Post by B5Erik on Jul 27, 2015 0:51:19 GMT
By the time that The Lost Tales was announced Babylon 5 had already been off the air for 7 years. The show had gotten a second run on The Sci-Fi Channel in widescreen, and then disappeared...
Crusade had never been given a chance, and Legend of the Rangers was DOA. To go back to the B5 Universe (after a battle with MGM over his Jeremiah series) JMS knew he'd have to use the main characters that the fans knew and loved. Unfortunately, for a direct to video/dvd movie (potentially a series of movies) the budget was going to be lower than what he had to work with a decade earlier. This meant cuts. The original sets had been destroyed (no need for them after Crusade was cancelled). The cast was huge, and even though Andreas Katsulas and Richard Biggs had (VERY unfortunately) passed away it was still too large a cast to be able to pay everyone. So the movie would have a more narrow focus - with fewer characters in the story.
And what made Babylon 5 so special in the first place? A HUGE, EPIC five year story arc of, literally, galactic proportions - as well as individual story arcs for all of the main characters. That made for a series that was massive in scope.
But with The Lost Tales that scope was gone.
The two stories in The Lost Tales (one of the possession of a B5 crew member by some evil being, the other a morality tale involving President Sheridan and the Technomage Galen with nothing less than the fate of the Earth potentially in the balance). For a story involving the potential devastation of Earth and death of almost everyone on it this half of the movie comes across much smaller than it would have in the actual series. It really boils down to a decision that Sheridan has to make in order to pre-empt the devastation.
Still, the visual effects look better than the orignial series, and the actors (including Stargate SG1's Teryl Rothery as an ISN reporter) give excellent performances. It's not a bad movie - just not a great one, and after such a great series a merely good movie was a bit of a letdown.
The movie reportedly sold well enough to earn it's sequels, but JMS (aka J. Michael Straczynski) decided to pull the plug, reportedly because he wasn't as happy with the quality of the movie as he hoped to be. Could he have successfully addressed the issues that kept The Lost Tales from being as good as the series had been? Probably, but we'll never know for sure since the sequels were cancelled.
Now that the cast is mostly in their mid 50's to mid 60's, and some of them are now gone (Richard Biggs, Andreas Katsulas, Michael O'Hare, Jeff Conaway, and even recurring actor Robin Sachs), it now seems too late to even try to return to the universe of Babylon 5 as it was. (And JMS reported last year that he is working on a Babylon 5 theatrical reboot, which really puts to rest the idea of a return of the actors that so many people loved.)
The Lost Tales was a great idea, and the execution is as good as could be reasonably expected given the budget, but the platform for the return to the B5 universe was never going to allow for the scope of the original series, or even the full remaining cast. As disappointing as it was that we didn't get the Garibaldi centered Lost Tales movie, maybe it's just as well that we didn't.
Crusade had never been given a chance, and Legend of the Rangers was DOA. To go back to the B5 Universe (after a battle with MGM over his Jeremiah series) JMS knew he'd have to use the main characters that the fans knew and loved. Unfortunately, for a direct to video/dvd movie (potentially a series of movies) the budget was going to be lower than what he had to work with a decade earlier. This meant cuts. The original sets had been destroyed (no need for them after Crusade was cancelled). The cast was huge, and even though Andreas Katsulas and Richard Biggs had (VERY unfortunately) passed away it was still too large a cast to be able to pay everyone. So the movie would have a more narrow focus - with fewer characters in the story.
And what made Babylon 5 so special in the first place? A HUGE, EPIC five year story arc of, literally, galactic proportions - as well as individual story arcs for all of the main characters. That made for a series that was massive in scope.
But with The Lost Tales that scope was gone.
The two stories in The Lost Tales (one of the possession of a B5 crew member by some evil being, the other a morality tale involving President Sheridan and the Technomage Galen with nothing less than the fate of the Earth potentially in the balance). For a story involving the potential devastation of Earth and death of almost everyone on it this half of the movie comes across much smaller than it would have in the actual series. It really boils down to a decision that Sheridan has to make in order to pre-empt the devastation.
Still, the visual effects look better than the orignial series, and the actors (including Stargate SG1's Teryl Rothery as an ISN reporter) give excellent performances. It's not a bad movie - just not a great one, and after such a great series a merely good movie was a bit of a letdown.
The movie reportedly sold well enough to earn it's sequels, but JMS (aka J. Michael Straczynski) decided to pull the plug, reportedly because he wasn't as happy with the quality of the movie as he hoped to be. Could he have successfully addressed the issues that kept The Lost Tales from being as good as the series had been? Probably, but we'll never know for sure since the sequels were cancelled.
Now that the cast is mostly in their mid 50's to mid 60's, and some of them are now gone (Richard Biggs, Andreas Katsulas, Michael O'Hare, Jeff Conaway, and even recurring actor Robin Sachs), it now seems too late to even try to return to the universe of Babylon 5 as it was. (And JMS reported last year that he is working on a Babylon 5 theatrical reboot, which really puts to rest the idea of a return of the actors that so many people loved.)
The Lost Tales was a great idea, and the execution is as good as could be reasonably expected given the budget, but the platform for the return to the B5 universe was never going to allow for the scope of the original series, or even the full remaining cast. As disappointing as it was that we didn't get the Garibaldi centered Lost Tales movie, maybe it's just as well that we didn't.