either of them to watch the episode over again with the commentary. No dis against anyone who regularily cries at movies or because of television show, but I'm the kind of person who just doesn't do that. Ever. But I did it when watching "Sleeping in Light"...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad