I’ve only seen The Gathering and In The Beginning. Gathering, as the pilot episode, was unsurprisingly undeveloped in spots (pilots always are), but I thought that In The Beginning was very good. I especially liked the way they used Londo for the framing story.
It’s not at all surprising that Straczynski wanted full artistic control, and given the work he’s done in the past, it’s fully justified, but I am a bit pleasantly surprised that he got it. Now if only the TV folks would get the hint to allow artists to create their art.
That bad, huh? Okay.
Ah hell, who am I kidding? I’ll watch it anyway, just for completeness.
FWIW, they’ve always made good with a low budget. Their episodic budget was less than half that of DS9, but they always managed to make the CGI much better, while being relatively on par with other things. (Although the CGI took a big hit when they switched to Netter Digital, I think, during season… 4? The battles got bigger, and more elaborate, and probably prettier - but they stopped doing the little things right, like showing extremely realistic physics on starfuries)
Years ago, Sierra was developing a starfury space sim. They got about 90% done, and then cancelled the project (along with others) when they reorganized their games division. Pretty much killed them. It had so much promise, too - a realistic space fighter, instead of “WWII dogfights in space”
Is that a scene I saw where an obviously CGI aircraft circles down to a landing?
cbawlmer thanks for the pointing. I knew I could count on someone around here for that (my Google-fu is incredibly weak.)
I don’t remember specifically when the switch happened, and they retained, I think, some of the core people… but the philosophy of the CGI battles changed to cramming as much action in as possible on huge battles, which has its own upside, but I really appreciated earlier in the series, when they had more minimalist, but surprisingly realistic and attentive to details, CGI.
Just try to ignore the silliness that is the controls for their weapons.
-Joe
Well, it’s true they can’t use Zathras anymore…but they could do a story featuring Zathras. Or maybe Zathras.
I got the disc yesterday & watched it. Hah! OMG. Turns out I had seen it before, but blocked it from my memory. The weapons controls are HI-larious!
Was Legend of the Rangers supposed to be the pilot for new show or was it always intended to a one-shot movie?
IIRC it was a pilot-but-not-a-pilot in that it had about a one in a jillion shot of getting picked up.
I loved B5 at the time, but it hasn’t aged well. And all the characters had complete arcs (except Lyta, IMO) - let it alone already.
-Joe
At this point, the best thing to do would be to tell the story of the telepath war and let the series rest in peace.