7 ms·

JMS, the creator of this show, was way ahead of his time, and did some amazing tricks to get this show produced. He drew heavily from technology culture, and f

JMS, the creator of this show, was way ahead of his time, and did some amazing tricks to get this show produced. He drew heavily from technology culture, and found innovative ways to save money on production. He was able to get consultation from the NASA JPL (and credited them), and he pioneered early CGI; season 1 supposedly built a rendering cluster out of 486 computers. Another way this show was trailblazing was that it was the first network television show shot in 16:9. You can read more about it on the Lurker's Guide[1] (That is a usenet reference), which contains excerpts from the newsgroups where he gave feedback to fans after each episode. [1]: http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/ http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/

AdamJacobMuller 8y ago
The original Babylon 5 script books are amazing as well. https://b5books.com/babylon-5-scripts-overview/ https://b5books.com/babylon-5-scripts-overview/ They contain all of the original scripts for every episode (in some cases multiple versions) as well as commentary written by JMS about both what is going on on-screen and off-screen. They have some really detailed information on the challenges he faced running this show in an exceedingly raw and real fashion. Sadly, they are only available in print and are very expensive. http://jmsnews.com http://jmsnews.com has complete archives of all of JMS's usenet postings, which span the entire period the show was on the air (as well as many years before/after). Again, some of this is very raw, like where he discusses the feature film due to be announced "in a few days" about the telepath war (which we never got :(). Anyway, revealed myself to be a huge B5 nerd here, but, I do believe it was in a number of ways one of the most visionary TV shows on air at the time, highly serialized plots 5 years before the sopranos and computer VFX that movies couldn't touch at the time.
- Diederich 8y ago
  Huge B5 fan here as well, watched them all (multiple times) as they came out. Honest question: does anyone know of any TV series that had a firm, 5 (or multi-year) arc planned out in detail years before any filming began? Babylon 5 got funded when JMS described, in detail, the last scene of the last episode in the last season. There were flash forward scenes in season 2 that took place in season 4. Two years later, they meshed together perfectly. Has any other show been like that? I'd love to know. (:
  - mcguire 8y ago
    Compare it with Lost.... :-)
    - Diederich 8y ago
      I just did some very fast research about that, and apparently both Lost and Battlestar Galactica attributed their coherent story arcs to Babylon 5. I never watched Lost though. If I may ask, assuming you watched the show: did they ever film scenes from years in the future, seamlessly connecting them in the present and then later on? Thanks for your reference.
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > Lost [...] coherent story arcs No. Those things cannot be used together that way. And I'm pretty sure that's the comparison the grandparent was suggesting.
      - philwelch 8y ago
        BSG borrowed the idea of having a coherent story arc, but they didn't plan it out ahead of time. Ronald D. Moore had a podcast of commentary tracks for each episode and openly admitted they were winging it the whole time. What BSG did right was to get all the small things right--get a bunch of really, really good actors, make everything look as naturalistic as possible, and let characterization rather than plotting or abstract concepts drive most of the storytelling.
      - mcguire 8y ago
        I didn't watch it, but I had many friends who did and were very upset about the ending and lack of closure on story lines.
  - aidenn0 8y ago
    As far as the planning goes: The treatment that he gave an actor (Michael O'Hare I think?) was leaked at one point and IIRC it diverged in many ways from the direction the show took, particularly from season 3.
- mcguire 8y ago
  I've recently been re-watching the show, and it stands up pretty well, especially the VFX. The two weaknesses I've noticed are the look (which is often dated to the '90s) and (ahem) JMS' writing. The plots are good, and stand against ST-TOS as actual science fiction, unlike many other SF shows, but the actual writing...well, yeah. Speaking of ST-TOS, B5 doesn't look too bad compared to the remastered (!) ST on Netflix.
  - krapp 8y ago
    >The plots are good, and stand against ST-TOS as actual science fiction, unlike many other SF shows, but the actual writing...well, yeah. It seems like JMS never met a genre cliche or trope that he didn't like. Crusade, what there was of it, was even worse. The worldbuilding was much better than anything in Trek until (ironically) DS9 came along.
    - Sharlin 8y ago
      Crusade, to be fair, was destroyed by Executive Meddling.
      - coldacid 8y ago
        To the point that some episodes ended up being filled with Take Thats at the execs, thrown in by JMS and the scriptwriters.
  - tracker1 8y ago
    The first season's acting was also very daytime soap opera... don't get me wrong, I loved the show as a whole, I just found the first season in particular sometimes hard to watch. Would LOVE to see a well crafted remaster, with some of the techniques that can improve images based on neighboring frames, and maybe a rework of all the CGI for higher detail. I'm have surprised there hasn't been a fan effort considering how far even desktop gaming tech has come since the series.
    - Zardoz84 8y ago
WorldMaker 8y ago
More than just being the first shot in 16:9, it was the first network show shot targeting HD television, before the networks fully agreed on what HD would be. It just never got the final HD treatment that it should have. It's still a huge shame that Warner Brothers supposedly lost all the digital originals for the special effects shots, because they should have easily had a chance to recompose the show for true DVD quality and then again for a decent Blu-Ray rerelease. Some alternate universe has amazing Babylon 5 remasters today on Blu-Ray versus the letterboxed no-worse-than-SD DVD copies ours is left with. (Another weird twist to the story here is that one tale has it that Warner Brothers blames French company Vivendi for losing the digital SFX archives, which WB loaned to Vivendi for a B5 game under development under the old Sierra games brand that was eventually cancelled. Which also isn't the only property that WB seems to have "lost" to Vivendi, as WB should probably be the owner of the No One Lives Forever videogame IP, by way of buying developer Monolith into WB Games, but Vivendi lost the publishing contract somewhere and no one seems to know in this timeline if WB actually does own it or not.)
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > because they should have easily had a chance to recompose the show for true DVD quality and then again for a decent Blu-Ray rerelease. IIRC, that was the actual plan from the beginning: render for SD TV in the 90s, then re-render when HD TV became common and computer power increased enough for it to be practical to render at those definitions.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    Indeed. Which is a shame. Contrast it on the one side to DS9/Voyager as well which weren't even filmed on film and intentionally had no plans to preserve SFX work and will likely never see Blu-Ray releases. Contrast it on the other side to Star Trek TOS and TNG which were shot on film, and had a big enough audience to warrant rebuilding SFX almost from scratch to get a Blu-Ray release. B5 was primed to be right in the middle there and if not for the unfortunate losses of data, could have had a strong Blu-Ray release at a huge fraction of the cost CBS put into TOS and TNG remasters.
- 8y ago
Rebelgecko 8y ago
Is 486 the quantity or the type of CPU used?

AdamJacobMuller 8y ago

The original Babylon 5 script books are amazing as well. https://b5books.com/babylon-5-scripts-overview/ https://b5books.com/babylon-5-scripts-overview/ They contain all of the original scripts for every episode (in some cases multiple versions) as well as commentary written by JMS about both what is going on on-screen and off-screen. They have some really detailed information on the challenges he faced running this show in an exceedingly raw and real fashion. Sadly, they are only available in print and are very expensive. http://jmsnews.com http://jmsnews.com has complete archives of all of JMS's usenet postings, which span the entire period the show was on the air (as well as many years before/after). Again, some of this is very raw, like where he discusses the feature film due to be announced "in a few days" about the telepath war (which we never got :(). Anyway, revealed myself to be a huge B5 nerd here, but, I do believe it was in a number of ways one of the most visionary TV shows on air at the time, highly serialized plots 5 years before the sopranos and computer VFX that movies couldn't touch at the time.

Diederich 8y ago
Huge B5 fan here as well, watched them all (multiple times) as they came out. Honest question: does anyone know of any TV series that had a firm, 5 (or multi-year) arc planned out in detail years before any filming began? Babylon 5 got funded when JMS described, in detail, the last scene of the last episode in the last season. There were flash forward scenes in season 2 that took place in season 4. Two years later, they meshed together perfectly. Has any other show been like that? I'd love to know. (:
- mcguire 8y ago
  Compare it with Lost.... :-)
  - Diederich 8y ago
    I just did some very fast research about that, and apparently both Lost and Battlestar Galactica attributed their coherent story arcs to Babylon 5. I never watched Lost though. If I may ask, assuming you watched the show: did they ever film scenes from years in the future, seamlessly connecting them in the present and then later on? Thanks for your reference.
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Lost [...] coherent story arcs No. Those things cannot be used together that way. And I'm pretty sure that's the comparison the grandparent was suggesting.
    - philwelch 8y ago
      BSG borrowed the idea of having a coherent story arc, but they didn't plan it out ahead of time. Ronald D. Moore had a podcast of commentary tracks for each episode and openly admitted they were winging it the whole time. What BSG did right was to get all the small things right--get a bunch of really, really good actors, make everything look as naturalistic as possible, and let characterization rather than plotting or abstract concepts drive most of the storytelling.
    - mcguire 8y ago
      I didn't watch it, but I had many friends who did and were very upset about the ending and lack of closure on story lines.
- aidenn0 8y ago
  As far as the planning goes: The treatment that he gave an actor (Michael O'Hare I think?) was leaked at one point and IIRC it diverged in many ways from the direction the show took, particularly from season 3.
mcguire 8y ago
I've recently been re-watching the show, and it stands up pretty well, especially the VFX. The two weaknesses I've noticed are the look (which is often dated to the '90s) and (ahem) JMS' writing. The plots are good, and stand against ST-TOS as actual science fiction, unlike many other SF shows, but the actual writing...well, yeah. Speaking of ST-TOS, B5 doesn't look too bad compared to the remastered (!) ST on Netflix.
- krapp 8y ago
  >The plots are good, and stand against ST-TOS as actual science fiction, unlike many other SF shows, but the actual writing...well, yeah. It seems like JMS never met a genre cliche or trope that he didn't like. Crusade, what there was of it, was even worse. The worldbuilding was much better than anything in Trek until (ironically) DS9 came along.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    Crusade, to be fair, was destroyed by Executive Meddling.
    - coldacid 8y ago
      To the point that some episodes ended up being filled with Take Thats at the execs, thrown in by JMS and the scriptwriters.
- tracker1 8y ago
  The first season's acting was also very daytime soap opera... don't get me wrong, I loved the show as a whole, I just found the first season in particular sometimes hard to watch. Would LOVE to see a well crafted remaster, with some of the techniques that can improve images based on neighboring frames, and maybe a rework of all the CGI for higher detail. I'm have surprised there hasn't been a fan effort considering how far even desktop gaming tech has come since the series.
  - Zardoz84 8y ago

WorldMaker 8y ago

More than just being the first shot in 16:9, it was the first network show shot targeting HD television, before the networks fully agreed on what HD would be. It just never got the final HD treatment that it should have. It's still a huge shame that Warner Brothers supposedly lost all the digital originals for the special effects shots, because they should have easily had a chance to recompose the show for true DVD quality and then again for a decent Blu-Ray rerelease. Some alternate universe has amazing Babylon 5 remasters today on Blu-Ray versus the letterboxed no-worse-than-SD DVD copies ours is left with. (Another weird twist to the story here is that one tale has it that Warner Brothers blames French company Vivendi for losing the digital SFX archives, which WB loaned to Vivendi for a B5 game under development under the old Sierra games brand that was eventually cancelled. Which also isn't the only property that WB seems to have "lost" to Vivendi, as WB should probably be the owner of the No One Lives Forever videogame IP, by way of buying developer Monolith into WB Games, but Vivendi lost the publishing contract somewhere and no one seems to know in this timeline if WB actually does own it or not.)

CharlesColeman 8y ago
> because they should have easily had a chance to recompose the show for true DVD quality and then again for a decent Blu-Ray rerelease. IIRC, that was the actual plan from the beginning: render for SD TV in the 90s, then re-render when HD TV became common and computer power increased enough for it to be practical to render at those definitions.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Indeed. Which is a shame. Contrast it on the one side to DS9/Voyager as well which weren't even filmed on film and intentionally had no plans to preserve SFX work and will likely never see Blu-Ray releases. Contrast it on the other side to Star Trek TOS and TNG which were shot on film, and had a big enough audience to warrant rebuilding SFX almost from scratch to get a Blu-Ray release. B5 was primed to be right in the middle there and if not for the unfortunate losses of data, could have had a strong Blu-Ray release at a huge fraction of the cost CBS put into TOS and TNG remasters.
8y ago

Rebelgecko 8y ago

Is 486 the quantity or the type of CPU used?