Babylon 5

The Trump Administration kind of makes the world look Genre Blind.

At least we didn't get nuked back into the middle ages this time around.

To be fair, that was a later government than Clark's.

Also, Earth must have seriously borked itself to be left to rebuild from the Stone Age.

No one wants to give any relief but the Rangers? Yeesh.

I thought the idea was that the other space faring races were basically running on Prime Directive-esque rules of not interfering with pre-space planets, even if they used to have the capability.

I think Babylon five was pretty good about avoiding any Prime Directive shenanigans.

I got the much darker but truer to the setting that Earth's (latest) fascist government had offended every single possible ally.

That, or the monk who mentions the Rangers doesn't know what's happening beyond them. It'd be pretty smart for the Rangers to just call themselves that and not talk about their funding and resource sources because that minimizes the risk to their agents on Earth.

Oh yeah, that's also entirely possible. I think that makes more sense, that the Rangers are just simplifying the narrative for their Earth agents a bit.

By the way, that one scene just about validates Ancient Aliens to a T...

RE: Earth after the great burn.

The survivors HATED technology and anyone off planet as they didn't "save" Earth from the aftermath of the war. Most of Earth's colonies were "screw'em, they got what they deserved" - keep in mind that the 1984-esque faction wanted to bomb the hell out of their enemy's ''civilian' population. So any relief mission would be met with torches and pitchforks.

The Rangers DGAF and so they moved in secret to inch humanity back to the stars - long after any anti-alien "take over the galaxy" ideology had died out. The Rangers made sure that the rebuilt Earth wasn't going to be a replay of the xenophobic past.

Edited by TairaMai on Feb 20th 2023 at 9:12:40 AM

Maybe that would have made a fun miniseries.

That's basically the plot of A Canticle for Leibowitz

On February 22, 1993, The Gathering first aired.

Happy 30th birthday Babylon 5.

Why isn't the pilot considered part of season 1?

Coz it was made separately (As is common for pilots). Hence the various recasting, slight retcons, and character shuffling. It's also a movie as opposed to an episode so different format.

Edited by Ghilz on Feb 22nd 2023 at 1:04:16 PM

Also, is there anywhere we can find the original version?

I'm pretty sure it was released on DVD but not as part of the movies boxset (The longer cut of the Gathering, In the Beginning, Thirdspace, A Call to Arms and River of Souls)

Well, it depends. Cartoons generally include the pilot in the first season, often as a multi-parter. But in cases like this, the pilot serves not just as the start to a season, but as a way of testing the waters for a potential show.

A lot of TV pilots go nowhere, and get released as standalone TV movies (or not at all, serving as more of a proof-of-concept than as something destined for release).

As far as where you can find the original pilot, I know when they first released the B5 HD remaster, I was able to find the pilot on Amazon Prime Video for $0.00 in stunning standard definition. I'm guessing even the folks doing the remaster to put the show on streaming decided the pilot wasn't worth wasting time on.

If you sit down to watch it, it is very much early 90s sci-fi TV

The pilot is in a weird boat. There was a widescreen version, but it got lost and misfiled with the fullscreen masters for the show, so for a long time, it was the only thing that was easy to find in fullscreen, so it had much better looking CGI integration. And then when they did the remaster of the show, they added the non-remastered widescreen version of the pilot as a bonus, despite it looking significantly worse than the version that's been on DVD this whole time.

WB also seems completely uninterested in doing anything with any of the movies.

Interestingly, the second in command from the pilot, Laurel Takashima, was played by Tamlyn Tomita who did a bunch of other roles for a while before resurfacing in Star Trek: Picard as Commodore Oh.

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 22nd 2023 at 8:29:15 AM

It's in the DVD box set as well, which also includes all the miniseries and movies.

Edited by Redmess on Feb 22nd 2023 at 3:09:58 PM

It's very strange that for a long time, the best looking part of the franchise was Crusade, of all things, because TNT fucking it over meant Warner Bros just stuck it on a DVD and released it as is because it wasn't worth giving it the widescreen treatment.

(Legend of the Rangers has the worst goddamn battle sequence in the whole franchise in it and Lost Tales took ages to come out and is very blatantly super low budget)

Edited by Zendervai on Feb 22nd 2023 at 9:11:23 AM

Ironically, despite the low budget, The Lost Tales has the best-looking space battle of the entire franchise because it was a low-budget direct-to-video movie made in 2007, with SFX done by the same folks who worked on Battlestar Galactica and who would later work on The Expanse.

Also Disney's Descendants 2, which was a pretty entertaining movie, BTW, if you like sing-alongs.

The point is, most of a decade moved the state of the art a pretty long ways from where it was in the late 90s.

Edited by AFP on Feb 23rd 2023 at 2:16:46 AM

A dream has been given form.

A new animated movie from Warner Home Entertainment is coming out, written by JMS and 100% complete. Details, including title and release date, will be revealed next week.

Edited by Zarius on May 3rd 2023 at 10:49:04 AM

Huh. Is this as well as the live action reboot? Or instead of?

This was worked on in secret for well over a year, and apparently if it does well enough, JMS is open to doing more of them.

The reboot was still going to happen, but it's looking like JMS wanted to keep the original cast and timeline going at the same time with one of these per year if they did gangbusters

Latest word on the reboot is that it's on hold pending the outcome of the WGA strike. The animated movie was already complete before this went down so it's not impacted by it.