Inspiration of Babylon 5 (1 Viewer)

[DanielKellmii]

I live in Palm Beach County (Boynton Beach). If you like, I could meet up with Joe and confirm he is real by letting him buy me a beer.

 

[Eric C D]

Thank you Joseph. I has always had wondered how the original story would have gone with just Sinclair.

BTW, for others who are curious about how some other things in the Bab5 universe/story play out, I'd really recommend reading some of the books that have come out. All of the below are at the least to outlines set out by JMS.

To Dream in the City of Sorrows (Sinclair)
Legions of Fire trilogy (Centauri)
Techno-Mage trilogy
Psi-Corps trilogy (Bester)

And in a bit of shameless Guerilla Marketing, if you enjoyed watched B5 let me suggest getting the DVDs for Firefly and watching that series (only one abbreviated incomplete season) before the movie Serenity comes out at the end of Sept.

enjoy

 

[RickGr]

I relly enjoyed B5 during its run but IMO I think the story started to loose steam at the end of the third season.

 

[Michael TLV]

Greetings

hmmm losing steam ... at the end of season 3 ...

Sheridan ... dead
Alliance in disarray ...
Station still a pariah ...
Garibaldi kidnapped ...
No idea where the story will go from here ...


Yup ... no steam at all.

Regards

 

[DanielKellmii]

Michael, just imagine waiting weeks between showings, playing "what time and channel is it on now" and never being quite sure if it would ever be finished. That really added to the suspense. Even my wife liked the show, and she is not anything close to a sci-fi fan.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

And then it was just downhill from there with that boring fourth season - all it had was the climax of three major story lines (and three wars) the answer to mysteries that were raised as far back as the pilot, the resolution of relationships, the discovery of new challenges - why did we ever bother tuning in for that. Talk about an anti-climax.

Joe

 

[Brent Hutto]

Purely from my personal perspective, the dramatic high point of the series was reached at the moment that the prison-cell door opened for a moment and G'Kar squinted in the sudden flood of light. At that point there was plenty of "steam" left in the story but it was waning--imperceptibly at first but winding down none the less.

Now if you want to talk about no steam, then we're in Season 5 territory.

 

[George_W_K]

I felt the same way about Season 5. I don't know if it has anything to do with me watching it on DVD, instead of an episode a week.

 

[Mike Broadman]

The beginning of season 5 had no "steam" because real-life circumstances prevented the pace and flow of the story from happening the way it was supposed to. The first half of season 5 suffers. The second half, however, is as good as seasons 3 and 4.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Exactly. The fourth season should have ended with the cliff-hanger of "Intersections in Realtime" with Sheridan in enemy hands, with the resolution of that thread coming 4 or 5 episodes into S5 - around the time that the Teep storyline that would have been quietly percolating since late S4 would have boiled over. Ivanova's latent telepathy, a plot element established early in S1, would finally have paid off. The near-certainty that S4 was going to be the last one and Claudia Christian's 11th hour decision to quit (literally a matter of weeks before the start of shooting on S5, when the first scripts were in progress) caused the early part of S5 to be distorted. Also one of the reasons for giving the Telepath storyline such prominence was the part it (and the subsequent Telepath War) were meant to play in the backstory of Crusade - which was already in the works. (Establishing the origins of the Teep Crisis in S5 and aboard Babylon 5 would have been one way of linking the two series.)

Regards,

Joe

 

[JediFonger]

howdy folx. this is the most recent rant on B5. thus begins my own rant.

B5 was one of those shows that i missed when i was still in HS. i wanted to rectify that situation and therefore i finished the entire series+movies+crusades and cliffnotes of the novels last September. out of the shows i've seen since, it is still haunting me. it is, without a doubt, the best SF epic TV show ever made.

the problem (aside from season5) is that the cinematography stunk. can't they pick ANOTHER angle to cover shots? god, it was terrible. that's one of the factors (and season5) that keeps this from outranking X-Files (think cinema). having said that, it's still a seminal turning point in TV history.

i would have loved to see more story threads wrapped up INSIDE the TV show instead of extended universe (novels). stories like the rogue telepath&G'Kar's adventure hinted in Legend of the Ranger, the son, Psi War, Bester, etc. i didn't like that lingering feeling.

if they fixed these issues, i think the show would have ended beautifully in with Sleeping In Light. it really did give us an emotion not unlike the end of LOTR. that of loss, rememberance and love for a time long gone, etc.

 

[todd s]

YiFeng,

I would respond...But, I am sure Joseph DeMartino will and do much better job.
Still love the show...flaws and all.

 

[TheLongshot]

Well, in real life, things don't wrap themselves up in a tidy little bundle. I think that was what JMS was going for. I know some were disappointed in how B5 ended, but B5 is about the story of Babylon 5 and the ending was the end of the story for the space station.

Jason

 

[Michael TLV]

Greetings

Well if more people had watched Legend of the Rangers ... then we'd still be in the B5 Verse ... so we only have ourselves to blame.

(Well those people anyway ... I watched ...)

Regards

 

[JediFonger]

legend of the rangers. HAR HAR =). i have seen it. sucked big time.

jason, it's not a generic criticism, it's a very direct one. even set-based shows like desperate housewives, most of trek and nearly everything else that's ever been made has superceded the cinematography of B5. it's just one of the most atrocious thing about the series. see, there's a minimum level (just like min. wage). and th cinematography just doesn't even meet that minimum level! *sigh*. so much wasted.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Two things: The show was shot in Super35 and intended for both 4:3 and 16:9 presentation, but some directors clearly favored the 4:3 composition. In addition the CGI footage and the composite shots only existed as 4:3 video. The producers had hope to go back and re-render the CGI and recomposite the live action/cgi/rotoscope combination shots for an eventual widescreen release (they were thinking laserdisc) but that never happened. Since the DVDs are widescreen only, and since the widescreen masters were produced on the cheap for the Sci-Fi Channel (US) broadcasts, some of the shots were very badly cropped, and some of the episodes have a claustraphobic look because they are basically 4:3 shows matted to 16:9. In addition B5 was produced on a per episode budget of something under a million dollars. That's 1/2 to 1/3 of the Trek series airing at the same time (the Voyager pilot alone cost more than the first two seasons of B5) and that meant less time to make things pretty. (In part this reflected a deliberate philosophy on the part of the B5 producers. While other shows often shot until after midnight, paying overtime to the crew and keeping the cast waiting for the latest rewrites, B5 rarely shot later than 8 PM. People got to go home and spend time with their families, nobody got burnt out, and the scripts - except for last minute line fixes and adaptations to sets and blocking - were often locked weeks in advance of shooting. That didn't always allow for reshoots and pick-ups, but it made for a happier cast and crew and explains why there was relatively little turnover on either side of the camera over five years.)

Regards,

Joe

 

[Yee-Ming]

Hmmm, it isn't something that I've ever thought about much, what working on a TV production is like, but if rarely working past 8pm is considered a bit of a luxury in the industry, with midnight sessions common, it can't be a cushy job at all. At least for the stars, they have the attendant fame and fortune as comforts, but for the crew? Ouch.

 

[Kevin Grey]

I thought B5's cinematography was *very* pedestrian in Season One but I can't really agree beyond that. I thought there was some great camera work in Season 2 and beyond.

 

[JediFonger]

joe, regardless of schedule, the final end product came out badly (presentation-wise). it's certainly not a show that someone would recall being "cinematic" by any means. that is one of the biggest factors in having legions of MORE fans proclaiming it something more than it currently is.

compare almost ANY show with a modicum of camera angles and what the conventional angles/cuts are, B5 falls very short. alas, it is one of its most fatal flaws.

 

[TheLongshot]

Fatal flaw? Hardly. While I agree that the cinematography wasn't a strength of the series, I hardly think it was a flaw either. If so, most of the Star Trek shows suffer the same flaw, since to my eyes, the cinemathgraphy is very similar.

Also, those of us of an older generation are used to lower production values. (See: anything SF made by the BBC.) For the quality of the story, that more than makes up for any weaknesses in production values.

Jason