BABYLON 5 Bargains

In June Warner Home Video quietly released repackaged season sets of Babylon 5 with new SKU numbers and a higher MSRP.  (I presume because they're expecting sales volumes to be relatively low this many years after the original release.)  Apparently the "new" sets are in new slim-line cases with sturdier center hubs.  (The old cases were notorious for discs shaking loose and sometimes being damaged.) 

The discs have an MSRP of almost $60 and a street price of around $42.  The good news is that stores that still have old stock on hand have cut the prices on those sets to about $20 each - so this is a good time for anyone who has wanted to pick the series up to do so.  These sets have exactly the same transfers and extras as the "new" 2009 discs, they just come with bulkier cases and a slightly higher chance of catching a damaged disc.

Regards,

Joe

Joseph, the packaging sucks. I'll stick with the original releases that I have.

The packaging? If you want to know what the new packaging looks like? Check out the packaging for; Matlock Season 1 and Fastlane The Complete Series. That's all it is. Warner Brothers decided to fool everyone into thinking that these new releases are "new releases" and the packaging looks like they might be thinpacks. Don't be fooled.

Warner Brothers created a type of "slider/slipcase box." When you "pull" the actual DVD box out of the packaging, the DVD box is similar to that used for the Matlock Season 1 release. It looks really gay.

I caught sight of the new packaging at the local Best Buy and I'm not impressed at all.

I posted those pictures under the Amazon entry for that release, in case you wondered where they were.

All the more reason to buy the "old" sets at the current fire sale prices.  




Well, to be fair, all packaging changes get new SKUs for legitimate reasons, and new SKUs are treated as "new" items by the inventory systems that retailers use.  It isn't like WB issued a press release about a "new" edition of Babylon 5 to the industry press to reach consumers.  They just updated their catalog and the sales stuff going to distributors and retailers.  The only reason most people know about the "new" release is that they've seen the new boxes in stores or did a search for Babylon 5 DVDs on sites like Amazon.com or Deep Discount and were surprised to find too different editions with two different prices for each boxed set.  (I first heard about this from a Canadian fan who had run across this at a local store and who actually did think that these discs had new transfers - as if WB would spend the money to do that at this point, or the CGI and composite shots could be made to look any better without being redone from scratch.)  He posted a message on the moderated B5 news group to that effect, and has spent the last two weeks arguing that they might be new releases, even after I quoted an e-mail from Gord Lacey at TVonDVD.com at him.  Apparenlty he'll need to see a note from JMS himself, hand-written in his own blood, before he'll believe what I've told him.

Regards,

Joe

Completely off topic, I know.  But I'm surprised at you, Mark.  What you're telling me is this new package looks exactly like me, then?  Well hot damn...I'm sitting on the shelf somewhere.  :)  Please be a bit more responsible in the language you use from now on.

Back on topic: personally, I prefer slimcases to the book-style the original releases came in.  Other "book" packages like Smallville continually fell apart on me, not to mention they take up a ton of room.  If the package art is the same, I don't see how this is any different than what Fox did with The X-Files.  The original, fold-out packs were available for ages and then they dropped some extras (which Warner isn't doing...?) and repacked in slimcases.  And they're on sale regularly for $20. 

Edit: I saw the pics for the Matlock set.  It's just like 9/10 of the Blu-ray muti-disc sets out there.  If the case is smaller and contains all the material, no problem on my end.


Edited by Jason_V - 8/11/2009 at 05:47 pm GMT

Mark,

You may wish to be a little more politically correct about your 
description of the Matlock case.  You may find that there are
some who are offended by the remark.

Thanks for understanding.

Oops, sorry, Ronald. I didn't mean to offend anyone. I'll be careful next time. I was only referring to the packaging of the sets, not the actual shows. 

I personally like Matlock and I have the first two seasons. Just waiting for the right price on Season 3. 

The packaging is more of the standard "fat DVD-cases" rather than the bookshelf format from the earlier releases. I was hoping that the new sets would be thinpack rather than what they turned out to be.

My apologies to anyone who was slighted by my post. Wasn't intended to be.

Quote:
Mark, it doesn't honestly matter if you were talking about the shows, the package or anything else.  The fact is you wouldn't say the packaging was "black," would you, for instance?  I'd guess not.  Using "gay" as a pejorative in any context is nothing but ignorant.  Gay is a lazy way of saying you don't like something in this context.  A better word?  Un-user friendly.  Stupid.  Unwieldy.  

I won't take up any more time here.  If you wanna chat about this, feel free to get at me on PM.

 Guys, it seems like an honest mistake.  Mark admitted so.
Take it outside of the forum from hereonin.

Thanks, Ron.

To the Original Poster. It really doesn't matter what anyone says about the production of these sets. Babylon 5 is one the best Military Sci Fi shows to come along in a long time. I actually like Babylon 5 a lot better than Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica for the simple fact that it's hard core Military Sci Fi.

Also, since Babylon 5 seems to always be on sale at Best Buy, I imagine you can find each season for around $20 each, no matter the packaging. I would suggest picking up the first four seasons first. You can pass on the last season and the Movie Boxed Set, since those deal with events outside of the television series.

If you're on a budget, I would start with Babylon 5 Season 2 since Seasons 2-4 make up a sort of trilogy collection and deal exclusively with The Shadow War.

After you purchase the first four seasons, I would suggest purchasing the last season and then the movie collection/boxed set. Personally, the only good movies out of that boxed set is "The Gathering" and "In The Beginning." "The Gathering tells about how Sinclair came to Babylon 5 and how he put together the coalition. "In The Beginning" tells the story about the "Battle of the Line" and details the war between "Minbar and Earth." It really is a fascinating movie told from the point of view of Emperor Mollari.

Thanks for the advice, Mark but I've owned the B5 discs since they were first released.  (In fact, I spent years before they were released actively lobbying Warner Bros. to get the show out on DVD.)  I opened this thread just to let folks know there were some bargains available. 


As I said earlier:



And sure enough, Best Buy is currently selling them for $49.95 (only the new sets appear to be listed on their website) because both the MSRP and the wholesale price for the sets is higher.  That's $10.00 off the list price. 

Also I must disagree with you about the 5th season and the movie sets.  Anyone who skips the 5th season misses the series finale ("Sleeping in Light"), which brings the story to a satisfying conclusion and which is worth the price of the set all by itself, plus a bunch of worthwhile extras.  And that is without counting the other 21 episodes.  While S5 starts slowly (largely because the producers telescoped the 4th season in the belief that the show would not be renewed), it builds through a series of events critical to the major characters to the story's climax.  Along the way there are a couple of "off-format", love 'em or hate 'em episodes, like "The Corps is Mother, the Corps is Father", "Day of the Dead" and "A View from the Gallery" (for the record, I'm in the "love 'em" camp), but even if you count them as "bad" episodes, B5 S5 still has a higher average episode quality than most TV series.  As for the TV movies - all technically fall "within the series" because all come before the series finale, which takes place 20 years after the events of season 4.  Even if you only consider the 2258 to 2262 time period covered by the core of the show, Thirdspace falls "within" the series (mid-season 4), while River of Souls takes place in 2263, about 6 months after "Objects at Rest".  While Legend of the Rangers and The Lost Tales don't work as well as the other films (largely owing to budget issues and studio/network politics), they're actually a cut above typical SF TV movies, and A Call to Arms is a very good B5 adventure, despite being set after many of the characters had left the station.  (It also sets up the spin-off series, Crusade, but it is really the last Babylon 5 TV movie, not the first Crusade adventure.  Only two of the major Crusade characters even appear in it, and the leading actor doesn't.) 

Regards,

Joe

The reason I mentioned the past season was the fact that it doesn't have a central storyline ... the movies, the remaining three movies, all take place after the television series (prior to the series finale which takes place 20 years afterwards). 

I'd also add that the second half of season 5 through the end are in the tradition of the finest of B5 episodes. From Meditations on the Abyss through Objects At Rest you've got a run of episodes that can hold its own with the best of seasons 2, 3, and 4.

I assume that "past" is a typo for "last" season.  And of course the last season has a central storyline.  It has a couple, in fact.  1) It is about "empire building", about the new political realities that exist in the aftermath of all those wars and how our characters react to them.  2) Intertwined with this story (because the Centauri present the new order with its first major test) is the continuation of Londo's story.  Those two threads, connected as they are, form the spine of the season, and lead us into "SiL".  Finally there is the unfinished business of Psi Corps and the telepaths, a problem that will continue to fester within the B5 universe until it finally explodes.  The events of S5 show how a tragic series of missteps leads to the fuse for that explosion being lit, even though the actual blast takes place during the period after main action of the season. 

Babylon 5 was a long story told in a series of "novels" for television.  If you consider each season to be one volume in a series, you can trace the normal dramatic pattern:  Introduction of characters and background, rising actions, dramatic climax, and denoument.  Just as the last chapters of a book, the last act of a movie or the tag of a TV show wrap up the story by showing us what happens after the villain is defeated, and how events have affected the characters, so B5 S5 shows us what happened after the guns fell silent, and how the character ended up where we see them later.  (Especially in Londo's case, via various flashforwards.)  "Sleeping in Light" is then the final coda for the over-all arc, which was the story of how the people who passed through B5 in a particular five year period transformed the known galaxy.

As JMS himself has said, in many ways the story of B5 is the story of Londo Mollari as much as of any other single character.  There is a reason he was given the opening narration for The Gathering and why he literally told the story of In the Beginning.  Much of the future history that is the B5 story would have come from Londo's memoirs, as completed by Vir Coto.  (There are echoes here of Bilbo, Frodo and Sam and the Red Book of Westmarch, but much stronger echoes of the Roman emperor Claudius and his lost history of the first Caesars.  People sometimes fixate so much on the obvious surface resemblances between B5 and LotR that they miss the much deeper connections to Greek and Roman history and mythology, Arthurian legend and a host of other literary and cultural influences on the story.) 

I'd just hate for anyone who hasn't watched the whole epic to get the wrong idea about S5.  I think some new viewers have their minds poisoned against it before they ever see it by older fans.  I suspect a lot of the initial dislike of S5 was due to impatience.  After ther whirlwind of S4 we were impatient to get on with it - to find out what happened to Londo, to see some of the future we had only glimpsed (there were rumors the last several episodes might take place years down the road from the rest of the series.)  Waiting while the story essentially restarted after a pause to absorb all of the events of S4 - and waiting a week between episodes - was tough. I know I kept hoping each new episode was going to feature the plot threads I most cared about, and I found it frustrating to find after seven days that that the focus of the story was somewhere else.  But that was mostly a matter of my imposing my own expectations on the show.  I had a direction I thought it should be moving in mind, and was annoyed when JMS didn't go there.  I was forgetting which of us was the viewer, and which the writer.  :-) 

(It didn't help that the seeming need to end the series at S4 meant that the telepath colony plot was not started during the Shadow War, as an organic part of the plot the way JMS intended.  Ginning it up as a new story ate up more of the first part of S5 than he would have liked and added to the "slow" feel to the season for those who watched it when it originally aired.) 

One thing I have since noticed though, with both veteran fans and new viewers who only discovered the series in reruns or on disc.  S5 "plays" a lot better when you can watch at least one episode a day.  It plays even better when you can watch two or three. 

Regards, 

Joe