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I do wish that the league had more screentime, maybe with more trade deals, trying to court the votes of individual ambassadors, or even a league member trying to become part of the station's security council, but I understand that would be pulling the show in a more episodic direction at a time when it was kind of blazing trails with its long-term plot.
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Mar 17, 2019 18:33
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Thanks to this thread, I subjected my Paranoia players to a "Grey 17"-inspired sewer cult in yesterday's game. So...thanks?
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Mar 19, 2019 05:49
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After The War posted:Thanks to this thread, I subjected my Paranoia players to a "Grey 17"-inspired sewer cult in yesterday's game. So...thanks? I felt like that was evocative of something but it’s probably been a decade since I saw it so I totally missed it. Hail BR15T3!
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Mar 19, 2019 18:06
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As a sidenote on the general (lack of) quality and care in TV-licensed fiction, there was a Charmed tie-in novel that got a main character's surname wrong. On the first page.
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Mar 21, 2019 18:00
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Watching S3E6 Dust to Dust and it starts with an Aryan-looking Night Watch-armbanded security guy harassing a Jewish shopowner, who calls him a "mamzer" and asks him whether he's late for a Bund meeting. In case you, the viewer, had any doubts as to what this is an allegory for. Edit: Now watching S3E9 Point of No Return and it has Londo telling an increasingly defensive Vir to rewrite his report on Minbar to be more negative, but this is exactly what he told him in Dust to Dust, some of the corrections being almost word-for-word. Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Mar 31, 2019 |
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Mar 30, 2019 23:30
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Woah there's a B5 thread! And it's 85 pages!
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Apr 4, 2019 03:28
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Baronjutter posted:Woah there's a B5 thread! And it's 85 pages! Welcome! Let's see if we can get more Stellaris players in here to talk War in Heaven strats.
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Apr 4, 2019 11:48
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Vavrek posted:Welcome! Let's see if we can get more Stellaris players in here to talk War in Heaven strats. Well I understand one of the star trek threads has a guy reviewing b5 in it. 
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Apr 4, 2019 15:03
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Vavrek posted:Welcome! Let's see if we can get more Stellaris players in here to talk War in Heaven strats. I have always been here.
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Apr 4, 2019 16:03
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I'm really getting a Quark and Rom vibe from Londo and Vir. Sure, Quark didn't go full evil war criminal but of the two of them Quark was the very traditional one obsessed with achieving "success" as defined by their culture, while Rom and Vir were misfits who were seen as failures and nontraditional by their own cultures, but as ethical and cool people by outsiders. Both are poo poo on by their high-status bosses who see them as naive idiots, but both are actually loved in their own way. Both are low status "naive voice of reason" types acting counter to their high-status counterparts. Both end up becoming reformist leaders of their entire societies.
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Apr 4, 2019 16:31
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There's that story about how JMS shopped his B5 script around, including the studio that produced DS9, who rejected it. Then mysteriously produced a new Trek that was incredibly similar... It's probably easier to list the things that are different about B5 and DS9 than those that are the same.
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Apr 4, 2019 16:47
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The weirdest thing about those overlaps are that each show has a character named Duk(h)at but with each having no similarity to the other. It's such a specific but pointless swipe (if it was not a weird coincidence).
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Apr 4, 2019 17:08
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ConfusedUs posted:There's that story about how JMS shopped his B5 script around, including the studio that produced DS9, who rejected it. Then mysteriously produced a new Trek that was incredibly similar... I'm introducing a trekkie friend to b5 and she's genuinely mad about how much stuff they stole and how much better b5 is
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Apr 4, 2019 19:18
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Genuinely LAST CHANCE for the big b5 book unsigned for cheap. 50% off, then they're gone. https://b5books.com/babylon-5-encyclopedia-unsigned/
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Apr 4, 2019 19:27
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I'm watching B5 for the first time now, and yeah there's similarities, but I also love DS9 and think it's pretty unfair (and pointless) to fan war about who "ripped off" who. Both shows are good. I ran a scifi rpg with some friends having never read or seen The Expanse, it turned out my worldbuilding and a ton of plot elements were ridiculously similar to the point that anyone could have said it was very obvious I had cribbed most everything from The Expanse. But there's just a ton of stuff that's going to end up seeming and playing out in similar ways when you've got similar starting points and general ideas. Also even if DS9 was like "yeah paramount started us off with a bunch of notes and ideas we cribbed from B5" I wouldn't think anything less of the show. All IP should be stolen. It's lovely when money's involved, but both shows managed to get on TV. B5's absolutely the more cult underdog, but it had to be to do the type of storytelling TV just wasn't ready for in the 90's.
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Apr 4, 2019 19:33
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ConfusedUs posted:I have always been here. You are not alone gently caress that's doctor who
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Apr 5, 2019 12:34
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I find the similarities enjoyable and in general from the little I've seen of Babylon 5 in reruns back when I had a tv, they're not quite that strong except in superficial ways; ripping off would have been resolving the Homefront arc with a season long civil war that tears the federation apart as half the Starfleet leadership decides that fascism is good actually. At most they tend to feel like nods.
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Apr 5, 2019 13:08
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Something about the B5/DS9 ripoff conversation that I haven't seen brought up before, and only occurred to me a few weeks back, is that what JMS shopped around as Babylon 5 is not the B5 that was actually aired past-S1. As strong as some similarities are between the two shows, B5 got reworked pretty extensively when O'Hare left the show, and I doubt the people at Paramount were in on any of that (especially given that DS9 hit the airwaves first). Seems like it might've just been a bunch of weird coincidences, unless I've gotten something wrong.
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Apr 5, 2019 13:30
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:The weirdest thing about those overlaps are that each show has a character named Duk(h)at but with each having no similarity to the other. It's such a specific but pointless swipe (if it was not a weird coincidence). Also Lyta/Leeta. But yeah, I do think it's coincidence. But I do think the germ of an idea for a station-based show is likely to have come from B5. I don't think there was any serious cribbing though.
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Apr 5, 2019 13:35
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Pick posted:Genuinely LAST CHANCE for the big b5 book unsigned for cheap. 50% off, then they're gone. That's an impulse buy I'll appreciate in the future.
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Apr 5, 2019 13:39
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Dirty posted:Also Lyta/Leeta. The other big coincidence is both of them getting a Cool Pew-Pew Combat Ship. Both with dual cannons on each side.
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Apr 5, 2019 14:28
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Neddy Seagoon posted:The other big coincidence is both of them getting a Cool Pew-Pew Combat Ship. Now I'm imagining the episode where Sisko announces the creation of a new Federation as dozens of Defiants fly overhead.
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Apr 5, 2019 14:56
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Neddy Seagoon posted:The other big coincidence is both of them getting a Cool Pew-Pew Combat Ship. Both in the first episode of the third season, no less.
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Apr 5, 2019 16:13
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 Ah Captain Sisko, I'm simply here to ask you a question: "What do you want?"
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Apr 5, 2019 16:18
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Neddy Seagoon posted:The other big coincidence is both of them getting a Cool Pew-Pew Combat Ship. I thought the Wraiths were worth a Spock-brow.
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Apr 5, 2019 16:30
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Dirty posted:Also Lyta/Leeta. Didn't the thing he shopped around also have a shapeshifter security agent? I remember reading about it (not in the context of DS9, but in what changed between the pitch and the show) and was like 
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Apr 5, 2019 16:35
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Hello, all. This is a random-rear end question, but I figured this thread would know more than most. I discovered this week that three of my season 4 dvds of Babylon 5 has disk-rot or something, and won't play. (No visible scratches or anything. The other seasons are fine. They were all stored together, so I'm not sure what's different). Anyway, I was going to re-buy the season off Amazon, but I see they've got a 2004 edition (which is what I have) and a 2009 edition. Does anyone know what the difference, if any, is? Is it just a re-issue? Dare I hope that they fixed that terrible matte-related crop and zoom?
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Apr 5, 2019 21:38
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The 2004 edition is probably the one with the big book-like DVD cases, if so I'm betting the 2009 edition switched to the slimmer version. I doubt they made any changes to the transfer or even added new bonus features.
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Apr 5, 2019 21:50
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Yeah, all the ones I've got (2004 version) are the size of a thick paperback. Thanks!
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Apr 5, 2019 21:54
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A lot of DVDs from that time are going to be rotting because they started using aluminum instead of gold in the DVD layers; gold is much less susceptible to corrosion than aluminum. Also aluminum is cheaper.
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Apr 5, 2019 23:51
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I can definitively answer this as the same thing happened to my season 2 set and I had to pick up another copy. The rerelease is just that, it's the same discs, just in slimmer packaging.
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Apr 6, 2019 02:53
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Blindeye posted:Didn't the thing he shopped around also have a shapeshifter security agent? I remember reading about it (not in the context of DS9, but in what changed between the pitch and the show) and was like At one point the assassin in the pilot was a shapeshifter instead of someone using technology to take different appearances. Something else from early documents that never made it into the show is Mr. Jones, who's officially an ordinary shopkeeper but who has a mysterious past and helps or hinders the other characters as it suits him. Sounds familiar....
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Apr 6, 2019 03:13
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Even to this day they are stealing B5's ideas! A Klingon monk had a very Minbari headdress in the latest Discovery episode
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Apr 7, 2019 19:31
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Son of Sam-I-Am posted:I can definitively answer this as the same thing happened to my season 2 set and I had to pick up another copy. The rerelease is just that, it's the same discs, just in slimmer packaging. Much slimmer - it was cheaper to buy the complete set than just the seasons we were missing, and the whole thing (including movie collection) doesn't take up much more shelf space than the two 2004 season sets we replaced.
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Apr 7, 2019 20:57
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Yeah, looks like my season 5 set is hosed, too. Guess I'll be looking into the slim set.
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Apr 8, 2019 01:13
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My friend bought the entire series on vhs just before dvds came in, I never asked him how it felt
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Apr 8, 2019 01:21
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ConfusedUs posted:There's that story about how JMS shopped his B5 script around, including the studio that produced DS9, who rejected it. Then mysteriously produced a new Trek that was incredibly similar... I looked into this and there was exactly one Paramount exec who pitched the idea of a third Trek series to Berman and Piller, and it was just that: the idea of "hey, let's keep milking this cow and make a third series". All the details came from them, elaborated from initial notes they developed with Roddenberry before he croaked. That exec wasn't even around when JMS made his pitch to Paramount in the late 80s, he was president of NBC's Entertainment Division and was busy making them king of the networks.
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Apr 8, 2019 08:28
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sebmojo posted:My friend bought the entire series on vhs just before dvds came in, I never asked him how it felt At 2 episodes per tape, "heavy"
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Apr 14, 2019 14:57
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sebmojo posted:My friend bought the entire series on vhs just before dvds came in, I never asked him how it felt I mean, high res is really not B5's friend so...
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Apr 14, 2019 18:39
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McSpanky posted:I looked into this and there was exactly one Paramount exec who pitched the idea of a third Trek series to Berman and Piller, and it was just that: the idea of "hey, let's keep milking this cow and make a third series". All the details came from them, elaborated from initial notes they developed with Roddenberry before he croaked. That exec wasn't even around when JMS made his pitch to Paramount in the late 80s, he was president of NBC's Entertainment Division and was busy making them king of the networks. I'm not saying it was anything more than a coincidence, but I'm also not saying that it is inconceivable that one or more of the people pitched B5 might have had conversations with other people besides the DS9 creators, who in turn had conversations with them about B5. Remember that B5 was getting pitched at a time where the commonplace wisdom was that a non-Trek sci-fi show was no longer viable. Does anyone really think that nobody who had heard about the pitch would mention it to any of the people working on Trek? That said, it's ludicrous to think that Berman and Piller sat down and said "let's reconstruct every single detail we heard about B5 in our own show." What is not so ludicrous is the possibility that they received suggestions from the network about tweaks or changes to make in the show that were in part motivated by a desire to make B5 look like a cheap knockoff. Barring a TNT/Crusade-style meltdown, no creative team is going to itemize the list of minor changes they may have made during the process because it was easier giving in to some ill-informed executive on a minor point than to fight. In this case, it's possible that one or more of those ill-informed executives might have known something Berman and Piller didn't.
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Apr 14, 2019 19:30
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