CW
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🙁
🙁

Yeah, I feel your pain..😥

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_CW
The CW -> CBS + Warner

Well, let's think positive..
The boss is a B5 fan and A. Kurtzman is not (yet) working on it. 😉

Edit: A picture popped up in my mind.
The Animaniacs portraying the cast/story of B5. Oh my.. 😱

How bad is it gonna be, like Arrow? ...

I am John Sheridan, to unite the galaxy I had to become someone else, BE something else..

Quick update. A bit late, sorry. News is from late May, sorry.

https://movieweb.com/cw-head-confirms-babylon-5-reboot/

Edit: The site says "Who better than the original creator of Babylon 5 to write the script for the reboot pilot?"

I'm not sure if that statement is true. People change, we all change.
Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
For example, young me had higher ideals and more imagination than current me.

And let's just look what people did to other sci-fi shows in the past years.
Noble characters were dragged through the
dirt by nothing less than their own actors.
That technically is not the case for B5, of course (rip), but still.

Some people are somewhat obsessed with perfecting their 'visions' or make a social statement that they lose focus on what really matters.

Edit: And then, there's that bitterness and disillusionment of age. And our era.
The 90s were a decade of hope, optimism. Something to live for.

The Berlin wall fell, cold war ended. The MIR space station invited astronauts from other countries.
Multimedia was everywhere. The future had arrived. Year 2000 was ahead. We had pagers, blinking shoes, PDAs/organizers.
We had digital encyclopedias on CD-ROMs..
Modems were to replaced by ISDN and DSL, videophones were in reach. A bright future of peace.

And now? It's the 2020s. Life is depressing, the world is gray, in occasional self-quarantine
and the geeks are using 3D printers to build their functional real world Pip-Boy 3000 replicas for the upcoming fallout. 😔

Edit: Oh, and we got Windows 11.
No, seriously. What can we expect from a B5 reboot under such circumstances?
If it's made in these days, will we see Delenn and her people being reimagined as space vampires?
I mean, let's just look what happened to the Klingons in STD..
Both races were proud people, both spiritualists and fighters at the same time.
I'm not sure if I could handle that.

instead of remakes why not 'makes'?

the reason is simply to get hold of the remains of an existing audience and get some pre-made setting ideas without having to think too much, its easier than trying to build a new audience and setting. It's just 'marketing'

the way in which things are reinterpreted - as you've said the rubbishing of past heroes just to elevate the new poor substitutes, the lazy mapping of supposedly 'current' views onto the tattered remains of the old shows setting and s on - are generally awkward, forced and disappointing

But it might be ok if all the new ideas were built onto an all new show whose premise and setting suit what the current writers want to write

in my view things are of their time and should be left there by and large to be picked up whole and enjoyed as is rather than 'reimagined', 'rebooted' and so on

Jo22 wrote:

If it's made in these days, will we see Delenn and her people being reimagined as space vampires?

By the way, would remake revisit original idea of ambassador Delenn being minbari male (as seen in the pilot episode) which morph into human/minbari female? That idea was scrapped for practical reasons, but it's <insert current year> now (in multiple meanings).

Straczynski could also make that infamous joke script (with gender switching and banging Londo) for G'Kar a reality 🤣

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-06-09, 11:23:

By the way, will remake revisit original idea of ambassador Delenn being minbari male (as seen in the pilot episode) which morph into human/minbari female? That idea was scrapped for practical reasons, but it's <insert current year> now (in many meanings).

What? Is this real 🤣

I thought Delenn just had bad alien makeup due to shitty pilot production values!

Sombrero wrote on 2022-06-09, 11:31:

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2022-06-09, 11:23:

By the way, will remake revisit original idea of ambassador Delenn being minbari male (as seen in the pilot episode) which morph into human/minbari female? That idea was scrapped for practical reasons, but it's <insert current year> now (in many meanings).

What? Is this real 🤣

I thought Delenn just had bad alien makeup due to shitty pilot production values!

Yesss! 😁 Something like that was planned originally.
On page one I made fun of that idea (the gender swap), albeit unintentionally.
It wasn't Sheridan/Sinclair, though, but Delenn.
That's what DosFreak meant to say in his reply, I think.
I learned about it when I searched the net for background information about the original B5 production.

Edit: But in B5's defense, I think the gender swap wasn't intentionally meant to follow a hype or to participate an existing gender war etc.
I think it rather was meant as a part of the whole metamorphosis thing.
Like a caterpillar who becomes a butterfly.

Surprise, another B5 project exists!
It's apparently finished and the release of the film/series is next year.

https://www.space.com/babylon-5-return-original-cast

https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/babylon … lease-date-2023

I’m so happy to see this show coming back

I feel the same - though, I must admit that this wasn't always the case.
Somewhen in the late 90s to early 2000s, when I saw B5 first time, it seemed like a strange show to me.
You know, for someone who used to be watching starship Enterprise on TV.. A show about exploration, hope, ideals.
Originally, the whole B5 story line and the aliens.. They felt strange. A bit too militaristic, maybe, as well.
However, when I got older and watched the re-runs without missing out on the episodes, I found it to be a solid show.
With the chance of evolving into a classic. Despite the lack of merchandise. Or a video game (since this is Vogons).
- I'm still baffled no one has made one as a fan project in the last 20 years yet. There was massive potential for a text-adventure, at least.

Edit: Rephrased a sentence. To, err, avoid misunderstandings. 😅

There are a bunch of B5 fan games for RTS titles like Homeworld and some low-grade official B5 mini-games were made, but the real gem that was never released was the Official B5 PC Game, Into The Fire. That one was basically a B5 movie in a video game, which involved time travel, depicting key moments from the series universe that had never been seen before but talked about, and was a flight-sim (think Freespace) that had the full involvement of the B5 cast and crew, on the production side of things. It had an episode's worth of newly-shot footage with the B5 cast members and finished VFX from Netter Digital, all made during the production of the final season of B5 and it ended up being the last vintage B5 stuff shot outside of what was being done for Crusade and it's lead-in movie, Call to Arms. It was very well received by the fans who got a look at it, but the same accounting scandal that took down Ken William's Sierra took out the team behind the game and the release and all work was scrapped entirely, despite the game being "almost ready for release" or so we were told. All we have left of it is a gameplay demo that leaked out some years back and I believe there's a thread about it on here.

gerry wrote on 2022-06-09, 08:31:

the way in which things are reinterpreted - as you've said the rubbishing of past heroes just to elevate the new poor substitutes, the lazy mapping of supposedly 'current' views onto the tattered remains of the old shows setting and s on - are generally awkward, forced and disappointing

I completely agree, but I wanted to say that I watched a historical drama recently that had a lot of "modern" views in it so I was sat there rubbishing the whole thing as having been updated for modern social ideals being forced on us, and no longer based on the original story.... then I looked up the original story from 100+ years ago, and.... all those "modern" views were there in the first place...

It's weird how old fiction can hit the mark so well. I reread Coming Up For Air by George Orwell a few years ago (I'd read it first in the 1970s when I was a teenager) - it hits the mark so well in its commentary on people and society - it fits the modern world. People are people.

Jo22 wrote on 2022-06-09, 07:17:

Edit: The site says "Who better than the original creator of Babylon 5 to write the script for the reboot pilot?" […]
Show full quote

Edit: The site says "Who better than the original creator of Babylon 5 to write the script for the reboot pilot?"

I'm not sure if that statement is true. People change, we all change.
Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.
For example, young me had higher ideals and more imagination than current me.

Agreed.

I worry when authors rehash (re-edit, and rewrite "for consistency" when there's a series) their old works - leave the past as it is, write something new, don't damage what you did. But some of that is because I enjoyed the books in the 1970s and when the author rejigs the stories 30 years later (say) the old ones become unobtainable new, and they lose some of their original qualities (inconsistency and gaps being among them).

Same with films (and I daresay some games), though what I have in mind there isn't a re-edit but things like Prometheus and Alien Covenant which exhibit another idiom (I think modern, because I didn't notice this until the last few decades...): everything has to be rehashed to have a backstory with banale motives and redemption all over the place, stories are redacted and retro-fitted and over-embellished, villains have to be explained by reference to their childhood PTSD or whatever (which is pretty offensive to anyone who suffered in their childhood) they can't just be "bad" - and of course retconning abounds. I have nothing against stories that go for the full monty with all the motives and backstories, but they don't ALL need to have it. Just as we don't need all this blasted bleed-through of each fictional universe into every other one - sometimes it's OK, sometimes it's fun, but don't do it all the time...

I don’t know Topgun called the bad guys “the enemy” .

In hindsight it’s pretty pathetic we can’t call certain elements in the world an enemy anymore.