Any Babylon 5 S2 reviews yet?

I've seen none as yet.
JMS posted this link to a preview of it on the RASTB5M newsgroup though
http://movies.yahoo.com/movies/feature/babylon5dvd.html

I think they are speeding things up slightly. I think season 3 is tentatively scheduled for Sept, instead of November as originally thought.

Blu,

You should be pleasantly surprised with the second season it is much better than the first (IMHO of course). The story picks up momentum, and the acting, production values, and cgi are all much better.

Paramount had no doubt that the various Trek series would sell well on DVD and that they'd make a profit on them. The various Treks were one of the handful of TV series that succeeded on VHS and LD when 90% of TV shows failed. So they were willing and able to invest millions of dollars up front to prep the shows for DVD release. The reason they were able to release TNG on such an ambitious schedule is that virutally all of the work was finished before the first set was released. Paramount had started preparing it for DVD release the year before it appeared on store shelves - and they went right into working on DS9 as soon as they finished with TNG.

Warner Bros. had seen B5 flop on VHS and LD and was hightly skeptical of the show's appeal to DVD buyers. They certainly weren't going to master 110 episodes in advance before the first season even went on sale - which is exactly what they would have had to do to match Paramount's Trek release schedule. Even Fox, which pioneered TV on DVD, is approving X-Files on a season-by-season basis as sales figures come in. That's another series they could never make a go of on VHS, the best they could do were some "best of" sets.

So Paramount and Trek are hardly the standard against which others should be judged. As has so often been the case, they are an exception, not the rule.

Regards,

Joe

I already know for a fact that S3 is in the post-production phase, so an earlier-than-November release is entirely possible! Don't necessarily count on it, though.

Right, JMS recently mentioned finishing his commentary tracks just before the deadline for S3, so things seem to be moving along. I suspect that based on the strong S1 sales and brisk S2 pre-orders that Warner Bros. is now at least willing to overlap work on the sets, starting preliminary work on the next season as the previous one nears completion. This could cut the gap between seasons from six to four or even three months, but that is the best they will probably be able to do, realistically. There is still the Warner Bros. UK production list that shows S3 in September though...

Regards,

Joe

Wow, Joe, that's the best explanation of season set timing I've seen yet. Thanks for sharing your extensive B5 knowledge with us!

All I can offer in the way of information is that Season Two is already #15 on the Amazon sales chart. Pretty impressive, considering there haven't been any reviews yet.

I can't complain about the job Warner is doing on the DVD sets now. I'll only hate them now for making it so I'll never know the full story behind the virus thing in Crusade.

Sorry, you can't hate them for that one, either. Crusade's premature end was TNT's fault, not Warner Bros. The studio would have been delighted to continue producing the show. (And they made every effort to sell it elsewhere in the interval between the cessation of shooting and the broadcast of the first episode.) TNT made it impossible for the producers to continue with the show, and also made it impossible for The Sci-Fi Channel or anyone else to pick the series up in 1999 by holding on to its exclusive Babylon 5 contract. Nobody wanted an untested sequel without the already-successful original, and TNT kept B5 in order to ensure that Crusade stayed dead.

Regards,

Joe

P.S.

The virus thing was not the main story in Crusade. A whole other plot element would have been introduced by the S1 cliff-hanger, and a cure to the Drakh plague would have been found in S2. The plague story was a way into the main story, much as the Minbari War and Sinclair's missing 24 hours were a way into the main B5 story. How much of the over-all B5 arc could you have predicted from watching only the first 13 episodes of B5?

And SOME B5 fans think that Crusade just was not that good anyway, TNT or not.

Oh yeah, well, then, I'm mad at Warner for putting the B5 movie disc in a snapper. Down with Warner! :b

I understand why some didn't like Crusade, but, personally, I started to get into it toward the final episodes. Wish it had a chance to develop. Legend of the Rangers, on the other hand...

But those fans would be wrong. Of the 13 completed episodes, 8 had substantial changes made to them at TNT's behest. And because the season was pre-planned and scheduled for maximum economy, several episodes that were planned for shooting later in the production year, but which would have aired earlier in the season, were never made. The result is that the 13 episodes produced are not the 13 that were meant to be see first - several episodes that would have come in between some of the existing shows were never filmed. There is actually no sensible order in which the existing 13 can even be presented because of this.

If you want to get a sense of the series JMS set out to make, watch only the 5 episodes featuring the red and grey uniforms, starting with "Racing the Night" and ending with "Each Night I Dream of Home". Those are the shows that were shot first, while the series was in the hands of TNT productions in Los Angeles, before TNT corporate in Atlanta decided to involve themselves in day-to-day production issues. You might also want to watch "Appearances and Other Deceipts", which is a thinly-veiled pardoy of TNT's interference with the show - one which went right over the heads of the TNT executives involved.

Regards,

Joe

Joseph,

Why was TNT so intent on killing Crusade?

They decided they didn't want the show when JMS, after compromising on a number of points, finally dug his heels in and refused to dumb the show down to the degree they wanted it. Technically it was less a matter of TNT cancelling the project than of Babylonian Productions (with the support of Warner Bros.) refusing to produce the show to TNT's specs and TNT refusing to buy the show Babylonian wanted to produce.

At that point the last thing TNT wanted was for WB and Babylonian to take the show to Sci-Fi and turn it into a hit. That would make the execs who killed it at TNT look stupid. So they used their exclusive contract for the B5 reruns as a way to keep Sci-Fi from buying Crusade. Someone familiar with the discussions described TNT's proposal for relinquishing its B5 rights as "a ransom note." The price they set was far higher than any program director in his/her right mind would pay for the series - and they knew it.

TNT ultimately let Sci-Fi buy them out of their B5 contract when it had about six months to run - for next to nothing. Crusade was safely dead by then, and they didn't have much of a bargaining position. Sci-Fi wanted to air B5 starting in the fall, but if TNT played hard-ball Sci-Fi was prepared to wait six months and debut the series the following spring, when TNT's contract would have lapsed without their paying a dime. But TNT did manage to air all 110 episodes one more time before "handing over the keys" by running it seven days a week (and twice on a couple of Saturdays) in an effort to hurt the show's ratings on Sci-Fi. It really did become an ego thing with them, especially after JMS started talking about what had happened on the internet and at conventions.

Regards,

Joe

According to a canadien Etailer my B5 2nd Season Has shipped

It's shipping?

Yeah, I got a "just shipped" notice this morning too. Looks like I'll have my copy before the week is out.

I can't wait for this one. It brings me closer to the best Seasons 3 and 4. I wish they would speed up the releases a little too but I'm happy they are coming at this point after the long fight and wait we had for this show on DVD.
I suspect that if the sales continue to do well we will see a Crusade set possibly with the other 4 T.V. movies thrown in to fill out the set. I would buy it.
I think Crusade would have been a great show if it was given the chance to at least make it through the 2nd season. As Joe also pointed out what would you think of Babylon 5 if there was only the 1st 13 episodes and nothing more.

*Sigh* For various reasons it made the most sense for me to order from Amazon.com this time around - which means I'll have to wait until next week because they never ship before street date.

BTW, got an e-mail from Warner Bros. today, and the features list includes "gag reel" as one of the items. Warner Home Video has two different web pages about the S2 set, one of which mentions that gag reel. Some retailers have picked up that features list, others the one with no gag reel listed. JMS has been his usual helpful self. Someone on the moderated newsgroup asked what this meant, and if it were some kind of mistake (because he has been very adamant that the full gag reels sometimes shown at B5 conventions could never be included on the DVDs because of contract and rights issues.) But he simply ignored the message and hasn't commented on the issue at all. The man is definitely part Vorlon. One of the reasons I've been looking forward to a review of the set is to find out if the "gag reel" is just the one or two clips that were aired on the Dick Clark "Bloopers" shows (for which the studio has rights) or something more extensive.

Loved the preview stuff, now that I finally got to watch it. (Recently upgraded both RealPlayer and Windows Media Player and neither of the damned things would play streaming media until I uninstalled and reinstalled them. )

Regards,

Joe

I got the shipping notice also. Hopefully i will have a b5 marathon this weekend

capt

And several TV movies. All of which happened while the show as being handled by the TNT Productions people. Things were fine until the suits in Atlanta became involved. And I've always thought that S5 played better on repeated viewings than it did in its original run. I think one reason people so hated the teep arc is that each week when they tuned in they were hoping for something else, knowing that there were only "x" number of episodes left, and that there were so many story threads to deal with.

Regards,

Joe

Hmmm. Both of those were season 3 outtakes... "War Without End" and "Severed Dream" plus one from Season 1 ("Survivors"). Be kind of strange to send them out with season 2.

Mine shipped from Amazon.com on monday. Though I won't be getting it before May...

Just like with season 1, I think I'll be getting season 2 through chapters. I'm gonna look around first though.

Just a note to any Canadian B5 fans:

Futureshop will probably have B5:S2 for $75.99 like they did for the last season. Right now their website shows $79.99 but it will probably be marked down lower in store.

Has anyone found a better B&M price than that in Canada?