Would you like to see a reboot of Babylon 5 with good actors?

I would say out of all the cast Peter Jurasik, and Andreas Katsulas were the best. I'm with you about the CGI, it looked cartoonish at best.

Not to sound like an apologist for the show, but to make the claim that the CGI in 1993, when The Gathering premiered wasn't cutting edge is totally off-base.

Perhaps compared to some theatrical films, especially huge blockbusters, but it was the first show to exclusively use CGI, and it saved them a load of money. The budget for special effects was a fraction of other contemporary shows such as Star Trek TNG or DS9. It looks "bad" now because they've zoomed and cropped all shots that include CGI, giving it a cheap, grainy feel.

Of course, if WB hadn't lost all the effects work, they could have re-rendered them in widescreen 15 years ago and while they may still be considered "dated", they'd look pretty crisp.



Regarding the monolithic cultures of alien species, it's very hard for writers to create a totally alien species, while still letting them be relateable to the humans that are viewing the program. How its that concept a bit of a dinosaur? Have there been other shows that have series regulars (not aliens of the week) that aren't from monolithic when it comes to beliefs, languages, etc?

To be fair, the Minbari have different castes they can follow, The Centauri have their cornucopia of gods, the Narn clearly follow different philosophers (as they talk often about through the run of the show). There's also, at least with the Minbari and Centauri, clearly defined reasons in their species history for the reason why they may seem to come from a very monolithic culture. The Vorlons and Shadows are so old that they've passed beyond that sort of thing.


Battlestar Galactica isn't comparable since the remake simply took the original series premise and removed all alien species from the picture.



The acting was about on par with other genre shows of the time. Some of the early Star Trek TNG/DS9 guest stars are pretty weak. Most of the other genre shows have been forgotten (anyone remember Time Trax? Sliders? SeaQuest? VR.5? M.A.N.T.I.S.? TekWar? Earth Final Conflict?). One reason why Babylon 5 might stands out is because of the show's lasting power after all these years because most of those shows have long since been forgotten. On top of that, some of the "acting" is actually from the odd writing style of JMS (like how some people don't like Joss Whedon'-y' dialogue, even when uttered by good actors).

No, not the mind probe!

The CGI was absolutely cutting edge for the time. It looks like balls now of course, but the show was groundbreaking.

It also introduced long arcing storylines in a viable formula.

1) Better CGI. Let's face it, the CGI was hardly cutting edge, even when the episodes were new

Let's face it, the CGI was hardly cutting edge

In B5, most of the major races had been spacefaring and in contact with other races for a long time. The Minbari were more advanced than B5-era Earth back during the previous Shadow war, and that was 1000 years earlier. The Narn and Centauri were both probably around or slightly below the level of B5-era Earth at that time, since we know they both remember that conflict. It's unlikely that a world could go through that without profound changes vs one that was sheltered from any knowledge of what had been happening. Besides that, we _did_ see some instances of regionally specific cultural differences, one of the most obvious of which was Centauri accents. Besides, JMS has compained on more than one occasion about more than one instance of being verbally harassed over making his aliens "too alien". In S1, they had the character n'grath, who Trekkies took great offense to because it didn't have the proper number of legs for an Earth insect. And I actually _just_ found out that the "alien zoo" from when they wander through the methane-breathers' section isn't quite as absurd as it seemed at first glance, since there were apparently doors on the back walls of the little cubicles where it would have eventually been revealed they could access more private quarters (JMS likened the glass boxes to sitting on the front porch). But verbal uproar, plus a year delay going to series, and it all got scrapped.

As for the CGI, it was most certainly cutting edge. During the first two seasons, all the CGI was rendered using a network of Amiga computers running some form of Video Toaster because neither Windows nor Apple had any comparable software available to use. Season 3 upgraded to brand new software released for PCs because the massive demands of the Shadow War far exceeded the Amigas' capabilities since they had pretty much stagnated at that point once Commodore let it be known that (contrary to contractual agreements) they were pulling the plug on Amiga development. This show came out very shortly after Young Sherlock Holmes made waves for doing a single rendered character with the Stained Glass Knight, which featured all of zero organic components, and only had a few seconds of screentime. Conversely, The Gathering (including set construction for everything seen in that movie, and in much of the series) had a grand total budget of $3.5 million. I think the average cost of an episode of ST:TNG at the time was $2 million. The pilot two-parter for ST:VOY was $23 million. So somewhere, between paying for many of the primary sets for the entire series, designing all the constumes and props, casting the full production, and doing large amounts of pre-production, some fraction of that $3.5 million had to be used to design all the CGI models seen in the pilot and render all the CGI shots. And break RotJ's record for total number of on-screen spacecraft in a single shot.

Meanwhile, Star Trek on the TV side never once had a really awe-inducing space battle scene until Wolf 359, because pretty much everything else up to that point (particularly on TNG where all combat was handled with a very limited and thoroughly predictable handful of "attack" and "defense" patterns) was like watching beached whales duke it out with laser pointers. Yeah, the polygon count had to be kept low so the computers wouldn't melt, and the textures on a lot of things (particularly organic stuff) often attempted (and rarely succeeded) to disguise this, but the Starfury combat sequences are to everything that came before them what A New Hope's X-Wing combat sequences were to everything that came before them. Speaking strictly in terms of a straight action sequence regardless of how pretty individual frames may look as still shots, nBSG is about the only TV show I've seen that's really even topped them to this day, and I attribute that in part to the fact that they didn't waste any money on developing a plot for the first two seasons.

You know what noone tells you about cooking with the Dark Side? The food is really good!

It's not fair to judge B5's CGI by today's standards, you need to judge it by its contemporaries....oh wait, you can't because there were no contemporaries (even Star Trek was still using models at the time). B5 I believe was the first series to use CGI to this extent.

I'm re-watching the entire series again after 15 years and I'm almost done with season 1. Wow... I like it even more now than I did back then. Episodes that I thought were dull now have greater meaning to me, I don't care that some of the performances were stiff, I didn't like Sinclair the first time around but now I do, same with Girabaldi. People keep bitching about the effects, I don't get it they look fine as do the aliens. I don't know.. people love a show so much I guess they want it to be perfect but I love it warts and all I mean even shows like the X-Files had a fair share of less than stellar episodes and lousy guest stars thats to be expected in just about every TV series.

"Sorry I'm late guys. I was taking a crap."
Paul Newman

B5 didn't need to look "Gritty" because they weren't alone without backups and resupplies etc, on the run from arguably superior forces as with both the remake BG (yes it's really BG) and Firefly.

Having B5 be "gritty" just because that's what people expect these days, and cuz they've somehow been programmed to think that's automatically more realistic, would have actually been the mistake.

B5 never struck me as being campy, though my former boss did comment that he was turned off from watching it by how cheesy Sheriden was when he first appeared. It turned out that was at JMS' behest, since Bruce Boxleitner was super-famous for one thing and one thing only at that moment, which was his cheesy performance on Scarecrow & Mrs. King. It was JMS' idea to capitalize on any cross-over viewers they might attract by playing into their expectations early on, and then transition him into a more rounded character after a few episodes.

You know what noone tells you about cooking with the Dark Side? The food is really good!