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Rappaport posted:I've been an idiot in this thread before, so I figure I'm not losing any more face by asking what was the copyright Sheridan would've been infringing in that joke scene? He couldn't say time and space together? He was going to say "Lost in Space", as in the old sci-fi show more recently rebooted by Netflix
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Aug 11, 2023 05:19
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Seemlar posted:He was going to say "Lost in Space", as in the old sci-fi show more recently rebooted by Netflix  Thanks!
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Aug 11, 2023 05:45
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It's a good Lennier joke. edit: spoilered just in case it gives it away.
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Aug 11, 2023 06:08
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It's been a while since I saw the original show, but was it so quippy as The Road Home was? Feels like they had to have a joke all the time.
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Aug 11, 2023 16:58
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Road Home is... odd. The White Star looks great in this style, but I never those big brown blocks on top of B5 were hollow, and the jump gates look really weird. Some of the humor is way off, and some of the writing is, too (did everyone really know that about the end of the Shadow War and the specific context of it?) Was it just my stream or was the intro really as sudden and jarring with the music cutting off? Mispronouncing pak'ma'ra was also really obvious. Franklin's angst about not telling Sheridan he died three years before, when Sheridan knew he only had twenty years ever since 2261? Sheridan says he took over Babylon 5 in 2258, but it had to be 2259 because the events of Chrysalis took place on New Year's Eve 2258. The Cobra Bays are weird, the Starfury sounds are all off. B5 has the upgraded defence grid (but I think it's before it happened?) Starfuries have four cannons around the cockpit. Garibaldi lassos a Shadow fighter with his fury's grappling hook. The Shadows just... in general. A lot of the editing feels weird. I don't know, I'm not sure I can finish this. If you'd told me JMS had nothing to do with it, or it was some Youtube fan effort, I'd believe you.
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Aug 12, 2023 06:03
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The missed opportunity to have the silhouette turn out to be Zathras in a dress trying to help The One is unfortunate
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Aug 12, 2023 08:03
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Yeah, that was basically awful. I regret my purchase and even just extending my benefit of the doubt to it and the forthcoming reboot. The new cast members were all really good, especially Delenn. The Vorlons being sore losers was a nice sequence, and strangely answers old fandom questions about their planet killer, but the rest of it just... Really disappointing.
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Aug 12, 2023 08:12
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:If you'd told me JMS had nothing to do with it, or it was some Youtube fan effort, I'd believe you.
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Aug 12, 2023 08:33
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Delenn's VA seemed like the only one trying to imitate the dead ( ) cast members. And G'kar's animated appearance was a bit strange. I noticed the station gun things too, the big honking cannon even shot a different kind of... Shot than in the series, right? And the animated Shadows looked different, but maybe they were going for a scarier look and really lean into the spider thing? At least the Shadow mother vessel thingy in one of the time-lines looked kinda cool. It was definitely different from the original series, but I liked the goofiness. There was no way this was going to be anything but fan service, so why not have fun with it?
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Aug 12, 2023 09:03
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Rappaport posted:It was definitely different from the original series, but I liked the goofiness. There was no way this was going to be anything but fan service, so why not have fun with it? The thing is, if that was the case, then I don't think it really went far enough with it. Like, give us some Kosh (you even made an asset for him!), give us a timeline where Morden was working with G'Kar, a timeline where Sinclair died at the Battle of the Line, a timeline where JMS shows us scenes from the infamous joke script where Londo marries G'Kar or whatever it was, an inexplicable timeline where Vir is Emperor of the Known Universe, a timeline where President John Sheridan meets Captain Jane Sheridan, a timeline where everyone looks like they do in the Babylon 5 series pitch, a glimpse of the telepath war, a timeline where Psi Corps and Clark won. The timelines we see are, like... 1. The original as of Objects at Rest. 2. Perhaps the same timeline, but in 2284, three years after Sheridan's death. 3. Perhaps the same timeline, but in 2257, during the Icarus mission to Za'ha'dum. 4. The War Without End 'bad' timeline where the Shadows board Babylon 5. 5. A timeline where the heroes lost the Shadow War. This one is a little strange because it appears that the Vorlons were allied with the Army of Light, only to turn about and begin purging the galaxy when they started losing. Which feels exactly like what they'd do. 6. A timeline where everyone is on B5, and IPX never woke up the Shadows because they went bankrupt. Admittedly, they probably had a very limited budget, but I mean... Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Aug 12, 2023 |
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Aug 12, 2023 09:40
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I have no objections to a full season of animated "What if?" but Babylon 5. The movie did start out slow, but production cowards probably figured there'd be potential viewers who don't re-watch the series annually like the participants of this thread. To cover all the stuff you mentioned and have some time with all of it, you'd need more than 90 minutes, IMO. I went in with low expectations, though, I can imagine it'd be different if people were expecting even the level of the original teevee movies.
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Aug 12, 2023 10:02
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Rappaport posted:I have no objections to a full season of animated "What if?" but Babylon 5. The movie did start out slow, but production cowards probably figured there'd be potential viewers who don't re-watch the series annually like the participants of this thread. To cover all the stuff you mentioned and have some time with all of it, you'd need more than 90 minutes, IMO. Yeah, we don't know the production side of things. For all we know, Warner Bros was like, hey, we're doing a B5 animated film, you get first refusal to write it, but it has to have a multiverse element because that's hot right now, and it should be open to people who've never seen it before because we've got that reboot brewing...
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Aug 12, 2023 11:28
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It was alright, didn't light my world on fire or anything. Mourning Andreas Katsulas all over again, not just because the G'Kar VA sounded nothing like him but imagining him delivering the dialogue from basically God when Sheridan landed on the Rim would've been spectacular.
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Aug 12, 2023 11:49
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Rappaport posted:Delenn's VA seemed like the only one trying to imitate the dead ( I've read an interview with JMS where he said that this was intentional. The new VAs were instructed to capture the attitude of their characters but not to try too hard to sound exactly like the original actor.
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Aug 12, 2023 11:56
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Where was uncle Bester? They should have focused on characters who have alive actors. Whatever Ivanova was doing after leaving b5. Bester, Talia and Lyta. Londo in every location hanging out. Corwin, Na'Toth. Bring back Rebo and Zooty. Or Morden.
CatHorse fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Aug 12, 2023 |
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Aug 12, 2023 12:15
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Jedit posted:I've read an interview with JMS where he said that this was intentional. The new VAs were instructed to capture the attitude of their characters but not to try too hard to sound exactly like the original actor. Probably the best call. You're unlikely to get a Mako > Baldwin level of being able to slot someone into a part that needs replacing, and trying and failing just makes it worse.
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Aug 12, 2023 20:36
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CainFortea posted:Probably the best call. You're unlikely to get a Mako > Baldwin level of being able to slot someone into a part that needs replacing, and trying and failing just makes it worse. They could have at least tried to say pak'ma'ra correctly. On the other hand I don't think there is a single US made movie/tv were Baba Yaga is pronounced correctly (emphasis on first and last a).
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Aug 12, 2023 23:29
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https://twitter.com/GineokwKoenig/status/1690075606636199936
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Aug 13, 2023 03:48
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:If you'd told me JMS had nothing to do with it, or it was some Youtube fan effort, I'd believe you. I'm at the point that I believe Straczynski had precisely one good idea in his head and he's been chasing the dragon ever since.
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Aug 13, 2023 12:20
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Timby posted:I'm at the point that I believe Straczynski had precisely one good idea in his head and he's been chasing the dragon ever since. Sometimes you just have to let go or you end up diminishing all that you have done before. 
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Aug 13, 2023 14:31
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Timby posted:I'm at the point that I believe Straczynski had precisely one good idea in his head and he's been chasing the dragon ever since. I'd say he had half a good idea with Rising Stars but couldn't really follow through.
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Aug 13, 2023 15:42
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I still like Midnight Nation but I don't know if I'd say it's good.
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Aug 13, 2023 16:09
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It was a pleasant surprise that we got The Road Home at all, but the story was a little flat with the love conquers all blahblah. I absolutely don't regret buying it, but now I thought the Lost Tales format was a lot better than this. Of the VAs, I felt like Phil Lamarr did a fine Franklin, but Andreas Katsulas's G'Kar is just irreplaceable and the G'Kar VA just couldn't deliver. Delenn was OK. As for Ivanova, I kind of felt like we should've had an older, wisened version of the character. Claudia Christian's voice doesn't really match the much younger officer anymore, which I felt like was especially noticeable during the B5 battle scene. It almost would've been better to directly borrow the audio from The War Without End where she's screaming out "They're killing us!". One thing I didn't understand about the end was where we are now. Young Sheridan says that he's been the commander of Bab5 for 2 years, and hasn't heard anything about a Shadow War or Za-Ha-BOOM. We never change perspective back to a non-alternate Sheridan as far as I know. Is this a setup for the reboot? Imagining something where the Shadow War is delayed 20 years, Terminator style? Introduce an older Sheridan and the rest of the living cast to set it up, perhaps?
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Aug 14, 2023 01:15
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cmdrk posted:One thing I didn't understand about the end was where we are now. Young Sheridan says that he's been the commander of Bab5 for 2 years, and hasn't heard anything about a Shadow War or Za-Ha-BOOM. We never change perspective back to a non-alternate Sheridan as far as I know. It's a timeline where the Shadows never woke up on Z'ha'dum because the Icarus never went there because IPX went bankrupt. Yeah, it doesn't make much sense.
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Aug 14, 2023 04:25
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:It's a timeline where the Shadows never woke up on Z'ha'dum because the Icarus never went there because IPX went bankrupt. Yeah, it doesn't make much sense. Yeah, which makes me wonder if something like the Drazi Inter-Purple Expeditions will be the ones to agitate the shadows in the new show
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Aug 14, 2023 04:26
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cmdrk posted:Yeah, which makes me wonder if something like the Drazi Inter-Purple Expeditions will be the ones to agitate the shadows in the new show I believe JMS has said that the reboot will not be set in that timeline, but any further animated things might be. Honestly, the problem with that timeline is the person who says Icarus woke the Shadows up was Anna Sheridan, and the Shadows did what they did because they were vulnerable and afraid. To say this is an unreliable account is an understatement. Additionally, there's plenty of material that suggests the Shadows were already awake and active (the Minbari expedition to check on Z'ha'dum was infamously waylaid by the EAS Prometheus, for example. So the Icarus would likely not have been the cause of the Shadow War as TRH implies.
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Aug 14, 2023 04:31
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I feel that for whatever reason TRH made a lot of minor references to other franchises. There was the obvious copyright joke. But that one animation of Sheridan shooting through the wormhole thing looked a LOT like the original Stargate SG-1 wormhole animation. And then there was the "Never give up. Never Surrender." Galaxy Quest reference. Probably there were more that I missed.
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Aug 15, 2023 21:33
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Video game rear end self destruct system.
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Aug 15, 2023 22:08
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Grand Fromage posted:Video game rear end self destruct system. I did had to laugh at the computer making sure this wasn't just "I'm having a bad day sort-of-thing." Also, I think this is the first time we've seen Shadows in actual combat? So, they lost the Shadow war, but the Vorlons got to wipe out the losers? I really don't get their rules of engagement or whatever.
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Aug 16, 2023 02:10
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Small White Dragon posted:I did had to laugh at the computer making sure this wasn't just "I'm having a bad day sort-of-thing." The Shadows and Vorlons don't want to actually fight each other. Their mandate was to watch over and guide the younger races together, but a stupidly long time ago their ideas of what that meant differed and now they've been fighting an eons long proxy war between each other. They don't want to actually come to blows with each other, but anything less than that is fair game because even if they scrub the galaxy of life, they can just reseed the whole thing and wait for new intelligent lifeforms to evolve.
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Aug 16, 2023 02:17
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Timby posted:I'm at the point that I believe Straczynski had precisely one good idea in his head and he's been chasing the dragon ever since. +1 It was nice to have new B5 after all these years, but overall this was at best on the level of the TV movies, with all the issues those had as double length standalone episodes with no B plot. I also thought it was a bit odd that Vir didn't make an appearance along with the rest of the main cast. The Lurker's Guide put up a page for TRH, and maybe something interesting will show up there.
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Aug 16, 2023 04:05
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Small White Dragon posted:So, they lost the Shadow war, but the Vorlons got to wipe out the losers? I really don't get their rules of engagement or whatever. They explained this perfectly well and clearly in that segment. It's salting the earth, the Vorlons are denying the Shadows further resources by eradicating everything in their sphere of influence before the Shadows can take it from them. And like A.o.D. said, they don't actually care about the lesser races, they can just make more later.
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Aug 16, 2023 04:09
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As a story, I thought that was quite lovely. Of course it can’t match the series, which had more than 55 times the length to tell its story. But as I’ll argue below, I think it’s the best movie-length B5, better than In the Beginning (which, despite some great speeches, relied on unlikely coincidence and our goodwill generated by the existing show, as it really has no independent story to tell).Milkfred E. Moore posted:It's a timeline where the Shadows never woke up on Z'ha'dum because the Icarus never went there because IPX went bankrupt. Yeah, it doesn't make much sense. Alt-Garibaldi would have no way of knowing, but IPX was clearly connected to the same people inside Earthforce who were researching Shadow-tech after waking up the ship on Mars. I would guess that that ship was never found and that Earthforce never spent black-ops money supporting IPX in that alternate timeline. There’s plenty that makes sense if you don’t limit your imagination to one quick line delivered by a character with limited knowledge. Nor am I concerned at all the inconsistencies and changes, especially in the alternate timelines. Heck, I thought two of the replacement voice actors sounded more like their characters than a few of the surviving cast did, though Boxleitner was spot on most of the time. You could also tell the difference between people with VA experience and people with little to no VA experience, and they obviously recorded people separately. So why do I think it’s a good story? Because it had a single coherent account and message to deliver, and didn’t deliver it as directly as the “universe reminds Sheridan that home is where Delenn is”. That obvious message of love sustaining the universe, linked to the various homages and references to other sci-fi shows, links to the ending of the movie. Sheridan is established as the quantum observer, during this particular period of time, but when he is able to take Delenn’s hand that special status ends, and we watch the alternate “no Shadow War… yet” B5 proceed for a little while before the credits roll. Because Sheridan stopped being the quantum observer and handed that duty back over to us, the audience. Like a lot of JMS’ work, much of this story was a meta-story about stories. In this case, the many possible B5 stories (and other stories), sustained by our willingness to watch and engage and by our capacity to love (or our lack thereof). This was a celebration of the old show and a giving up, too, a goodbye to one story and an invitation to consider other stories. I have no doubt many B5 fans don’t like this aspect of JMS’ writing. As someone who does, I thought that thread made this whole story hold together despite the highly limited nature of the individual scenes, which ranged from solid (I especially liked the initial Franklin scene) to mixed (the B5 is destroyed story, where the self-destruct lever sequence worked about as well as in the Doctor Who “The End of the World” episode), to working in concept more than practice (drinking to the end of Earth, which was oddly lifeless, probably because of the whole separate recording thing). Sheridan’s road home may lead to Delenn; our road home might still lead to B5, but a new B5. Frankly, I’d prefer stories set in the B5 universe over a reboot, but I think the chances of WB going for that seem like zero unless the reboot happens successfully. It’s short-sighted, but I do think JMS has some different stories to tell. It is quite possible, of course, that his interests and that of the show’s fans have diverged. But he’s a cunning story-teller and I’m curious to see what he has in store if given a longer story format.
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Aug 16, 2023 05:35
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Small White Dragon posted:I did had to laugh at the computer making sure this wasn't just "I'm having a bad day sort-of-thing." Anyone who thought that scene was bad or out of place should be reminded that it wasn't new to TRH. B5 has a history of AIs that think they know better, and if Harlan Ellison was still with us I don't doubt that he would have been asked to play Sparky again. Instead there was another sadly necessary recast - probably the most famous as well, as Mara Junot voices Ikora Rey in Destiny 2, Alleria Windrunner in WOW, and is the player's voice in the Remnant games.
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Aug 16, 2023 09:19
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Listening to the commentary track now. I'll post observations (spoilery or not) as I go: Someone already mentioned that Franklin mispronounces pak'ma'ra. Well, so does JMS in the commentary. There's discussion that the woman's voice during the Icarus scene is Anna's. It's a little odd she doesn't recognize John's voice, if that's so, but there's not really any time and it's essentially an Easter egg for fans anyway. The Shadows' shields apparently absorb incoming fire and then allow them to fire the energy back. JMS refers to the Starfury pilot in the B5 Shadow attack segment as Keffer (although he may have gotten the name wrong in the commentary and thought he was Kepper). Boxleitner says the Shadow attack segment was his favorite. JMS points out he screwed up in the destruct sequence because there seems to be no way for G'Kar and Lyta to get into the reactor room. He claims producer JMS convinced writer JMS that "they were hiding." He also says Sheridan shouldn't have a link as that's Earthforce-related and should have been returned when leaving B5. I didn't notice on first watch, but Sheridan looks at his wedding ring during the jump leading to his scene at the Rim. During that scene, JMS claims that so long as the character of G'Kar still exists, Andreas is still present. While on the one hand that's an inversion of what he said before when explaining why he could never recast, on the other hand it's precisely the same idea that Kosh articulates during the original series. JMS: "science fiction is the only inherently optimistic genre in existence" because it asserts there will be a future. (Arguable, obviously. I'm guessing JMS doesn't read a lot of romance.) After the final jump, alt-Sheridan is walking away as our Sheridan approaches Lennier, which explains why he glances over in the direction his Sheridan went. JMS says the Garibaldi "Briefed her? I 'longed' her" sounds dirty but he can never figure out why. Doyle would absolutely have made that line sound dirty if he'd been doing the voice. JMS on the cartoon reboot world: the slate is clean, the Shadow War may never happen, and that means anything could happen. You can bring in all the characters if you want. When JMS says the story is about Delenn as well as Sheridan, Boxleitner says "such a wonderful character" and you can hear in his voice that he misses Mira Firlan. Also, out of curiosity, I checked to see which performers had voice acting experience and which didn't. Only two didn't. I'll spoil in case readers don't want to know who appears. Didn't: Peter Jurasik Tracy Scoggins (Pat Tallman had one voice credit, for Babylon Park)
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Aug 16, 2023 21:15
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Narsham posted:Also, out of curiosity, I checked to see which performers had voice acting experience and which didn't. Only two didn't. I'll spoil in case readers don't want to know who appears. drat, you'd never guess.
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Aug 16, 2023 21:34
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Narsham posted:
He did the audiobook
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Aug 16, 2023 22:31
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MikusR posted:
He also did a Doctor Who audio drama back in 1999/2000
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Aug 16, 2023 23:36
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Zaroff posted:He also did a Doctor Who audio drama back in 1999/2000 He and Andreas did a "radio" drama together for SciFi back in I think the early '00s about having their brains hijacked into genetically-engineered lemurs by aliens curious about humanity. It was awesome, and way more coherent than you'd expect from that description.
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Aug 17, 2023 00:27
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Babylon 5: The Road Home Was this meant to kinda sorta be like Abrams Trek like was this meant as a pilot for a new series in the timeline we see prominently at the end or something? I hope they make more of these because overall it's good stuff. I liked the voice actors overall. I think trying to 1:1 imitate the original actors exactly would be pointless. It was a lot of fun to see these characters rolling around again, and I thought they did a really good job with the bleaker timelines/dimension especially the Londo/Ivanova chilling as the world ends one. And I liked the bit of extra info about the Vorlon's planet destroying technique. I felt like several of the moment to moment "sets" and dialogue felt like stuff that could have been made when the show was still on the air. WTF was up with Zathras though? I seemed like bullshit to have him and Zathras be so prominent instead of Zathras. I mean I get what they were going for but why not use Zathras for that part? I hope we get more of these.
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