Babylon 5 officially being rebooted

[Durckad]

For someone who already owns the old DVD set for B5, was the HBO remaster an appreciable increase in quality? Enough so to maybe justify buying another set?

[IlyaP]

7 minutes ago, Durckad said:

For someone who already owns the old DVD set for B5, was the HBO remaster an appreciable increase in quality? Enough so to maybe justify buying another set?

There are no commentaries, for some reason, which makes me le sad. It's also unclear ot me how this is going to work, given the screen ratio of the original show, which was 4:3 from what I recall, which is not the same thing as our current 16:9 that's become the convention/norm. 

Also: no telemovies or Crusade. The latter - I get, but the former? Come on. 

I somehow anticipate that some inventive person out there will, upon release, take this edition and combine it with everything else, including BTS footage, commentaries, etc., into some kind of unofficial "pirate" release (NB: I'm speculating here, but from friends of mine who love B5 WAY more than I do, I've had it suggested to me that this is what they likely expect to take place.)

[Ran]

Pretty sure the "for some reason" is that they didn't want to pay people again to reuse their commentaries. Shame, but what are you going to do? Still nice to see broadcast-quality versions of the show given a Blu-ray release

[Lord of Oop North]

If I had a Blu-ray player, I'd get this for sure. Some of my old discs are non-playable.

[Werthead]

21 hours ago, Durckad said:

For someone who already owns the old DVD set for B5, was the HBO remaster an appreciable increase in quality? Enough so to maybe justify buying another set?

Yes. The live action footage is very noticeably superior. In fact, they remastered the live action material in 4K, not just HD, meaning it looks very good (and will look better with Blu-Ray's superior bitrate to streaming).

The CGI has been upscaled, not too badly as far as these things go. An improvement over the DVDs, certainly.

21 hours ago, IlyaP said:

There are no commentaries, for some reason, which makes me le sad. It's also unclear ot me how this is going to work, given the screen ratio of the original show, which was 4:3 from what I recall, which is not the same thing as our current 16:9 that's become the convention/norm. 

Also: no telemovies or Crusade. The latter - I get, but the former? Come on. 

I somehow anticipate that some inventive person out there will, upon release, take this edition and combine it with everything else, including BTS footage, commentaries, etc., into some kind of unofficial "pirate" release (NB: I'm speculating here, but from friends of mine who love B5 WAY more than I do, I've had it suggested to me that this is what they likely expect to take place.)

Babylon 5 was shot in 16:9 and the existing DVDs are all in 16:9. Unfortunately, whilst the live action footage was shot natively in 16:9, the composite and CGI scenes only exist in 4:3 (due to cost-cutting reasons at the time). For the DVDs they overcame this by combining the 16:9 widescreen footage with cropped CG and composite footage (i.e. every CG shot is "zoomed in," losing detail from the sides of the image to create a fake widescreen image).

For this version they decided to switch back to the 4:3 of the original broadcast for both live-action and CG, as fans hated the cropped CG of the DVD release. The only other alternative - apart from remaking all of the CGI from scratch which would be expensive - is to switch from 16:9 live-action to 4:3 effects shots, which would be wildly distracting.

It's unclear why the TV movies have not been either re-released or remastered. I've seen some speculation that it's because they were done for TNT rather than Warners directly. Warners own TNT, but there may be some legal loopholes or holdups because of that.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Werthead

[Kalbear]

There's probably another interesting idea - using AI to scale views from 4:3 to 16:9 by expanding it some. I've seen this in some videos on TikTok for more modern movies (Blade Runner 2049 and Avatar) and it works surprisingly well, and could be reasonably cost effective. 

[felice]

10 hours ago, Werthead said:

For this version they decided to switch back to the 4:3 of the original broadcast for both live-action and CG, as fans hated the cropped CG of the DVD release. The only other alternative - apart from remaking all of the CGI from scratch which would be expensive

Not unreasonably expensive. Some of the original files still exist, and re-rendering CGI of that vintage in HD (or even 4K!) could probably be done in realtime with modern hardware. And recreating the missing files would still cost chicken feed compared to modern CGI. Though composite shots might be a problem - if the raw film for those sequences no longer exists, then upscaling the 4:3 SD version is the only option. It's disappointing they haven't re-rendered any of the CGI, but it should still be a big improvement over the DVDs, and 4:3 as originally broadcast is probably a good choice anyway.

[SpaceChampion]

Interview at SDCC with the Director of The Road Home.   The sound quality is terrible with the background noise, but interesting bits of info in there about how they put it together.

 

Interview at SDCC with JMS

 

[SpaceChampion]

Clip :

 

[Ran]

Quote

Buffy Summers : With Mom at Aunt Darleene's this year, I'm not getting a Thanksgiving. Maybe it's just as well.

Anya : Well, I think that's a shame. I love a ritual sacrifice.

Buffy Summers : Not really a one of those.

Anya : To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It's a ritual sacrifice, with pie.

 

[Werthead]

I wonder if Xander eats his Thanksgiving turkey from one of his Babylon 5 collector's plates?

[SpaceChampion]

Another SDCC interview:

 

[SpaceChampion]

Another released clip:

 

[Werthead]

That was fairly mediocre.

The animation of the human characters was fine, the environments were largely good but the CG for the station, the space battles, the ships etc was pretty lame. Apart from - weirdly, if you think about it - our first-ever look at a Minbari jumpgate, the space CG was far inferior to that in the show itself, which after 30 years was a bit weird.

Despite his age, Boxleitner gave a very spirited performance which overcame the unavoidable fact that he doesn't really sound like Sheridan any more. Peter Jurasik was even better, and Tallman the best of all. Bill Mumy probably sounded the most removed from his original voice. Of the newcomers, Delenn was decent, Garibaldi and Franklin were okay and Sinclair (who also did Zathras) was really good. G'Kar was the weakest from the POV of being a soundalike, but Andreas Katsulas's voice was so totally unique that a replacement was never going to nail it. Instead the actor just went for the same kind of theatricality and I think did a good job in is own way.

The movie did make a mincemeat of the canon though. It's clear JMS couldn't be bothered to fact-check his own details: Sheridan took command of Babylon 5 in 2259, not 2258; and Tuzanor is not the capital of Minbar but an important religious centre (Yedor is the capital). The other inconsistencies you can put down to the parallel universes, so he gave himself an out there. I like the design of the new Shadow ships but not the suggestion these are supposed to be the same warships as during the series itself when they look incredibly different.

Spoiler

Overall I think the multiverse angle just made the stakes feel low. Some cool visuals - the Vorlon planet-killer displacing Earth's moon as a more efficient way of destroying Earth - can't make up for the fact that the plot felt quite low-stakes. We know Sheridan gets home and doesn't destroy the entire multiverse (and urgh I hate that B5 now has a multiverse, despite JMS insisting during the show itself that it does not) so where's the tension?

Also, far too much Zathras. Zathras was really, really good in his first appearance because he mixed his comic moments with a really bleak sense of pathos, which JMS forgot about in all subsequent appearances. He was okay but a bit played out by the end of the Season 3 two-parter and all his subsequent appearances were maximum cringe. This went far beyond that. Yeah, the entire army of Zathrases was an amusing one-scene joke, but that was as far as it went.

Most of the humour in general was shit, even worse than the show itself. So many awful line readings, apart from Jurasik of course who did make his lame lines sing. Guy's still got it.

Some of the show's worst tendencies also cropped up here, with lots of pontificating and speechifying (most of it reusing material from the OG show) and underwhelming PPG shootouts.

Having thousands of Shadows everywhere and them having an energy weapon/shield combo thing...urgh, just no. When the Shadows killed Kosh, JMS refused to show it on screen because he knew it would look crap and he wanted to keep it in the realm of myth and legend, which means keeping things off-camera.

The ending, with Sheridan going home but the camera staying in the new alterno-2261 where the Shadows had never appeared, Delenn was still full Minbari, Sinclair and Lochley were rival ship commanders docking at the station etc is actually vaguely interesting, but I'm not sure I want to see an alterno-version of the story without those elements.

Overall it's a bit fun to see those characters again, but the movie runs roughshod over established continuity, is painfully unfunny and the whole thing serves no purpose beyond nostalgia. It was also slowed down by exposition about things that happened during B5's original run, but given only hardcore fans are going to watch this, I don't see the point in that. I very much doubt any newcomers are going to pick up the show after watching this.

I think Straczynski should let another writer come in and give their spin on the universe. I think it's clear at this point (after repeated failed attempts) that JMS is highly unlikely to write anything worthwhile in this universe again.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Werthead

[Lord Varys]

Yeah, one has to say that this was pretty lame.

Not bothering fact-checking things also does kind of suck when you yourself are the guy wrote most of the material, anyway. Didn't catch the year mistake in Sheridan's appointment ... but the 'a few weeks' remark of his dad did suck as only got to B5 like a week after the assassination, meaning it was at best two weeks on 17th January. When your only son starts to command a huge station you only get confused about the date if you are demented. Also must say the running gag of us never seeing Sheridan's mom was never funny.

The Shadows being like their own cannon fodder was ludicrous. The show very much implied that the Shadows don't even man their own ships - they remote-control them via their telepathic central processor units. If they needed 'ground troops' - which I don't think they would as they are not actually fighting a war against the Vorlons, they merely manipulate the younger species into fighting each other - they would use some of their slave races like the Drakh for that - not themselves.

And if they run amok on B5 definitely not with silly gun rays and energy shields ... but on a completely different level. Sheridan even hints at what they should be ... only to the move then depicting them like clichéd space alien monsters.

Also, I think the shit about the Icarus 'waking up the Shadows' is also nonsense. They returned to Z'ha'dum, didn't live there, and unless I'm misremembering other Shadow ships were found and activated earlier, no?

[Derfel Cadarn]

9 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Yeah, one has to say that this was pretty lame.

Not bothering fact-checking things also does kind of suck when you yourself are the guy wrote most of the material, anyway. Didn't catch the year mistake in Sheridan's appointment ... but the 'a few weeks' remark of his dad did suck as only got to B5 like a week after the assassination, meaning it was at best two weeks on 17th January. When your only son starts to command a huge station you only get confused about the date if you are demented. Also must say the running gag of us never seeing Sheridan's mom was never funny.

The Shadows being like their own cannon fodder was ludicrous. The show very much implied that the Shadows don't even man their own ships - they remote-control them via their telepathic central processor units. If they needed 'ground troops' - which I don't think they would as they are not actually fighting a war against the Vorlons, they merely manipulate the younger species into fighting each other - they would use some of their slave races like the Drakh for that - not themselves.

And if they run amok on B5 definitely not with silly gun rays and energy shields ... but on a completely different level. Sheridan even hints at what they should be ... only to the move then depicting them like clichéd space alien monsters.

Also, I think the shit about the Icarus 'waking up the Shadows' is also nonsense. They returned to Z'ha'dum, didn't live there, and unless I'm misremembering other Shadow ships were found and activated earlier, no?

The Icarus wakingg upnthe Shadows was referenced in thr show. Notnsure if they were hibernating or if the Ocarus sinoly triggered an alarm and the Shadows came back.

edit or maybe there was always a small garrison there

Edited August 17, 2023 by Derfel Cadarn

[Werthead]

The Shadows were already active in 2253, over three years before the Icarus expedition, when the Shadow ship was discovered on Mars and a second ship arrived to retrieve it. In the comic book covering the events there's even a single Shadow on the ground overseeing operations.

In the novel The Shadow Within they even confirm that it was the events on Mars that sparked the Icarus expedition, and it was the Shadows gaining better pilots for their ships (via Anna and, it's implied, some of the other crew) and a willing mouthpiece in Morden (after they help him lay his wife to rest) that kicked their plans up a notch.

[Lord Varys]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

The Shadows were already active in 2253, over three years before the Icarus expedition, when the Shadow ship was discovered on Mars and a second ship arrived to retrieve it. In the comic book covering the events there's even a single Shadow on the ground overseeing operations.

In the novel The Shadow Within they even confirm that it was the events on Mars that sparked the Icarus expedition, and it was the Shadows gaining better pilots for their ships (via Anna and, it's implied, some of the other crew) and a willing mouthpiece in Morden (after they help him lay his wife to rest) that kicked their plans up a notch.

Yeah, that is how I recalled things. This entire thing is going on between the Vorlons and the Shadows and has literally nothing to do with some ants stumbling on an ancient site. The entire 'the Shadows go away/lie dormant' etc. routine is also just a Vorlon good vs. evil propaganda narrative. They are never gone as such, they just only interact with the lesser races when they feel like the time for another game/instruction cycle has arrived. It might be true that they leave Z'ha'dum for a time ... but it isn't actually their planet but Lorien's and we know that they go there to be close to him, not because they like it there.

It does make sense that the Shadows would like to play around with and use the people as tools who got closest to them - whoever gets to Z'ha'dum likely deserves to be given the choice of joining their ranks and see the light in their mind - but it is clear that the audience sees but a tiny part of both the manipulations of the Shadows and the Vorlorns.

Also, it was a big thing in the show that Interplanetary Expeditions was no actual corporation but merely the front for Earth Gov's and the megacorporations of Earth's weapon research department ... it can't go bankrupt in a real sense if it is just a front. Then some other front or fake firm would do what the real interest groups running things would want them to do.

The notion that them not being there stopping the Shadow War is utter horseshit. That said, ISN framing things that way was okay ... but later the movie presents that as facts, and there is where things break down.

You also feel that the movie failed to really have the scenes play out the way they should - like Sheridan being with the Icarus meaning we should have seen Morden and, especially, Anna and Sheridan simply forgetting reason/time travel shenanigans and doing everything in his power to save his wife from that dreadful fate.

Also it could have been a point where we see the weirdo anti-Sheridan Z'ha'dum guy who actually directed the Shadow agents (Morden was just lesser mouthpiece) so there would have been potential there to show that this guy was like a Shadow version of the Jack the Ripper inquisitor the Vorlons had - a man they converted to their cause and used as a tool for a long time at this point.

[SpaceChampion]

https://www.cbr.com/babylon-5-the-road-home-j-michael-straczynski/

Quote

After I finished Season 5, Damon Lindelof looked at what we did on Babylon 5 and figured out how they could take that structure and apply it to Lost. Over at Battlestar Galactica, they looked at what we were doing and said, "Okay, how can we structure this similarly?" All of a sudden at that point, it became critical mass, and suddenly everybody began doing it. As far as I know, that was a new thing for that time.

On the B5 reimagining -- should that go ahead after the strike -- I've come up with a new structure. It's a new paradigm for television storytelling. Hopefully, it'll transform television again. I can't tell you how it works yet. If I can make it work, it'll also be transformational.

 

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, SpaceChampion said:

https://www.cbr.com/babylon-5-the-road-home-j-michael-straczynski/

 

Good to see that JMS's modesty has remained fully intact after 30 years.