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They definitely aren't 1/4 SD (DVD) though... The original series was SD, shot in SD for the early seasons with 1/4 res CGI. The HBO Max release was 1080p with some wife screen usage... The extra pixels came from somewhere.
Series were shot on film. The HD versions are a mix of rescanned film and upscaled vfx shots
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> if i remember it correctly: they used a software called "lightroom" Afaict, it was Lightwave3d, that I just learned still lives to this day. Last release June 11 2025. Also used to make SeaQuest :) Oh, the memories...
That explains why the effects looked so similar in the two... Never did get into Babylon 5, but SeaQuest, for all its campiness, was my jam briefly in my childhood.
Those who come to this magnificent piece of Sci-Fi for the first time, a word of advice: Pay attention. There are things set in motion in season 1 that are resolved multiple seasons later and there's a lot of foreshadowing (pun very much intended) both subtle and overt. Oh and, enjoy the ride. It's a good one.
I believe B5 was the first sci-fi show to do this kind of multi-season story arc. For all the poor acting and filler episodes, it is still hugely influential.
B5 is known for the fact JMS had a full five year arch planned from the start (due to O'Hare's unfortunate state of mind he was forced to pivot with Boxleitner as well as season 4-5 got gutted for other reasons) but I can't recall if DS9 had similar aspirations from the get go or if they eased into it as the story progressed. For comparison: was the Dominion War in the cards all the way from episode 1 or did it come into play later?
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We recently watched all the 80's and 90's Star Trek for the first time. So it's really interesting to compare the series' from the modern perspective. TNG is a classic, with the classic crew and after the first hiccups is some of the best scifi of all time. Absolutely great actors and amazing writing. DS9 is the weird one. I do really enjoy the trajectory of many of its characters: Sisko, Odo, Bashir, Dax (one of my…
Something I've said about Voyager for years*: It has some of the best and some of the worst Star Trek episodes. Very little consistency there. I think that's probably why a lot of people don't like it, the bad outweighs the good for them. * Before some recent entries at least. Yikes.
Luckily Lower Decks was good, Picard had some good moments and there were a few good episodes in Strange New Worlds too, even though that series didn't really excite me anymore in its latest season.
Voyager's bad episodes are still better than most of the scifi I've watched in the recent years. They are cringe, but in a funny way.
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I believe B5 was the first sci-fi show to do this kind of multi-season story arc. For all the poor acting and filler episodes, it is still hugely influential.
Kind of. What is an interesting topic of debate is that B5 aired at the same time with Deep Space 9 (pilots were released a month apart). DS9 switched out the "adventure of the week" formula from Star Trek for a long form storytelling and it is fought over to this day if one copied from another. B5 is known for the fact JMS had a full five year arch planned from the start (due to O'Hare's unfortunate state of mind he…
What I find fascinating is that JMS wrote in all kinds of escape hatches for if major characters left and of course, there's the time travelling shenanigans that are shown in season 1, but not resolved to much later which show just how planned out it was. Of course his 5 season arc was tied up in 4 seasons when the studios threatened to cancel the 5th season, and then when they changed their mind, it led to a somewhat tacked on season 5 as the main story had been resolved.
It seems like a common factor of having a static space stations that lends itself well to story arcs. The other Treks were based on exploration, so they make sense to reset each episode as they travel to a new region.
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It's let down by its effects which even appeared ropey at the time. However, some good storylines.
Having been alive at the time, I can tell you that the effects were amazing then. B5 was one of the first shows to use computer graphics and partially-virtual sets. It wasn't limited by the number of times you could re-composite a handful of models together, so it showed whole armadas of ships. Windows didn't open onto a black felt field of stars but a green screen that allowed ships to pull up right outside the wind…
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It is extremely difficult for me to believe that someone watching Babylon 5 as it aired on a typical sized CRT television thought the effects looked "cheap". Hokey? Okay, maybe, that's subjective enough to be non-debatable. But "cheap" in the context of a television show? The shots were so much more dense and dynamic than what Star Trek was doing at the time, which is the obvious comparison. It's the season one actin…
The costuming and sets and CGI are impressive, but the lighting is unnecessarily murky and the dark industrial tunnels aesthetic makes me think of Red Dwarf , which I can’t imagine was a very lavish production.
I did watch Babylon 5 when it first came out in the UK. Deep Space 9 definitely had better looking effects, but I preferred B5 to DS9 on the basis of other factors.
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Having also been alive at the time, I can tell you I thought the effects looked hokey and cheap.
Was there much with better effects on TV at the time?
The trick with effects is to make whatever you have look good. There are a few ways of doing that. 2001's effects are genius and still look pretty good nearly sixty years later. They look better than 2010's from the 1980s. In fact, I'm even impressed with Forbidden Planet — yes, there are a lot of painted backgrounds but it does very well with what it has.
For those who have watched both Babylon 5 and Star Trek TNG- which did you like better?
I liked B5 far more, it tended to show people as real people. A good example is Walter Koenig, to me he was amazing in B5, at times you hated and loved his character, even at the same time.
Absolutely. I just rewatched S02E05 ("The Long Dark") that had Dwight Schultz[0] as a guest star.
While watching it (and not for the first time), it occurred to me that in that one single episode on Babylon 5, Schultz showed us more humanity than in all the dozen or so Star Trek: TNG/Voyager episodes he was in as Lieutenant Barclay.
In both roles, Shultz's character is emotionally damaged, which causes problems for them, but in the Star Trek roles it's mostly played for comedy and the issues around his dysfunction aren't addressed at all.
As the B5 character, his PTSD (based on serious trauma as a soldier) made him a homeless substance abuser. The plot pushed him to examine and face the source of his trauma. While I wouldn't call it a "powerful" performance, the B5 character was much more believable and human than the ST character.
Same actor, incredibly different on-screen results.
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Definitely not my favorite episode, but I got a kick out of the similarities to A Canticle for Leibowitz during one of the segments in it.
That was a very conscious and deliberate homage.
"It was only when I was about halfway into the act that I thought, "Oh, crud, this is the same area Canticle explored." And for several days I set it aside and strongly considered dropping it, or changing the venue (at one point considered setting it in the ruins of a university, but I couldn't make that work realistically...who'd be supporting a university in the ruins of a major nuclear war? Who'd have the *resources* I needed? The church, or what would at least LOOK like the church. My sense of backstory here is that the Anla-shok moved in and started little "abbeys" all over the place, using the church as cover, but rarely actually a part of it, which was why they had not gotten their recognition, and would never get it. Rome probably didn't even know about them, or knew them only distantly.)
Anyway...at the end of the day, I decided to leave it as it was, since I'd gotten there on an independent road, we'd already had a number of monks on B5, and there's been a LOT of theocratic science fiction written beyond Canticle...Gather Darkness, aspects of Foundation, others." -- Lurker's Guide