"B5" DVD (and other) news from JMS (1 Viewer)

[Kevin Grey]

Mikel, I hope you didn't take my post as a criticism of Babylon 5. I've been very impressed with the show so far. I have an idea of what happens later in the series and my concern was if the show had the resources to pull it off. I'm so impressed with the stories I'm hoping that JMS has the resources to do justice to it.

A lot of shows noticeably improve their production values over the course of their run and I was wondering if that was the case with Babylon 5. Even if there aren't new sets, I imagine that improvements in lighting and cinematography should go a long way toward improving the overall look.

 

[Moe*A]

Come on guys be fair, the show did improve its look from the second season onwards, the colour schemes and lighting was better. Okay the ship interiors always looked ropy but at the end of the day it was a small budget show. However now rewatching Trek and B5 on DVD after all these years time has defiantly been kind to B5 it doesn’t look at all dated and that has to be down to its simplicity where as TNG just looks old (no bad thing ofcourse).

 

[Tony Whalen]

Kevin, let me just say this... seein' as you are part-way into season one, and awaiting season two to arrive.

You ain't seen nuthin' yet.

B5 just gets better and better. (And I'm not refering to sets...although they do improve a little.)

Enjoy!

 

[Kevin Grey]

Tony, thanks. I'm now worried that I'll finish up the first season before the second season arrives. Its very addicting

Oh, and I know I'm in the minority on this, but I'll hate to see Sinclair go.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

I just don't see any studio in their right mind green-lighting a B5 feature film. Unless whatever JMS has up his sleeve has enourmous appeal outside the B5 fanbase, a story only incidentally related to B5 yet placed in the B5 universe, I cannot see a B5 film doing well at the box office.

Yeah. And who besides a few tolkein geeks would ever sit through almost nine hours of The Lord of the Rings? JMS has one major story from the main period of the B5 story that has been deliberately left untold despite several subsequent projects that overlapped or closely followed the time period - the Telepath War. This is a largely self-contained story with elements similar to the good vs. bad mutant story of the X-Men films and an essential backstory that would be very simple to lay out for newcomers to the universe. (While long-time fans would naturally catch nuances and references that would escape those who never saw the series - just as fans of Tolkein's books got more out of the LotR films than non-readers, although both were able to follow and enjoy the films.)

I don't see any reason why a well-told story in the B5 universe could not work at least as well on the big screen as Trek or X-Files - or Scooby-Doo. JMS and company are used to doing wonders on a pittance (I don't think the series suffered from bad production design so much as it suffered from a lack of money to execute some of the designs everyone would have liked to have done.) In fact, I think the production design was a triumph of art over means. B5 had less than half the budget of TNG, which was itself cheaper than DS9 and Voyager)

I think with $40 or $50 million (which is quite a modest budget by today's standards) JMS could turn out a pretty spectacular film - and WB would be virtually certain of turning a profit even if the film did relatively modest first-run business. Once you figure in not only U.S. domestic box office but foreign ticket receipts (the show is amazingly popular in some unlikely countries), worldwide pay-per-view, premium cable, network and basic cable sales, and finally that inevitable DVD release, it actually becomes hard to see how WB could lose making such a film. If the movie got good word of mouth and a bit of repeat business it could be a certified hit. This absolutely would require going beyond the hard-core fan base, but X-Men had to do that, too. I doubt if one person in four buying a ticket to those films had ever read the comic books. But interesting-looking ads and good word of mouth let the film show "legs" after the hard-core geeks provided a good opening weekend. (OK, interesting-looking ads, good word of mouth and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos dressed in nothing but blue paint. Maybe JMS can talk Claudia into a nude scene. )

Regards,

Joe

 

[Kevin Grey]

How about this- if Firefly, a series cancelled halfway through its first season, can get $60 million for a feature film, then why not Babylon 5? I seriously doubt that Firefly has more fans.

 

[PhilipG]

What matters more to me about B5 is the Stories not the sets. In the day and age of the recent Star Wars movies and the lastest Trek series where look is more important than characters and their development, I think B5 was refreshing.

Yes, stories and characters over sets. I agree. All I was saying was that the weak production design in B5 (okay, production "execution", Joe) brings me out of the show sometimes. It is crucial with these sorts of shows for the audience to suspend disbelief, and for that you need the big three (dialogue, plot and acting). If you only have 1 out of 3 or 2 out of 3 (and B5 was generally strong on plot, bad->great on acting, and diabolically awful->good on dialogue), then other factors begin to weigh in, one of them being production design.

I think it's unfair to say that, in Enterprise, the look of the show is more important than the content. It's a lot more fair to say that the budget is good on Enterprise, and the people in charge of the "look" are 100 times more competent in their jobs than those writing the scripts.

 

[MaraKM]

Funny thing -- when I watched the show back during its initial run, I never had a problem with the look of the sets. But looking at it on dvd now (haven't bought the sets, just Netflix'ed the discs with bonus features), the show does look cheaper to me. I don't know if it's just that I'm not the big fan of the show that I used to be, or that the clarity of dvd is making it look worse.

But, going back to Kevin's original question, I do think that the look improves somewhat in later seasons when they've worked out some of the kinks, and when they can get off of B5 to other sets. (Centauri always looked good, I think)

 

[Tony Whalen]

Rebecca Romijn-Stamos dressed in nothing but blue paint. Maybe JMS can talk Claudia into a nude scene.

BUH!

...


...er... sorry. What were we talking about? I got really distracted for a minute there.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

I don't know if it's just that I'm not the big fan of the show that I used to be, or that the clarity of dvd is making it look worse.

I think it is the clarity of the DVD format. Sometimes if I look really close I can see brush marks in the plywood that they used for the sets. But that's part of the show's charm, and also one of the reasons B5 was the only major TV SF show in the post Trek TOS era to stay within its agreed-to budget and allow its studio to break even or make a small profit during its initial run, rather than going into a deficit during production and only going into the black in reruns. Doug Netter, the former MGM exec who handled the business side of things, had a genius for getting costumes, props and sets made just good enough to be passable on the average TV set receiving the average cable signal. Since nobody expected anyone to watch the show on anything substnantially better, it would have been wasteful to create make-ups or props or what-have-you good enough to survive scrutiny on a 60 foot movie screen, say. Better to use the extra time and money to add a little more CGI to an episode, or to make the one special set being used in a given show that much more spectacular.

Now that we have DVD, we're seeing just how closely Netter cut some of those corners. But this is the same kind of discovery that local TV stations made about how cheesey their news and talk show sets looked in HDTV, when what had been realistically looking brick-wall backdrops at NTSC resolution were suddenly obvious bits of wallpaper in HD. When DS9 reused footage from the 1967 TOS episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" in "Trials and Tribble-ations" Paramount had to digitally clean-up the transfers from the original film prints because modern telecine equipment accurately showed coffee stains on Spock's costumes and seams in the dry-wall of the sets that had never been visible in earlier master tapes.

In a few years B5's physical production values will seem as quaint as a Larry "Buster" Crabbe serial. The original King Kong had women fainting in the aisles when it first appeared and movies were still a kind of magic. Now it is suitable for kids who are hardly fooled by its once state-of-the-art FX. But Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers still have a primative charm and raw story-telling power - enough to have inspired George Lucas and the Star Wars franchise. And King Kong is still a terrific story and a great film

I think B5 will be enjoyed as a great story 50 years from now, just as Kong is still enjoyed, no matter how many "advances" are made in the art of television and cinema.

Regards,

Joe

 

[Kevin Grey]

I started watching the Season 1 DVD on my 55" Mits but stopped almost immediately into the first episode because:

1) The size and resolution of the screen made the Babylon 5 set look like Star Trek TOS era construction.

2) The 16:9/4:3 CGI issue was extremely glaring with lots of aliasing and moire.

I took the DVDs upstairs to my 27" WEGA and I am now MUCH happier. It also has the added bonus of allowing me to watch episodes without being bitched at by my wife for hogging the big screen

 

[TheLongshot]

Well, it IS a TV series, so it should be seen on a TV.

Yeah, I basically do the same, mainly because it is easier to get the wife to watch it with me. (She's going through it for the first time.)

Jason

 

[Dave Scarpa]

If it is a tv movie or Mini series I hope it goes somewhere other than TNT or Scifi. Would the WB Network take a shot on it?

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Would the WB Network take a shot on it?

Not likely. They turned down B5 S5 and Crusade, after all. B5 originally aired on local stations that were members of the Prime Time Entertainment Network, a proto-network that Warner Bros. was a partner in and which took the better part of a decade to get off the ground. PTEN had a stable of shows (including Kung Fu: The Legend Continues and Time Traxx) - all produced by Warner Bros. The problem is that by the time PTEN went on the air, another group within Warner Bros. was trying to start an actually wholly-owned network of its own. This group saw PTEN and all its works as the competition and the enemy. Even when PTEN collapsed and B5 was the only show left, the folks at The WB refused to have anything to do with it or any other PTEN production.

I don't know if that attitude still persists over there (it might if enough of the same personnel are in place), but the other factor was the demographics - The WB has carved out a niche for itself with a small but loyal audience, which skews heavily female. B5, like most SF, skews male. (Although it probably has more female fans than a lot of SF shows do.) It is hard to see Gilmore Girls providing a really good lead-in to a B5 TV movie or vice versa.

Sci-Fi's exclusive deal for the B5 reruns is up, and evidently hasn't been renewed. That doesn't preclude them from getting a new TV movie. TNT is unlikely less because of the bad history between them and JMS than because they don't do a lot of SF generally, and it wasn't and isn't a good match for their core audience when they did.

USA Networks is a possiblity for a mini or a MoW, especially given their new connection with NBC and Sci-Fi, which could be open to co-financing a project to air in different windows on more than one network. (A la L&O: SVU)

I wouldn't rule out the broadcast networks, either, since they seem to be more open to SF projects these days. (Isn't the new version of Lost in Space being developed for a broadcast network?)

Regards,

Joe

 

[John Berggren]

I have no problem watching B5 on my 50" Toshiba. I'm well aware of the production values, but I think it holds up really well. Of course, it helps that the storyline is so engaging.

 

[Philip Verdieck]

Good to finally hear some news. Now where's our S5 DVD set

Time to see if anthing was mentioned in the chat.

 

[Bhavesh]

I have absolutely no problem with the set design. I think the newbie will be quite suprised by how good the War Room set looks.

 

[Kevin Grey]

Bhavesh, this newbie no longer has a problem with the set design. I posted some comments about how improved I found the production values in Season 2 over in this post in the TV discussion forum.

I went back and rewatched Signs & Portents from Season One after getting about halfway through Season 2 and the improvement in the sets is very striking.

 

[Bhavesh]

Glad to see your enjoying it so much:b
Just stay away from spoilers and ur in for a great ride.

 

[Darren Haycock]

Any updates on this? I'm really looking forward to whatever it is he's planning on making in the future...