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.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
rollin' on dubs
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
I tried to walk like an Egyptian and now I need to see a Cairo practor....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 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
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

The Trump Administration kind of makes the world look Genre Blind.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.