When it debuted on PTEN back in 1993, Babylon 5 was unlike anything seen on television to that point. J. Michael Straczynski’s space opera featured both a rich mythology and some ground-breaking visual effects, and it’s become a cult classic in the years since.
But while the series has endured for its story, its appearance hasn’t dated well, thanks in part to a subpar home release to DVD (and later streaming). This week, the series moved over to HBO Max, and it’s undergone a significant facelift that leaves it looking better than ever.
Babylon 5 has had a bit of a troubled history when it comes to home releases, and it takes a little explanation for why fans have been disappointed with how the show’s been presented.
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Henrik Herranen wrote up a detailed, wonky deep dive (as does Engadget) into the ins and outs of the technical aspects, but in short: the series was originally shot on 35 mm film in a 16:9 ratio, and Straczynski has said that one goal was to shoot it in such a way that it would be compatible with high definition television when the technology improved. For broadcast, Warner Bros. had to crop the video, and scaled the CGI accordingly, meaning without a complete remaster of all of the digital effects, there would be no way to release a true HD version of the show.
And as a result, when the show made its debut on DVD, the studio opted to release the series in widescreen, but because of the differences in aspect ratios between the live-action and CGI sequences, its presentation left something to be desired.
When the series made the jump to streaming on Amazon Prime Video a couple of years ago, Straczynski outlined on Twitter some of the steps that the streaming service could take to improve the quality for fans.
4. @amazon @AmazonStudios …so all you'd have to do is get WB to strike new prints off those original master negatives, and you'd have pristine compies you could uprez to HD. They wouldn't be 16:9 but at 4:3 they'd be the best versions ever seen, even more than first broadcast.
— J. Michael Straczynski (@straczynski) May 17, 2018
Those original masters still existed in Warner Bros.’ archives. They still wouldn’t be able to do a proper HD-upscale because of the CGI—which Straczynski noted would be prohibitively expensive—but it would be better than what’s been released before.
Now, Warner Bros. has remastered the series in preparation for its debut on HBO Max. Engadget reports, that the new version has been “scanned from the original camera negative,” and the “film sequences were scanned in 4K and then ‘finished’ or downscaled, back to HD with a dirt and scratch clean-up, as well as a color correction.”
The show’s CGI and composite sequences, meanwhile, have been digitally upscaled to HD with only some minor tweaks where absolutely necessary.
The series still isn’t presented in widescreen as intended, Engadget says, but is presented in the 4:3 aspect ratio that the CGI was designed for, and in which the series was originally shown.
Watching a couple of episodes on HBO Max and comparing them against the DVDs that I bought years ago, I can say that the quality is much better, even if it’s cropped. While the DVDs show off more in that widescreen format, the tradeoff is worth it: the streaming version feels cleaner, and looks as it as intended—mostly.
This has all been a roundabout way of saying that Babylon 5 is now streaming on HBO Max, and if you’ve never seen the show, this is probably the best opportunity to check it out. While that original CGI has definitely aged, it’s a phenomenal, classic series that’s perfect for streaming and that’s well worth being enjoyed by a new generation of fans.
At the time, the CGI in Babylon 5 was less convincing than feature-quality CGI or conventional miniature effects, but it was worth the tradeoff, because it was so much more versatile and allowed far more complex FX shots than were previously possible on TV budgets and schedules. The affordability of the Video Toaster system was the really revolutionary thing, and I think it was responsible for the SFTV boom we got in the ’90s and after, because it made it far more practical for even modestly budgeted TV shows to do elaborate visual effects.
It and ST: DEEP SPACE NINE were also groundbreaking in having serial storytelling instead of only standalone episodes.
I just read a review of a new Blu-Ray release of BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY, both seasons. It’s great to see both classics and fan-favorites being polished up for future generations.
Come for the intense space battles. Stay for the Londo & G’Kar character arcs.
@3,
Stay for the Londo & G’Kar character arcs.
Yes, and that will teach you to think twice before trifling with a Centauri! :D
Just to note that nothing in the new remaster is cropped: it’s the show as originally presented. Yes, the live-action-only footage is no longer in widescreen, which is irritating, but it was either that, crop the CGI (which we know from 19 years of the DVDs looks terrible) or careen back and forth from widescreen to 4:3 and back again whenever a vfx shot cropped up, which would be wildly distracting.
@2: Yes, but Babylon 5 was pre-planned to have a long-from storyline unfolding over five years. Deep Space Nine was not, and only kind of drifted into more serialisation because of the nature of the storytelling (i.e. if a character shows up on the station and decides to stay, another writer would pick up on that and use them again a few weeks later). DS9 was never significantly pre-planned to any extent, whilst B5 was pre-planned enough that there were scenes in the pilot episode foreshadowing things that would happen in the finale. Although there was also a lot of course-correction in B5 due to castmembers leaving and other issues, they did a good job of hiding it and making the whole thing seem seamless.
@2/MByerly: There were some earlier SFTV shows with a degree of serialization, or at least ongoing continuity. The short-lived 1977 series The Fantastic Journey did a pretty good job maintaining continuity between episodes; each one was a self-contained story, but it picked up right where the previous one left off in terms of the characters’ status quo and wardrobe, and often referenced previous episodes’ events, though the continuity faltered in later episodes. The original 1978 Battlestar Galactica and even Galactica 1980 managed to have developing continuity arcs from episode to episode and evolving status quo rather than a perpetual reset button. V: The Series in the early ’80s was an out-and-out soap opera with serialized plotting. As, of course, was Dark Shadows back in the ’60s, even more literally.
And it’s incorrect to treat episodic and serial plotting as mutually exclusive. Lots of shows in the ’70s, ’80s, and early ’90s had ongoing, developing continuity threads on top of their episodic formats, like TNG’s evolving character arcs with Worf or Data, or Quantum Leap’s gradual peeling back of the nature of Project Quantum Leap and Sam Beckett’s journeys. Episodic and serial plotting are ingredients in a recipe, not opposite poles.
What Babylon 5 pioneered was not having any serialization, but making it more systematic — treating each entire season as basically a complete “novel” within a multi-volume series, a unified whole with its own distinct narrative arc that reached a climax in the finale and led into a new phase of the saga in the following season, with an overall master plan laid out for the entire series. That season-arc model has become pretty much standard these days.
@5:
Right, the live-action footage is cropped from how it was originally shot. It might be as it was originally presented, but it’s not presented exactly as originally intended.
@7/Andrew Liptak: “It might be as it was originally presented, but it’s not presented exactly as originally intended. “
I disagree with that interpretation. B5 was always intended to be shown in 4:3, because that was the only TV format in regular use at the time. That’s why the FX were created in that format. It was shot in widescreen so that it could potentially be reframed for widescreen if and when HDTV caught on in the future, but that was an optional possibility, not the primary intent. The composition of the live-action shots was always designed with 4:3 in mind, since that was the only way television viewers would get to see it in the foreseeable future.
@5: Sort of. They wanted to future-proof the show by shooting and protecting for widescreen, because people were just starting to twig around 1994 that widescreen TVs would be a thing in the future, but it wasn’t the norm just yet, so the show was protected for widescreen but shot predominantly for 4:3. The CGI was only rendered in 4:3 because Warner Brothers refused to pay for a widescreen reference monitor for Foundation Imaging (and it’s possible FI was also hoping to re-render all the CGI at a later date in native widescreen and be able to bill Warners for it, because they were being paid next to nothing to make the CG for the show, so they didn’t make too much of a fuss about it).
The only reason the widescreen version exists is because they were hoping for a widescreen laserdisc release in Japan and because several European countries asked for a widescreen version instead of the standard one, so they created both a 4:3 and a widescreen edit (with cropped CGI) at the same time when they originally made the show, otherwise it’s unlikely it would have happened later (WB’s cost-averse attitude to B5, a show that has made them roughly seven times its production costs in profit, has always been weird). Really weirdly, the later DVDs were the PAL European widescreen versions re-converted to NTSC before being pressed, which didn’t help their image quality, and was all the more annoying because the original US widescreen edit were still sitting on the shelves.
The irony is that this HD version is the best the show has ever looked, but it drops the widescreen presentation despite being filmed and protected for widescreen. There’s no way of squaring that circle without redoing all the CGI, which is possible (and probably at a rather cheaper rate than the TNG full-bodied remaster) but WB are unwilling to pay for it.
Looks sadly at my boxed sets…Well, I still love you just as you are.
R.I.P. Mira Furlan
“Mira Furlan, Actress on ‘Lost’ and ‘Babylon 5,’ Dies at 65” (https://nyti.ms/2LV8pH3).
@10: They are apparently putting out this new release on Blu-Ray later this year, although apparently only in Europe.
The main reason for all the playing around is that, as a contract requirement, ALL copies of the digital masters, including the models, wireframes and action files were required to be given to WB, and no copies were allowed at FI. When they went to do some of the follow up movies, they discovered that WB had LOST (destroyed?) all this material, making it necessary to recreate all this material, a prohibitively expensive process. With this material, re-rendering all the CGI in HD would have been a cakewalk, but without it, it will probably never happen…
WB are probably waiting for tech to advance enough that a fan manages to do HD rendering in their bedroom, then they’ll offer to buy the renders at a superlow price in exchange for not suing them for copyright infringement or some such bullshit.
Greatest American SF series, and only surpassed by The Prisoner globally.
This was a marvelous show. The first season was a bit uneven, but new viewers should hang in, because once it hit its stride, it was a thing of beauty. I was always impressed what they did in set dressing to squeeze every bit out of a limited budget. And it was a great example of what skilled actors can do when armed with a well written script.
@13: JMS himself has refuted this on Twitter, and many of the Foundation Imaging artists kept multiple copies of the models and entire scenes for private showreel use, or because they knew that WB would lose them. That’s allowed one guy (Tom Smith from the B5 Scrolls website) to actually collect together a lot of that stuff and re-render them with modern PCs. So that’s the 1994-98 models and scene data just being redone in widescreen at 1080p, and it looks great.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtNtUIbU5zDuTq_BJ7xj_MA/videos
The collected material is most of the file/scene data and models from Seasons 2 and 3, and the models from Season 1 (Tom is trying to recreate some Season 1 scenes from scratch by eyeballing the camera moves from the original episodes, but notes this will not be as close a recreation). Unfortunately, the rather more inefficient and less skilled Netter Digital lost or destroyed most of their material from Seasons 4 and 5, which will make redoing those seasons much more difficult.
Everyone knows this material has survived and WB could make use of it very easily. They have chosen not to do so and to do everything on the cheap instead.
JMS is being a dick about it and send a cease and desist. He’s being petty.
https://www.reddit.com/r/babylon5/comments/yyvn81/jms_wb_takedown_of_high_res_fan_renders_of_b5_cgi/