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So the Babylon 5 (for the first time) not a star trek podcast guys have done their season 1 wrap up. It's actually quite wholesome to see people putting a lens over the story to pull out star-trek 'like' messages and realising that B5 is its own beast. Also they ranked TKO as one of the best episodes so let me just retrieve my soul from orbit.
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Oct 31, 2022 17:16
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Iymarra posted:Also they ranked TKO as one of the best episodes so let me just retrieve my soul from orbit. The B plot with Ivanova was good.
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Oct 31, 2022 17:41
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I said come in! posted:So right now all we know is that a pilot episode for a proposed reboot is in the works, right? Is there anything else that has been confirmed? It's probably doesn't look too good considering JMS tried to organize a hashtag campaign to prove there's interest for it, presumably for some studio suits. I do understand the campaign did kinda well though, so it might have worked
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Oct 31, 2022 19:27
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Iymarra posted:So the Babylon 5 (for the first time) not a star trek podcast guys have done their season 1 wrap up. It's actually quite wholesome to see people putting a lens over the story to pull out star-trek 'like' messages and realising that B5 is its own beast. Powered Descent posted:The B plot with Ivanova was good. And one of the two reviewers is a big boxing fan so.... 
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Oct 31, 2022 19:30
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jng2058 posted:And one of the two reviewers is a big boxing fan so.... Yeah, there's been a consistent "bro"-vibe with them since the beginning, although I suspect some of that was deliberately put on. But watching the show thinking "how similar is this to Star Trek" is going to lead to some really unusual episode readings. (I should add to those not listening that recently they're shifting away from that perspective and appreciating that an episode can be "not good Trek" and also "good B5.") Listening to them explain how TKO was an extremely "Star Trek" episode was certainly amusing on a number of levels, too. Now that they've both straightened out all the character name mispronounciations, I'm looking forward to their responses to the rest of the show. And really interested to see how they react to S5.
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Oct 31, 2022 19:45
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runaway dog posted:drat I am loving the hell out of season 1 on this 3rd rewatch. The alien stuff and station scenes actually has a real panache in s1, like they are really pumped about doing the show and it shows? Also Sinclair owns, I love his big theatre energy.
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Nov 2, 2022 05:32
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sebmojo posted:Also Sinclair owns, I love his big theatre energy. He does, he really does. I mean I'm completely happy with Sheridan and his story, but five seasons of Michael O'Hare would have kicked some major rear end. It's just that JMS cast a barely functional schizophrenic in a role where "You have a hole in your mind" is a plot point in several episodes. And a refugee from Sarajevo as someone who has to sacrifice herself to end a civil war. Method acting is a thing, but that's a bit much.
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Nov 8, 2022 09:14
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https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/1602816919266287616?s=20&t=ofOcebNWEFIR8J_jR9cFSg
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Dec 14, 2022 06:51
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McCloud posted:https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/1602816919266287616?s=20&t=ofOcebNWEFIR8J_jR9cFSg The relationship between B5 and DS9 is pretty interesting. Like, I think it's obvious that Paramount was a little shady, and they rushed their series to completion to get ahead of JMS. But then, on all those comparison lists which show things that DS9 'took' from B5 (both crews get an advanced warship at the start of the third season, etc.) they don't tend to mention that DS9 was one season ahead. Meaning that perhaps B5 was borrowing as reprisal.
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Dec 14, 2022 07:13
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As a huge fan of both I find the similarities to be very superficial. The shows are totally different.
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Dec 14, 2022 07:28
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:The relationship between B5 and DS9 is pretty interesting. Like, I think it's obvious that Paramount was a little shady, and they rushed their series to completion to get ahead of JMS. But then, on all those comparison lists which show things that DS9 'took' from B5 (both crews get an advanced warship at the start of the third season, etc.) they don't tend to mention that DS9 was one season ahead. Meaning that perhaps B5 was borrowing as reprisal. Pretty sure the main reason it didn't go to court was the fact that only the lawyers would win. DS9 is one Trek among many but B5 is B5.
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Dec 14, 2022 08:02
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Grand Fromage posted:As a huge fan of both I find the similarities to be very superficial. The shows are totally different. honestly i think that's one of the most interesting things about it; they're very different takes on those superficial similarities and I love seeing that kind of variance.
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Dec 14, 2022 08:21
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If there wasn't any theft going on, how do you explain such obvious similarities as both shows screwing over their female lead, causing them to be awkwardly written out for the last season?!
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Dec 14, 2022 10:41
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Angry Salami posted:If there wasn't any theft going on, how do you explain such obvious similarities as both shows screwing over their female lead, causing them to be awkwardly written out for the last season?! I'd argue that Nana Visitor was DS9's female lead, but otherwise it's an interesting comparison that I haven't made before. But I thought Terry Farrell wanted to leave of her own?
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Dec 14, 2022 12:59
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Torrannor posted:I'd argue that Nana Visitor was DS9's female lead, but otherwise it's an interesting comparison that I haven't made before. She “wanted to leave on her own” because she was tired of being sexually harassed by Rick Berman. (She also apparently begged to let her stay on board with a smaller episode count commitment to let her schedule other work around the show and had that vetoed too)
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Dec 14, 2022 13:38
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Chevy Slyme posted:She “wanted to leave on her own” because she was tired of being sexually harassed by Rick Berman. Ah I see. I never knew that. I shouldn't be surprised about the Berman sexual harassment thing.
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Dec 14, 2022 14:15
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Grand Fromage posted:As a huge fan of both I find the similarities to be very superficial. The shows are totally different. I think my favorite is the occasional shared names (Lyta, Dukat). They don't mean anything, there's no significance, it could easily be a coincidence of sci-fi naming conventions. But they're there, serving as fodder for claiming one copies the other.
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Dec 14, 2022 15:00
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Torrannor posted:Ah I see. I never knew that. I shouldn't be surprised about the Berman sexual harassment thing. I can't remember if it was a youtube or an article, but a number of years ago I learned a whole lot about how Berman hosed with Star Trek in general and DS9 specifically. fake edit: it was youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeSz2gW8IsE
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Dec 14, 2022 15:03
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Its a kind of silly question to ask JMS because it feels like its one of the most known things about his most well-known work. I think he has a pretty good case, but I adore DS9 so I don't care, and largely it just sounds like execs took the basic idea and said "make it a star trek" to a group of writers without knowledge of B5. It made getting B5 on the air considerably harder, and it always provided a considerably more spendy and slick counterpoint to the low budget B5, but in the end as a viewer we got two great shows.
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Dec 14, 2022 15:06
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Did JMS ever release the Babylon 5 pitch he put to Paramount? While both shows having a character called D(h)ukat seems a suspiciously huge coincidence, the deep backstory about who’s death started the Earth/Minbari seems far too much unnecessary information to put in a series pitch.
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Dec 14, 2022 15:24
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The Dukat thing is a good example of the superficialness. It is weird both shows have a character with that name. The characters also have absolutely nothing else in common. Dhukat in B5 is important as a backstory character but we only ever see him for like, five minutes the one time? Versus the main ongoing antagonist of the entire series.
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Dec 14, 2022 16:29
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In DS9 though ducat doesn't become the main antagonist until way later. In the beginning he's just the symbol of the occupation.
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Dec 14, 2022 16:41
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I think Mass Effect had a good amount of inspiration from Babylon 5, at least at the beginning. I think I first started really hearing about B5 from a Mass Effect thinkpiece.Grand Fromage posted:As a huge fan of both I find the similarities to be very superficial. The shows are totally different. It is pretty superficial, and the two don't really have much thematic or narrative overlap, but I do think that a lot of DS9 is basically what you would get if you take the overall premise and ideas of B5 and garbled it around and passed it through the minds of people who didn't really get what JMS was specifically trying to do and wanted to bend it into more of a Star Trek mold (and also since it wasn't the "main" show when it started, it didn't have very much authority to muck around with things that are important, so it couldn't set the show on the main embassy between space empires). But also a lot of the similarities come not just at the beginning but during the runtime of the shows where it's hard not to see the similarities and inspiration when you start running the numbers of when shows came out. DS9 didn't start out dealing with as much international galactic politics; they were pretty clearly trying to work out a way of doing a similar planet-a-day formula at the beginning, and they only really ramped up into what the show would be known for in the second season, after B5 had its own start airing. And then DS9 never exactly becomes the sort of always-developing soap opera that B5 was, but a lot of its big status-quo changes come after B5 already took similar steps. The Dominion shows up in DS9 after the start of the Narn-Centauri war had aired, and DS9 doesn't get directly involved in the Dominion War until after the Shadow War had gotten rolling in earnest on Babylon 5. The only thing I think goes the other way is the introduction of the White Star happening after the introduction of the Defiant. B5 also gets a lot of these firsts because it puts in the effort to put in a lot of foreshadowing for what JMS had planned, while DS9 was more clearly written on the fly in which case it'd be hard not to take inspiration from the world around you. But also y'know, JMS is a big ol' weirdo with a massive chip on his shoulder, so he's gonna be weird about all these things, regardless of whether or not he was actually screwed over.
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Dec 14, 2022 16:43
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CainFortea posted:In DS9 though ducat doesn't become the main antagonist until way later. In the beginning he's just the symbol of the occupation. He's always Literal Space Hitler, not the kindly mentor of one of our main characters whose death kicks off events. E: He is a complex character though, you're right that it's not a simple "that's the bad guy" thing. But I think antagonist is a valid term, if he shows up it's always to gently caress with the crew. He doesn't turn into a villain until the end. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 16:56 on Dec 14, 2022 |
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Dec 14, 2022 16:49
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Grand Fromage posted:He's always Literal Space Hitler, not the kindly mentor of one of our main characters whose death kicks off events. He doesn't really seem to actually take much action until later. Originally he seems mostly just to be the voice of the cardassian government. Because he himself disagreed with the government he keeps hiding behind "Well my government says I have to do X so here we are" I mean, yea he's obviously *AN* antagonist, but at the start it's more that he represents a bigger antagonist than himself. As time goes on that changes. And it's only in like the last season that he becomes the *MAIN* antagonist. I guess i'm just being pedantic about degrees. But yea obviously the two characters with the same name have nothing in common.
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Dec 14, 2022 17:16
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SlothfulCobra posted:B5 also gets a lot of these firsts because it puts in the effort to put in a lot of foreshadowing for what JMS had planned, while DS9 was more clearly written on the fly in which case it'd be hard not to take inspiration from the world around you. But also y'know, JMS is a big ol' weirdo with a massive chip on his shoulder, so he's gonna be weird about all these things, regardless of whether or not he was actually screwed over. After reading the autobiography, I have a lot of willingness to cut JMS slack for this sort of thing. He was raised by an abusive alcoholic Nazi father and an abused and mentally ill mother who attempted to kill him when he was young. It's a minor miracle any of his characters seem recognizably human. Vol 15 of the Script Books has the original B5 treatment, and I just wasted twenty minutes reading through it (because I'm pretty sure I did the same during a previous one of these thread discussions). In all likelihood, one of the Paramount execs at the pitch meeting thought the "Casablanca in Space/the adventures come to them" concept was good but saw no reason to pay this guy for it when they had a perfectly good franchise going already. The original treatment mentions shapeshifters and the Gathering script always seems to have had the Changeling Net, so Odo may have been a second insertion. That's about it, though. Any other overlaps would have been either subconscious--I doubt JMS watched DS9 himself, but people around him would have been, and we know some of the DS9 people were watching B5--or coincidence, or introduced externally. For example, the PC game Star Control 2 predates B5 and had members of an ancient race with two philosophies, one about enslaving or imprisoning all other species and the other simply exterminating them. The former group flew around in green ships and the latter in black ones, so it's been suggested as an influence on B5, but JMS has said he never played that game. OTOH, we know someone on the visual effects team had, because they took the Earthling Cruiser design from SC2 and stuck it into a B5 episode as one of the ships approaching the station to dock. So while giving the "Shadowmen" a black ship simply makes sense, someone may have suggested green for the Vorlons as an homage to a game that JMS hadn't played, making it an influence on the show despite the creator not knowing anything about it. Given how bellicose JMS can be, especially with upper-echelon folks like studio execs, I think it's entirely believable someone at Paramount read the treatment and decided to deliberately kneecap a potential competitor to Star Trek by rushing a show with a similar basic premise to air before B5 went to series. We're lucky they didn't elect to purchase the series and then sit on it without producing it.
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Dec 14, 2022 17:37
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Vorlon ships are yellow.
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Dec 14, 2022 20:34
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They're purple.
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Dec 14, 2022 21:50
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Green!
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Dec 14, 2022 22:32
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Every Vorlon reaches into a box and pulls out a green or purple ship.
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Dec 14, 2022 23:18
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they shoot purple lasers but i think the ships are yellow
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Dec 14, 2022 23:26
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For reference, the ship that B5 copied from Star Control was itself copied. It Star Control's best attempt at making a Star Trek-style ship with its limited 8-bit DOS isometric graphics. The game also had a Vree ship!  
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Dec 15, 2022 00:54
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Friend of mine got into a discussion with me as how he thought it was weird that all the shadow entities would agree with their plan, especially since it puts their lives at risk. Did JMS ever talk about whether some shadows went against the plan, or went off and did their own thing? We know that at least with Vorlons they didn't all see eye to eye, as evidenced by Kosh.
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Dec 15, 2022 01:03
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Zaroff posted:Did JMS ever release the Babylon 5 pitch he put to Paramount? Per JMS it wasn't a pitch, it was a literal "series bible" https://twitter.com/straczynski/status/1427794760375234566 This article sounds like there was some higher level corporate bickering between Warner and Paramount that ended up creating the situation as it did, and likely they split ways and the DS9 showrunners were sort of guided by execs into making a space station based show, no idea when the serialization of the story, a core part of B5, was planned to start. https://www.tor.com/2013/02/26/is-this-the-smoking-gun-proving-deep-space-nine-ripped-off-babylon-5/ quote:I was working at Warner Bros. in the publicity department when Warner Bros. and Paramount were preparing to launch a joint [emphasis mine] network. Warner Bros. already decided to buy Babylon 5 for their adhoc PTEN network (a group of independent stations that agreed to show Warner Bros. shows in prime time.) A lot of it depends on how much you think JMS has written/planned/plotted up to that point. The story is that he was always planning for a 5 season, 22 episode series with a planned end, rushed the 4th season due to the cancellation while jamming in the original S5 stuff, then the last actual season was sort of a weird mix of ideas he had to come up with last minute and then some of the remaining original plot.
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Dec 15, 2022 01:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:For reference, the ship that B5 copied from Star Control was itself copied. It Star Control's best attempt at making a Star Trek-style ship with its limited 8-bit DOS isometric graphics. Which B5 ship is this? Does anyone have a screenshot? I can't bring it to mind.
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Dec 15, 2022 01:16
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Another B5 - DS9 "synchronicity": Bureau 13 - Section 31.
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Dec 15, 2022 01:24
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theblackw0lf posted:Friend of mine got into a discussion with me as how he thought it was weird that all the shadow entities would agree with their plan, especially since it puts their lives at risk. I don't think the Shadows themselves were ever at risk - they don't crew their own ships, after all.
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Dec 15, 2022 03:38
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SlothfulCobra posted:For reference, the ship that B5 copied from Star Control was itself copied. It Star Control's best attempt at making a Star Trek-style ship with its limited 8-bit DOS isometric graphics. Funnily enough, I loved both the Arilou when I played Star Control and the Vree when I played Bablon 5 Wars! Flying saucers for life!
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Dec 15, 2022 04:11
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theblackw0lf posted:Friend of mine got into a discussion with me as how he thought it was weird that all the shadow entities would agree with their plan, especially since it puts their lives at risk. I always got the impression that they had a hivemindy thing going on, but I don't think there's actually anything to back that up.
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Dec 15, 2022 15:14
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theblackw0lf posted:Friend of mine got into a discussion with me as how he thought it was weird that all the shadow entities would agree with their plan, especially since it puts their lives at risk. They are all 'true believers in the cause', a few thousand(million) years of indoctrination and you will know your cause is right & just. Those who objected were discarded, like the crew of the Icarus... accept what they offer or become weapon components inside a Shadow vessel.
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Dec 15, 2022 15:44
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