I can take Byron if they promise me Lt. Warren Keffer won’t be there.
If HBO is showing the program at 4:3 then that’s on them. The live action scenes were filmed at 16:9 which was then masked down to 4:3 for the original broadcast.
The CGI was only done in 4:3, though.
The show was made on a small budget at a time when filming and broadcast standards were in a very early period of transition, and it shows.
Not to mention that, but the costumes and set design are just screaming with an early-1990s aesthetic. (By comparison, the contemporaneous Deep Space Nine has a more timelessly futuristic look. It’s not perfect, but it at least doesn’t look like it was shot for a Computer Shopper photo special.)
Are the non–live action scenes also available in 16:9? If not, it’s going to be pretty jarring to viewers for the aspect ratio to change every time the show cuts to an establishing exterior shot of the station, or to some outer space action sequence. Either that, or they’ll have to zoom in on and crop those shots, with the associated degradation of quality and possibly cutting off important parts of the action. Or they’ll have to redo all the CGI in 16:9 from scratch at great expense, à la the remastered Star Trek: The Next Generation. Somehow I don’t think any of those three options is acceptable to HBO.
ETA: What @Smapti said.
Speaking of the 90s, I call for a riot if there’s no neon Zima sign in the Zocalo
It’s more on WB than HBO Max. There were a series of miscommunications and cheap outs back in the 90s. The live action was filmed at 16:9 but the CGI were only ever done at 4:3 (miscommunications and cheap outs). So, when they went back and wanted to re-do a widescreen home release (which would be what would be used for streaming later), they found the live action would have been fine but the CGI and composites would not.
They would either have to stretch or crop the CGI images to fit them into 16:9 or re-render them. The first would look terrible (in a different way) or cost a fortune (minimum several 10s of millions).
It was a joke (Time Trax went over the head, I guess). Lighten up and enjoy the thread
But more seriously, sure, JMS is going to make some compromises with the network. He’s never been part of a show where he hasn’t had to make changes, both minor and major. Always has, and he’s always adjusted.
Just as with the original show, sometimes this will result in something that doesn’t live up to his original vision and other times it will result in something phenomenal he would never have foreseen.
Where are they gonna find one?
JMS said at the time he didn’t figure Zima would last 5 years, never mind 2,250 so they were put up as a joke.
…I’m good thanks.
It made it to 2008, FTR.
I do have to admit trepidation over it being on CW. I haven’t seen anything on that network that I haven’t hated. Maybe the point of this reboot on their network is to get people to watch their network that hate all their other shows, and will let it be free of the idiocy that infects all other shows there.
I’ll certainly give it a chance, but if they re-cast the main actors into teens/early 20’s, I will not have very high hopes.
OTOH, it’s sort of the ‘original’ network for B5 at the same time.
PTEN dissolved because the players involved started up UPN and the WB, which subsequently merged to form the CW.
I’m not sweating the show much at this point. The original is still there if the reboot isn’t very good. And, if we’re being honest with ourselves, the B5 work JMS has done after Season 4 has been very hit or miss, with some excellent episodes in Season 5 and in Crusade and some nigh unwatchable stuff in some of the DTV movies. Some network editorial guidance may actually be good, in that respect.
I’ll be more than satisfied if there are a few good episodes and simultaneously won’t be too put out if the show doesn’t last more than a season. Catching lightning in a bottle twice is setting expectations way too high.
Well yeah, but that’s true of almost all the reboots we’ve seen in the past decade or so.
Personally, I think that a reboot of B5 is oddly enough, one that I’d like to see. Mainly because I have this sneaking suspicion that JMS might actually be able to realize his vision more fully in today’s TV landscape, versus that weird syndication/low-budget landscape of the mid 1990s. Having a multi-season story arc isn’t quite so unusual these days (although the degree of planning still is), and the CGI is there to do a lot of things RIGHT that they couldn’t quite manage the first time around.
And more importantly, science fiction and fantasy have become far more mainstream than they were in the mid 1990s. Themes like dragons, time travel and aliens aren’t the exclusive province of neckbeards anymore. The MCU and GoT have pretty much shown that conclusively.
So I think that a B5 reboot could both be done better AND better received today than during its original showing. And I happened to love the Battlestar Galactica original series AND the reboot, so I feel that a well-done B5 reboot could be something special indeed.
This. So much this. I trust JMS to give it his best shot, and that will be good enough for me.
Although, it was a lot more explicit than most shows of the time. At one point, Ivanova explicitly says that she’s in love with Winters. And there was also an episode where… I think it was Franklin and Garibaldi? were on an undercover mission, and their cover story was that they were on their honeymoon, completely unremarkable.
And personally, I actually thought that the cast changes, unintended though they may have been, served to make it more realistic, because yes, in the real world, sometimes personnel do get reassigned and so on.
The reboot could certainly feature aliens that are more alien; JMS did have a few non-humanoid aliens in the background, but none as major characters. Am I the only one wonder how far the CW would let him go with Centauri sex scenes?
True, but IIRC that was played for comedy. In any event it was 2 straight characters pretending to be gay; not all that daring for the '90s.
It’s not that two straight characters were pretending to be gay. It’s that they were doing so because, in the world they were in, being gay was regarded as not at all noteworthy. They picked “honeymooners” because that was a cover story that would avoid drawing attention to them (as compared to the time when it aired, where a pair of male honeymooners would most certainly have drawn attention).
Oh, and would it really be cost-prohibitive to re-render all of the CGI from the original show (to go with the 16:9 live-action footage)? I mean, sure, it was expensive at the time, but CGI is much cheaper nowadays. You could make CGI that looks better than what was in the show, using a video-game engine real-time on a typical home computer.
You could probably do the rendering on your PC far better than they had.
The problem is that you’d have to rebuild all the models and scenes, as they were all lost.
Ivanova says “I think I loved Talia” in S3, when she’s accepting her new uniform after the station quits Earthgov. That’s the most explicit it gets, and it happens after Talia is for all intents and purposes dead. ISTR a scene in season 2 where they’d spent the night together, but the given reason is that the hot water in Ivanova’s quarters isn’t working (or something like that) and I don’t recall them ever sharing so much as a tender gaze on camera. It was subtle enough that I didn’t pick up on it my first time watching the series all the way through, and only found out they were supposed to be in a relationship by reading a fan collection of things JMS had said online.
I wouldn’t need to get a new Amiga, I still have my 1000 and 500 [ and I have the hard drive for the 500!] I really should dig them out and see if I can remember what to do - been using a PC exclusively since about 1998.
While you’re at it, check to see if you have the Babylon 5 CGI models on there.