Any new news regarding season box sets for Babylon 5?.... (1 Viewer)

[todd s]

The last I heard was that the creator of the show said Warner was almost finished working on the first season. Hopefully, sales were strong enough on the In The Beginning/The Gathering disc to justify releasing more. But, their is no way of knowing how many sold and how many were needed to sell to convince Warner to make more.

 

[nolesrule]

Still no official announcement on any Babylon 5 DVDs other than the single disc already released.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

What JMS said in October was that WHV was close to "conforming" all the episodes of S1 for DVD (I think they had three to go at that point.) I'd be a lot more excited about this if I had some idea what "conforming" meant, exactly. Sounds to me like a very preliminary (and probably inexpensive) step that they wanted to get out of the way so they'd be that much closer to doing something when/if the final decision is made. In any event the word doesn't suggest "authoring" or "compressing" or anything really germane to DVD production. Maybe they just produced the 480 line anamorphic "originals" from the new hi-res masters.
The day the discs hit stores he posted a follow-up message saying that based on the response so far (which could only have been to pre-order numbers at that point) WHV was "close" to greenlighting at least "the first couple of seasons." But there has been no word from either JMS or WHV since. I'd sure like to know what's going on, but right now it looks like nobody's talking.
Regards,
Joe

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Keith:

I'm getting a "server not found" error using that link, but it is obvious that Gordon is quoting the same JMS post that I referred to above - in which he does not say that they are working on the DVDs, merely that they are "conforming" the first season episodes to get them ready for DVD release:

...due to the response to the movie B5 DVDs it's my understanding that WB is almost there on deciding to release the first few seasons -- jms

So even by December no firm decision had been made, and clearly whatever was being done in October was merely "getting ready to get ready." It isn't like they had mastered all but three episodes for DVD.

Regards,

Joe

 

[David Stone]

Well, it can't be soon enough for my family. I only pray to God that they somehow find someone with brains at Warner Home Video to package them & set MSRP. If they loose all sense of reality and try to market them like Star Trek with 2 episodes per $15, we can safely assume a complete failure for the entire project. At 22 episodes per season, only few crazed fans will pay a combined $330 per season and collect all 5 seasons. (No television re-runs are worth $1650 when you already have them on VHS tape.)

Would Warner Home Video do something this stupid? Well, these are the same people who still think we want cheap cardboard snap cases instead of sturdy plastic cases, who released "Space Jam" a second time as a Special Edition still in full-frame format only, and who caused confusion just this fall when they released "Cats and Dogs" and "Willy Wonka" in seperate full-frame & widescreen editions (and the widescreen "Willy Wonka" didn't hit the streets until 2 months after the full-frame version did).

(sorry, about the rant, but I'm rapidly loosing faith)

Selling each complete season in a boxed set for $79-$99 each would be on par with the X-Files DVDs. We'll keep our fingers crossed.

 

[Rob T]

Warner knows we want the season box sets for the show.

Warner also knows that we hate those snapper cases.

I find them to be a bit stuck in their ways though and they don't like change too much. Afterall, not too many distribution companies are applying the VHS methods to DVD anymore. Warner is one of the few, from what I've seen.