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EX-GAIJIN AT LAST posted:Especially on the DVDs and, Lord willing, eventually remastered for HD I join you in this prayer but it is a slim, slim hope. I think we basically have to hope that some insane B5 fan manages to blackmail a Warner Bros executive.
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Aug 9, 2016 20:55
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EX-GAIJIN AT LAST posted:Can we convince Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to fund it? I mean, that'd be nice too, if a super-rich fan just basically threw a shitload of cash at WB and said "here, it's loving free money for you, loving do it now." Of course I wouldn't be surprised if WB was spiteful enough to say "wellllllll that's nice, but we just can't do it because of... reasons..."
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Aug 11, 2016 18:59
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EX-GAIJIN AT LAST posted:That's why the sfx on the DVDs already look like crap - for all the effects shots they had to use the NTSC broadcast masters, which were 4:3 on video, and upscale/crop them to 16:9. The actual filmed portions are fine, but every single shot with any kind of effect would need the effect recreated from scratch and recomposited. And it probably has way more effects than TNG, which, as a more popular show already proved... unfulfilling from a monetary investment standpoint. CBS really hosed up that release. When those Blurays were coming out I kept seeing my friends posting variations on "watching TNG on Netflix, still love this show". From a capitalist perspective, CBS should have yanked all streaming and broadcast rights while the Blurays came out so that the only way to watch TNG was either previously-bought DVDs or buying BD sets.
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Aug 12, 2016 01:58
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Data Graham posted:I mean the acting, I mean jesus christ. If overacting isn't your thing, space opera is probably not the right genre for you.
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Sep 7, 2016 07:12
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Kingtheninja posted:What kind of space customs has one guy and no security?! Of course this guy is going to get killed by smugglers. Babylon 5, like the production crew tasked with producing it, was pretty consistently shown to be severely underfunded. I know it's ultra-corny as gently caress, but I love that moment in By Any Means Necessary where Sinclair tells the Earthgov stooge "you should never hand someone a weapon without knowing where they're going to point it.  "
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Sep 8, 2016 20:46
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coyo7e posted:Are there any documentary movies or books on the show's production and all the poo poo that went crazy? I have heard a lot in snippets here and there but it seems like something that'd be a really interesting thing to sit down and watch or read. There's a bunch of behind-the-scenes interviews and production art here. I can't remember which interviews include it but there was apparently some drama between the CGI guys and Doug Netter. One cool tidbit is that the Omega-class destroyers were originally intended to launch their fighters from the very edge of the rotating section, using the centripetal force to fling them out like B5's Cobra bays did.
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Sep 11, 2016 17:51
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Data Graham posted:Jesus, Bruce Boxleitner is going to be the first one they tap to do the biopic of Bill Clinton, huh? I always felt like Boxleitner with a beard would have been perfect to play Ulysses S. Grant 
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Sep 19, 2016 06:59
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Dirty posted:Ron Thorton's ill One of the striking things about B5's CGI is that the "camera" work is really excellent.
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Sep 23, 2016 19:38
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DrBouvenstein posted:Also, that awkward elevator scene with Zack trying to hit on a telepathically possessed Lyta is hilarious. uggghhhhhhh h Honestly none of the movies really do it for me. Even In The Beginning is only barely "okay".
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Oct 18, 2016 04:34
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Data Graham posted:Well—it has to do with certain easter eggs that might actually get someone in trouble if I elaborated here. I'll PM anyone interested. I WANT TO KNOW MORE (yes, I know, wrong space-fascists  )
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Oct 18, 2016 18:56
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Does anyone else get the impression that Delenn - at least at one point - was intended to be a low-level telepath?
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Oct 29, 2016 05:16
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hope and vaseline posted:Isn't it weird how the one race that has legit prophets are the Centauri, who weren't visited by the Vorlons? I'm rather glad of it - not everything has to tie back into one single origin.
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Nov 2, 2016 18:24
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Dirty posted:Gideon's hover-bike chase and the Homunculous were particular low points, but I think they'd have looked bad in any series around that time period - they were both overambitious. I get that the homunculous wasn't supposed to be photoreal, but I assume was also supposed to not look laughable. I think the effects house change is big. The people at Netter Digital did not have the experience (or creative vision) that Foundation Imaging did. Another thing is that technology was pretty rapidly progressing at that time, and Firefly still came out a couple years after Crusade did. More CPU power and more memory allows for more detailed models and effects.
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Dec 18, 2016 00:21
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Bieeardo posted:I've been watching a few episodes a week with friends, and going through Clark's takeover a few weeks back was unsettling. "Everything's gone to hell, John. God help us all; you're on your own."
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Feb 9, 2017 06:38
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turn left hillary!! noo posted:We just had to buy a new season 2 because of some scratched discs, but they're only like $18 on Amazon. I bet if B5 was selling big the execs at WB would just say "well hell, they're already selling great, why bother spending any money on it??"
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Feb 17, 2017 08:25
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:Honestly I'm disappointed this man hasn't been in more. He has such an excellent voice, like a rough-hewn knife - sharp yet earthy and rough. Every time I see Sheridan with a beard I think it was a criminal waste that Boxleitner was never cast as General Ulysses S. Grant.
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Jun 29, 2017 21:53
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Pick posted:Season 1 has some funny-rear end episodes too. My favorite scene from that episode is when Sheridan thinks that he's about to get chewed by Londo for being about to kiss one of his wives' hands, and then Londo takes him aside and basically says "woah, dude, watch out, she's bad fuckin' news." That "we'll talk later" at the end slays me.
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Jun 30, 2017 05:43
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Jedit posted:Bester was meant to be 72 at the time; ...what?! Really?
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Jul 9, 2017 04:50
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I don't think there was supposed to be any ambiguity on the audience's part as to whether Sheridan was doing the right thing. Bombing Mars and Proxima were bad enough, but the show made a big deal out of Earth destroyers shooting down liners full of helpless civilians. There were numerous ways JMS could have tried to fuzz that - the liners ignored orders to heave to and prepare to be boarded, the liner tried playing chicken with a destroyer, make it not a fully loaded starliner but a transport shuttle trying to run the orbital blockade - but he pretty clearly chose to make it black-and-white mass murder. I think about the only way it could have been worse is if Clark had gone on a public broadcast and announced a general planetary bombardment with mass drivers against the secessionist colonists to exterminate them right down to every last traitorous man, woman, and child.
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Jul 10, 2017 05:23
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Were Douglas Netter or Harlan Ellison involved after the main series? Maybe the spinoffs were what happened when JMS didn't have them around to check him.
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Jul 12, 2017 15:01
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Timby posted:Dude can't help but repeat himself. It's funny that he wrote the subplot of Garibaldi worrying about Sheridan's cult of personality, because Straczynski cultivated the mother of all cults of personality around him. Even bigger than the Roddenberry cult? Timby posted:As I recall, he built Netter Digital in a kind of lovely way, basically doing a smash-and-grab on Foundation Imaging, robbing them of most of their best staff and rendering them a skeleton crew. Foundation was ready to go under until they got the Voyager contract at the last minute. The guys at Foundation claim that Netter actually got the less-talented staff, didn't get their custom software package that allowed them to use the office computers as part of the render farm, and also didn't have the ultra-close relationship with Lightwave that Foundation Imaging did: quote:Interview with Ron Thornton quote:Interview with Paul Bryant B5 Scrolls
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Jul 12, 2017 19:45
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The facet of Babylon 5 that wouldn't fly today is that at heart it's a really sappy show.
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Jul 15, 2017 00:02
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The Unlife Aquatic posted:What I wouldn't give to listen to Garak and Londo have a conversation over dinner. Dude. Gul Dukat and G'Kar.
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Oct 5, 2017 06:43
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Babylon 5 started airing about midway through the first season of seaQuest DSV
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Oct 20, 2017 04:07
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ConfusedUs posted:SeaQuest was my jam even if it was hokey as gently caress seaQuest DSV season 1 is still my jam. I think that bridge set is the best ever. Hilariously there's even Blurays of it out now, apparently it had enough money thrown at it that when they did the CGI renders, they were rendered at higher-than-standard resolution - not high-def, but still high enough to be not as terrible when blown up. And they did 35mm prints of all the episodes for international distribution, so they were able to just rescan those prints and call it good. Like, seaQuest. Who would have ever thought that series would get a Bluray release?
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Oct 20, 2017 16:15
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Dirty posted:But then Michael Ironside showed up. Everything is better with Michael Ironside. I'm ignoring the fact it was cancelled about 10 episodes later. Season 3 was more consistent than season 2, but it wasn't good. And if that final episode was any indication of where the series was going, it needed to be put down.
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Oct 20, 2017 16:47
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Michael Ironside is only in season 3 and it's a bad season. Watch the first season and end there.
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Oct 20, 2017 16:50
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Kibayasu posted:Besides some of the actors these days the only things I remember about Seaquest is that there was a dolphin and two of the later episodes, one which had terrorists or whatever blowing up gigantic global carbon dioxide scrubbers (because we killed all the plants???) and another where some guys were doing the decidedly non-sea-related activity of being commandos in a jungle. That may have been the same episode or neither being an episode of Seaquest at all. The giant scrubbers being blown up was part of the second season opener. I don't remember the jungle commandos but I could totally buy that being a second or third season episode.
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Oct 20, 2017 17:38
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I dunno, the telepath story was less grating for me than some of the early Lochley stuff ("nuhhhh some of us thought it was wrong to turn against your government (that was deliberately massacring its own civilians)" and "why? why does Sheridan trust you??" "because i'm his ex-wife okay???")
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Feb 21, 2018 17:59
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ConfusedUs posted:Ultimately, I sort of dread this episode on each re-watch. I don't even bother. I think I'd only ever bother watching if I was watching along with someone else who'd never seen the series before.
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Feb 22, 2018 20:10
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Milky Moor posted:A drat shame. Warner Bros treatment of this show is really something. Yeah, don't ever let anyone tell you businesses or corporations are governed solely by the almighty dollar. There's plenty of people in charge who will happily shoot themselves in both feet out of utter pettiness and spite.
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May 2, 2018 06:21
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Doctor Zero posted:What do you have a problem with entire plot arcs being resolved by literally drawing names from a hat? I heard it was a dartboard
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May 23, 2018 20:12
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Most of the live-action footage for B5 was shot in 16:9, so a lot of what you're seeing wasn't zoomed or cropped. That said, when they go to effects shots, those weren't created or composited in 16:9, so that's where it becomes zoomed and/or cropped.
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May 25, 2018 20:25
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Jedit posted:^^^ If you don't watch it, you miss a heck of a lot of setup for things that pay off later. It introduces Lyta Alexander, hints at the reason why Sinclair was made commander of B5 at the insistence of the Minbari, reveals the Narn lack of telepaths, and there's even a very subtle clue towards the longstanding alliance between the Minbari and the Vorlons (and possibly also to Sinclair's ultimate fate). I don't think "you get more clues" is really a good enough reason to make a newcomer slog through the pilot, since a lot of those get brought up later anyway; the Narn telepath thing gets brought up in Legacies, the insistence on Sinclair being made commander gets brought up in (I think) And The Sky Full Of Stars, and the audience doesn't need to know Lyta Alexander for her later re-introduction to work.
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Jun 3, 2018 17:46
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V-Men posted:Roddenberry must have gotten kookier with age. In TOS he had Nichelle Nichols read for the parts of Spock and Bones because he hadn't decided that their characters would be male. There were multiple factors that contributed to his deterioration: - In the 60s, he was still relatively young and relatively successful. (Successful compared to other producers? Maybe not as much... but how many writers never manage to get a show on TV in the first place?) By the late 70s, he had sabotaged himself enough times that it was hard to deny that the apex of his career was a three-season show that never got great* ratings. So his natural insecurity only ever got worse. - Paramount took creative control away from him after the trainwreck production of the first Trek movie, relegating him to "creative consultant" where he was promised that his memos would always be read, but there was no obligation to follow his advice/requests/dictates. To be fair, his memos were read, and some of his ideas were allegedly incorporated... but he was still very bitter over losing control, and moreso over the direction that the sequel movies took under producer Harve Bennett. This only played into his natural tendency to blame The Man and squabble with management, but it also spurred him to paranoia when TNG began production - he was always fearful that if a writer or producer became too good, Paramount would kick him out again and install the rising star in his place. - Rabid Trekkies had spent a couple decades exulting Star Trek as great, brilliantly insightful art, and promoting Gene as an equally great and brilliant man. This fed his ego tremendously and made it easier for him to huff his own farts, but also fed a natural desire to blame others for his lack of success elsewhere. - Gene had been smoking pot at least as far back as the late 60s, but in the 70s started experimenting with (and eventually, habitually using) harder drugs and developed a pretty severe drinking habit. This did his cognitive abilities no favors. Between his natural insecurity and his paranoia, he (and his lawyer!) took to rewriting scripts, demanding unnecessary changes, and even just outright sabotaging some of the people who worked on the show. That would have been bad enough under a competent producer (or even Gene at his prime), but by 1986 after years of hard drug abuse, he was rapidly mentally and physically deteriorating. He was known to call in a writer to give notes on a script another writer had written. TNG's first season saw thirty-five writers come and go. Gene (and his lawyer), through abusive behavior and bizarre witchhunts to ferret out perceived traitors, drove off the TOS old guard he'd initially hired on at the beginning. Paramount wound up paying off David Gerrold with a large undisclosed sum to settle an imminent lawsuit that, had Gerrold won, could have seen him awarded a permanent co-creator credit for his work on the TNG writers' bible. How much of the racism and misogyny that erupted late in his life was due to his deterioration, or was simply better-hidden in his past, can't be said for certain. He was certainly always willing to exploit and use the women around him. But it's also entirely true that, just as some people's views evolve to be more enlightened as they grow older, some people's views go the opposite way. In my opinion one of the big takeaways should be that if anyone tries to say "well, starting a sci-fi series is haaaard, look at TNG season 1," they're implicitly admitting they couldn't do better than a senile, drugged-out old man. Which isn't to say that starting a series isn't hard... just don't use TNG as your point of comparison! Farmer Crack-Ass fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jun 6, 2018 |
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Jun 6, 2018 20:25
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skooma512 posted:Season 3 Episode 8: Isn't it two days' time for the White Star, though? I don't think your average freighter is hauling rear end like that. That said I think the transit time for Franklin and Marcus to get from B5 to Mars was like two weeks, although that was on a relatively circuitous route as to avoid being picked up, so maybe a week is more normal? I'm also a little surprised that Babylon 5 can't accommodate some chickens - you'd think you could keep them fed on food waste or something, and you could use the chicken poo poo as fertilizer for the gardens, couldn't you?
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Jul 10, 2018 05:22
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I think the weird thing for me about the Shadow War cycle is that while it's portrayed in dialogue as two superpowers manipulating things behind the scenes to try and bring younger races around to their way of thinking, the Shadow Wars seem to be about rallying the troops and driving off the Shadows themselves rather than their proxies.
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Jul 18, 2018 21:33
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Have to wonder... if there really were so many previous cycles of the Shadow Wars, and if most of those past combatants are no longer around, how many times could the cycle have climaxed with the Vorlons and Shadows running around with their planetkillers? How many interstellar civilizations were annihilated, how many times has sapient life had to crawl up from the muck so the ancient assholes could start all over again?McSpanky posted:That was the former Shadow thralls in the present, like the Drakh using the last Shadow planetkiller and then the plague on Earth. (Presumably some unchained Vorlon allies would've gotten into the mix sooner or later also.) The worlds the Excalibur was researching were victims of previous First Ones war cycles. Ah, I never watched Crusade, so I never heard that before.
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Jul 18, 2018 23:36
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If I remember right the "energy mines" the Narn cruisers shoot were also intended to be part of the EarthForce Omega destroyer's loadout.
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Jul 19, 2018 06:19
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Kingtheninja posted:Ahhh holy poo poo you guys the centauri just beat the narn and londo is stone cold demanding g'kar go to trial. Sheridan looked like he was going to murder londo for yelling at him. Also love that poo poo-eating smile on Sheridan's face as he says "I'm afraid that's not possible. " in response to Londo's demand for G'kar's surrender.
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Jul 19, 2018 06:26
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