Babyon 5 - you're probably never getting more...

Frankly? Good. I wish Crusade had lasted, and wouldn't mind JMS continuing to try to complete the story. But the original series shouldn't be redone, even bearing in mind that it could do with a proper widescreen remaster and redone CG. That cast was lightning in a bottle. As Lucas found doing Star Wars (the original film), time and budget pressures can yield something not exactly what the creator originally envisaged -- but that unexpectedly surpasses them.
 
I don't think they should reboot or mess with the original in anyway. This just means that absolutely nothing from the B5 universe will ever get made.
 
Right, which... I want Crusade to finish. I want to maybe see more new stories from that universe. I would like a proper restoration of the original series. But knowing what JMS wants to do, I can live with this if it means no reboot.
 
The real shame of it is that there will probably never be a way to reintegrate the mix of filmed and digital footage for modern displays. So, your DVD copies are about as good as it's gonna get, most likely.
 
:darnkidsI would love to have B5 remastered.
Guess I have to keep enjoying it on my ipod classic were the film and old CGI really doesn't matter.
 
As much as I miss all those in the cast who have died, I miss Michael the most. When I was living in New York, we frequented the same independent genre bookstore down on Chambers Street. His son went to Stuyvesant at the end of said street, so he tended to be there every week for B5 viewing parties with the owner and several of us fans. I asked him about the blue spacesuit he wore in "Babylon Squared" and he confirmed it was the unused blue suit from Discovery's pod bay in 2001. He had a serious nerdgasm when they pulled that out in wardrobe.

Then I moved to Japan and Sinclair was written off the show and I never found out why until years later.

Bruce and Claudia are wonderful to hang out with, too, though I have done that far, far too briefly. And Julie Caitlin Brown has organized several events a friend of mine has volunteered for. She knows I'm a B5 nerd so she sent me a pic of her with Julie while they were setting up. I responded with something along the lines of "I LOVE YOU, NA'TOTH!! ......... Or, I mean, tell her I said hi." Julie thought that was hilarious and we've been friends since. :$

All that and more is why I feel that cast and that crew in that place at that time are an unrepeatable phenomenon. I will hold out hope, though, that new leadership at WB in a few years might green light a new full-res transfer from the original 16:9 live-action film footage and do a straight VFX update in the same resolution, saturation, and aspect ratio.
 
Bruce is one of “the Guys” no airs about him, my friend gets Christmas calls from him every year.

Andy K was also a great guy albeit with a strange but wicked sense of humor, when I was introduced to him outside where he was smoking a cigarette I mockingly said, god save the queen there she is smoking a cig! To which he did a curtesy and then extended his hand.

Peter would also just show up at fans houses knock on the door and shoot the chit with them, and the good Doctor at the cons in England would go up to peoples rooms and just hang out.

And Jerry was always fun to be around as well

They were certainly a great bunch that as you say will never be duplicated again



 
At least the DVD set is wide screen.

Alas, fake widescreen. They took the 4:3 broadcast version and cropped the top and bottom of the image. This is why the tops of people's heads and their chins are cut off in close-ups. Most irritating is in "And Now for a Word" where the fake Psi Corps ad has half the top and almost the entire bottom line of the "subliminal" message cut off and unreadable.
 
Or you can just watch it on Amazon Prime. I read it is available.

Sent from my Hewlett Packard 48G using Tapatalk
 
What I wouldn't mind would be mini-series adaption of the book series that follows Londo after the events of season 5 where he's become emperor. That was a pretty good read and tied in nicely with what was happening, to a degree, in Crusade. It really made Londo a really tragic character and you really felt sad for him because even though he had achieved his dream of becoming emperor, he was not able to enjoy it. But, sadly, Peter is too old now to play Londo at the age he's supposed to be in the books and they'd have to use de-aging CG for most of the series to pull it off.
 
I've only read two of the book trilogies, that one and the Technomage one. Those are both excellent. Speaking of that I just watched the episode last week when Comet was doing a B5 marathon, where Londo becomes Emperor. I think that did a pretty good job of showing him as a tragic character. The scene with G'Kar where he tells Londo that he forgives him and that they're friends and Londo says he won't be able to see him again was pretty sad. Then Londo says when he had everything all he wanted was power, then when he got power he had nothing.
 
As much as I miss all those in the cast who have died, I miss Michael the most. When I was living in New York, we frequented the same independent genre bookstore down on Chambers Street. His son went to Stuyvesant at the end of said street, so he tended to be there every week for B5 viewing parties with the owner and several of us fans. I asked him about the blue spacesuit he wore in "Babylon Squared" and he confirmed it was the unused blue suit from Discovery's pod bay in 2001. He had a serious nerdgasm when they pulled that out in wardrobe.

Then I moved to Japan and Sinclair was written off the show and I never found out why until years later.

Bruce and Claudia are wonderful to hang out with, too, though I have done that far, far too briefly. And Julie Caitlin Brown has organized several events a friend of mine has volunteered for. She knows I'm a B5 nerd so she sent me a pic of her with Julie while they were setting up. I responded with something along the lines of "I LOVE YOU, NA'TOTH!! ......... Or, I mean, tell her I said hi." Julie thought that was hilarious and we've been friends since. :$

All that and more is why I feel that cast and that crew in that place at that time are an unrepeatable phenomenon. I will hold out hope, though, that new leadership at WB in a few years might green light a new full-res transfer from the original 16:9 live-action film footage and do a straight VFX update in the same resolution, saturation, and aspect ratio.

Minor thing, but I wanted to address it here.

As I understand it, the elements for the mixed live-action/CG shots are impossible to recreate at this point. The live action footage as a separate element is lost. You could re-do whatever CG you want, but the live-action footage to insert into it would still look like garbage and tehre's no way to clean it up. At best, you'd need to fully CG the actors and use their dialogue. Granted, CG technology has advanced a ton since then, but the expense involved coupled with what a niche fandom B5 is would make it cost prohibitive to do something like that, I expect.
 
To my own understanding, there were no digital intermediates made during the show’s run, so what was broadcast on airwaves was processed on film and had the effects printed over to create the final cuts of the episodes. I suppose if this is true, the negatives could be rescanned and have the VFX re-rendered at a higher resolution and then printed over the negatives again. I believe the live action footage that was in the mixed shots was processed analogously and not reprinted by the computer, allowing for a clean transfer of the shot by scanning it and then reprinting the VFX.
 
What with Paramount complaining that they lost a ton of Money doing the TNG Blus, no way in hell will Warners pony up for this to be upgraded
 
I had thought that the film elements of the composite shots were simply gone, and that all we had left were the composite shots which can't really be fixed.

To the extent that the film portion of the composite shots still exist, it's theoretically possible to redo the digital effects anew, and remix the film components in. The problem with that, though, is that you lose a lot of the "film history" aspects of CGI in the early to late 90s on TV.

At this point, I think the wiser course is to just, you know, be happy with what we have, accept its flaws, and realize that what you're really watching for isn't the F/X but the story.
 
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