Slashdot Mirror
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)."
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.
The rest could probably be skipped.
In particular, God kills a kitten every time someone watches TKO.
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.
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.
But what about Firefly? You forgot about that series.
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.
Traditionally television has been more about taking excerpts from people's lives and showing them as they happen. Today in court, the lawyers did X, Y, and Z, the doctor saved 3 people, and the family down the street had this most comedic run-in with the mail man. These shows are safer for networks to produce because you don't need background to get into them. If I watch an episode of Law and Order, I can get 95% of it without any need for background.
Babylon 5 helped to establish that a TV show with a defined story arc could be successful. If you walked into Babylon 5 during season 3, you'd be completely lost. Yet because of the defined arc, those who did follow it followed it very loyally. The real struggle though was if you didn't start from the beginning it was hard to catch up.
Well since they broke that ground we've seen the advent of two things that make such shows possible:
1) Season by season DVD releases of TV shows
2) ITunes
With Lost, for example, I heard good things about it all during the first season but never got around to watching it. AS the second season approached I decided to give it a try. After watching two episodes I was totally hooked. A friend of mine just finished the season one DVD's in a marathon and is now eagerly awaiting netflix to deliver season 2. Then for season 3, they can catch up via Itunes.
But ultimately Babylon 5 is what broke this ground and whatever may be said about it's production values, it did make for some great televison that even now is relevant. Go back and watch Intersections in Real Time as a prime example. This is the episode where Sheridan is tortured to get him to turn against his friends in favor of the government. Now go and read about waterboarding and some of the crap that's legal for our government to do to people right now and it's just chilling.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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."
...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.
There was one interesting post in rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5 by JMS about Karl Rove and President G.W Bush watching Babylon5.
:-)
I suppose Karl Rove is avid fan for character Mr. Morden
The problem in the world today is communication. Too much communication - Homer Simpson
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.
>>I suppose Karl Rove is avid fan for character Mr. Morden :-)
One day can i have Rove's head mounted on a pole as a warning to the next few generations that twisting the truth only gets your head twisted off. so i can smile and wave at it?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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 can imagine her response in words:
"Only one human has ever survived asking me that question. He is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your life... be somewhere else."
>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 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."-