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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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
>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.
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."-