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I have read three different time frames in this thread about the Sheridan-Galen tale and I am getting confused.
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??? I'm not entirely sure what "three different time frames" you're referring to.
Both the stories on the
TLT disc take place within the same 72 hour period 10 years after the founding of the Interstellar Alliance. (The planned Garibaldi story would have taken place during the same three days.)
Now, I don't think the exact date of that founding has been established. Arguably it was late in 2261 (almost certainly the very end of December), when the original agreement was announced after the Earth Civil War. You can also make a case that the "official" birthday of the Alliance would be January 2262, when Sheridan was actually inaugurated and the IA became a going concern. (I lean towards the January date, myself.) Either way, we're talking about a difference of a couple of weeks.
The Telepath War begins in 2264, when Lyta and G'Kar return from their two year exile. It is over by 2265 (by which time G'Kar is once again serving on the IA advisory council, as seen in the
Rangers pilot.)
So
TLT takes place in either December 2271 or January 2272.
A Call to Arms, the TV movie that introduced Galen to both Sheridan and the audience, took place in December 2266. Preparations were underway for the celebration of the Alliance's 5th anniversary, either later that month or early the next, but the event hadn't happened yet. The
Crusade episode "War Zone" is set in the first week of January 2267, shortly after the Drakh attack on Earth.
So
TLT basically takes place 10 years after the first episode of season 5 (give or take a couple of weeks), and 5 years after the first episode of
Crusade (also give or take two weeks.)
To put this in further perspective, Londo and G'Kar die in 2278, established in "Midnight on the Firing Line", "War Without End, Part 2" and the framing sequence from
In the Beginning, among other places. That's the same year David Sheridan is given the Urn that Londo gave the Sheridans to hold for his 16th birthday, and the year Sheridan and Delenn end up as Londo's prisoners on Centauri Prime. Those events all take place roughly 6 years after
TLT.
The series finale, "Sleeping in Light", takes place early in 2281, a further 10 years or so after
TLT a little more than 20 years after Sheridan's "death" on Z'ha'dum.
JMS has said that his plan for
The Lost Tales is to jump back and forth in the timeline of the
B5 universe, sometimes by hundreds or thousands of years, through flashbacks and flashforwards and stories-within-stories, though most segments would focus primarily on one or two established characters. (Including recurring roles for new characters "established" by appearances in the
Lost Tales themselves.)
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That reminds me of the other budget constraint impact on the production - the lack of other familiar faces.
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This is only indirectly a budget issue. Since the plan is for 3 episodes per disc, each of about 30 minutes, there is time to tell each story and less room for extraneous cast members. As JMS said about "WWE" and "SiL" you have to decide what the story is
about. Sure it would have been nice, for the fans and the actors, to have Sinclair visit with G'Kar, Londo, Garibaldi, etc. - but it wouldn't have advanced the plot. The same with having more characters mentioned in the toasts around the table. It would have extended the scene for no particular purpose and also undercut the idea that each character named someone personally important to him or her. No one would have mentioned Lyta, for instance, because no one at the dinner had that kind of relationship with her. (The only people might have were G'Kar, who was dead, and Zack Allen, who missed the party.)
Garibaldi was a casualty of the budget, but not because Jerry Doyle would have cost too much. The additional SFX shots, specialized costumes and set pieces that a story set on Mars would have required were just too much for the available dollars. (This is also why the "alien trilogy" was always planned for disc 2 at the earliest. Prosthetics and costumes are pricey, and obviously more affordable when done in combination with station fly-bys and green-screen "sets" and backgrounds already produced for disc 1.)
Don't forget, Warner Bros. would have budgeted this thing to return a profit on the most conservative domestic DVD sales estimates, since a TV sale is by no means assured and international sales are always iffy given exchange rates and other factors. Once they see the actual sales numbers they'll be able to decide (a) whether or not there will be any more of these things and (b) how much they can spend on each.
I'm confident that sales will be more than sufficient to get us disc 2 and beyond, and that the production will gradually build up a "bank" of material from the early stories that can be applied to the later ones at little cost and thus improve the over-all "look" of the project as it moves forward.
(And while pre-orders have been strong,
TLT has
not been in the Amazon Top 10 sales rank since the disc went up on the site. It dropped well down the list after the first few weeks, then climbed again as the release date approached. We may not have access to actual figures, but I'm sure JMS will let us know whether or not sales exceed Warner Bros.'s expectations - as they have
every single other time they've released a B5 project on home video 
- and what that means in terms of future releases.
But it will probably be a few weeks as he is on deadline for his screenplay for the
Silver Surfer feature film, and Clint Eastwood and Angela Jolie are hot to start shooting his original screenplay
The Changeling and he has a few other irons in the fire. With a writer's strike looming, the studios are trying to stockpile as many scripts as they can, so every scribe in Hollywood is pounding his little fingers bloody at this point.
Regards,
Joe
