Midjack posted:

You used the letter after g twice in your post, friend.

ultrafilter posted:

Were the season titles ever displayed anywhere outside the internet and the box sets? I think it might be a point of interest for the blind thread, but I don't want to even mention them if a regular viewer back then wouldn't have known about them. Amazon doesn't display them.

Small White Dragon posted:

...rights problem?

Zaroff posted:

I'm thinking the first episode of War Without End.

Doctor Zero posted:

Ah okay. Yeah that's not too bad.

Doctor Zero posted:

Grand Fromage posted:

Legal stuff takes a while, sadly.

MikusR posted:

Which episode? the one in deconstruction is a Human

MikusR posted:

What is Communion?

TheAardvark posted:

S2E15 - And Now for a Word

Lmfao at this Psi Corps commercial, God I love stuff like this.

quote:

RE: the FCC...what we did in the commercial was totally legit. We researched and found that the FCC considers a subliminal to be 2 frames per second (out of the standard 24). So we made the blip 4 frames total.

Jedit posted:

In The Shadow... is the start of JMS's 50+ episode streak. The avalanche has started. It is too late for the newbies to quit.

abrosheen posted:

Is "The Gathering" not on amazon prime at all, even for purchase? I sure can't find it.

quote:

Never had to read for the part of "Vir" in Babylon 5 (1993). When he went to the audition, he saw that the other actors had their hair done in the Centauri crest, while he didn't. A trip to the bathroom to raid the soap dispenser and plaster his hair up ended disastrously with his hair askew and tears running down his face where the soap had gotten in his eyes. When he was called in, he entered apologizing profusely in run-on sentences for his appearance, whereupon the creator and producers looked at each other and said, "Oh my God! It's Vir!" He asked if they wanted him to read and they said no, he had the part.

Lemniscate Blue posted:

Some of these songs are great, thanks!

You can certainly tell that most of the cast are emphatically not pro singers, but they definitely don't suck and they put so much heart into singing that it doesn't matter, it's really enjoyable. It helps that Bill Mumy is a pretty drat good songwriter so they've got good material to work with.

quote:

>
> Category 18, Topic 9
> Message 284 Tue Aug 17, 1993
> STRACZYNSKI [Joe] at 01:55 EDT
>
> As reward for the humor, here's what Kosh will *really* say, when he
> utters the first words we hear. He's on the Observation Dome, looking out
> through the window as a ship passes overhead, the lights shining down at him
> through a window.
>
> "Ahhh....beautiful." Long beat as he looks around the place. Then:
> "I will miss this...when it is gone."
>
> And then he exits, as Garibaldi mutters to Ivanova, "I *really* hate it
> when he does that."
>
> jms
>

MikusR posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDgWXhuDG_E

quote:

"We already knew everything this episode revealed."
If I can, let me address one aspect of this, for your consideration.
Back when I was working on MURDER, SHE WROTE, we'd sometimes get letters saying, "This wasn't a good episode because I figured out the ending. It wasn't a surprise." (Which is, to some extent, your point here.)

The problem we had with that particular letter was this: of COURSE you figured it out. Because you were paying attention to all the clues we had put out there in the episode.

There seems to be this notion that nobody should be able to jump ahead, or else something's wrong or bad about the episode. Absolutely not true. If you're going to play fair with the audience, whether it's B5 or M,SW, you've got to put enough bits of information out on the table so that the person who's really following it can figure it out...so that at the end, those who *didn't* figure it out can back up the tape, watch for the clues or leads, and see where it all came from. That's playing fair.

If NObody gets it, you haven't done your job right.

If EVERYbody gets it, you haven't done your job right.

The best case scenario is a bell-shaped curve. Some don't have a clue what's coming, some manage to figure it out, and the majority have a kind of vague sense where it's going, but there are still surprises along the way. If the bell-curve shifts one direction or the other, then you're in trouble.

So far, B5 seems to be hewing right to the bell-curve. For every person who says "okay, this was expected," there's been another saying, "I had no *idea* this was going to happen here, or so fast." (Many of these have been right on this forum, in fact.)

Finally, do bear in mind that you have an advantage here that 99% of all the viewers don't: the discussion here on CIS, and direct comments from me. For instance, I just noted elsewhere that we've got major turns at the end of this season, and one 2/3rds into year 4. Now, if at those points, somebody says, "Well, I knew this was coming, that's bad," I intend to whap them, because the reason they likely knew it was coming was because I *said so* right here.

But that same 99% doesn't have this advantage.

This is the main difference I've noted in the mail that's come in: the net-folks are constantly trying to figure out what's coming up next, treating it like a mystery story (which, really, it's not, any more than ANY novel is a mystery in that you don't necessarily know its turns and twists as you're reading it), whereas the non-netted folks tend to just take it as it comes.

See, that's the other part of this. People on the nets tend to treat it as though it's a mystery novel, and when it doesn't hit that aspect, say it's flawed as a result...when it was never INTENDED to function as a mystery novel. It's a novel period. A mystery novel depends absolutely on the riddle at the center of it. This is a saga, which uses a different structure. It isn't a mystery any more than Lord of the Rings is a mystery, even though when I first read it I was wondering what was going to happen next.

Also, a mystery novel is done when the mystery is finally unraveled. Not so the B5 story. By the end of this season, most of the mysteries will be unraveled, and the pieces laid on the table for all to see. It then becomes a matter of what the characters *do* about it thereafter.

If I'm doing my job right, and setting up things to come properly, and giving all the clues to it, then by definition a certain number of people HAVE to figure out what's coming. As long as it's the smaller portion, that's as it *should* be. So you'll understand why I tend to get in here for a moment when that's held up as something bad or poorly done. (And, again, even you note that the only reason you knew about the shadows on Mars was via reading it here, or others read it via the comics. Again, that's a very small portion of the audience; most I've heard from had NO idea about that aspect of it. If you hadn't read it here, you likely would have been surprised by it.)

Anyway, just something to consider in all of this....