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Not actually true. B5 was rejected as a Trek show because DS9 was already underway, at least at the early stage.

It’s like saying Dredd ripped off The Raid, when you don’t know Dredd was in production before The Raid,

I’m not saying DS9 didn’t learn lessons from B5, but it’s not a carbon copy rip-off.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Not actually true. B5 was rejected as a Trek show because DS9 was already underway, at least at the early stage.

It’s like saying Dredd ripped off The Raid, when you don’t know Dredd was in production before The Raid,

I’m not saying DS9 didn’t learn lessons from B5, but it’s not a carbon copy rip-off.

Ehhhh.... not quite.

JMS had written his Babylon 5 Bible during the mid 1980's (and was referenced in Captain Power). He took the pitch and the series Bible scripts for the first season, and concept art with him to every major studio.

Among those was Paramount, which JMS approached in the summer of 1986.

5 years later (as JMS and company thought Paramount was going to turn Babylon 5 into a show), Paramount ghosted JMS, so he approached Warner Bros. with the project and they were the ones to eventually pick it up for their new Prime Time Entertainment Network (PTEN). This was announced formally in 1991 November. The same year that JMS was the head writer for Murder, She Wrote.

However, 1991 was also the year that things got rolling for Deep Space Nine. Recently hired President Motion Picture Group for Paramount Brandon Tartikoff approach Star Trek writer and producer Rick Berman about the idea of expanding the show to another series to run parallel and after Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Now, Jeri Taylor and JMS were friends and had worked together professionally.

JMS believes that Taylor had no working knowledge of Babylon 5, but the studio obviously did.

JMS would learn of the similarities from Walter Koenig (aka Chekov, later Bester)....

Walter Koenig:

Joe, it's about an Earth-sponsored space station, identified by a name and a number, located in neutral territory that serves as a meeting place for alien races, with a bar, a casino, a female second-in-charge, and a shape-changer.

JMS:

During the 5 years spent pitching Babylon 5 we'd given Paramount all of our developmental material. This led to several discussions with the executives that seemed to be going in a positive direction when suddenly they went radio silent. It never occurred to us that someone within Paramount might have looked at that material and thought, Hmmm... a companion series to NextGen about a space station, that's a great idea.

But why do we need theseguys?

And to misquote Kurt Vonnegut... and so it goes...

I don’t remember a shapeshifter as a main character on B5? Also DS9 wasn’t a meeting place for aliens. It was specifically just a Bajoran thing. I don’t even believe it was a neutral space.

 AduroT wrote:
I don’t remember a shapeshifter as a main character on B5? Also DS9 wasn’t a meeting place for aliens. It was specifically just a Bajoran thing. I don’t even believe it was a neutral space.

The shape-shifter was the villain in the first episode of Babylon 5.

Plus Bajor wasn't a part of the Federation.

JMS has only ever claimed that Paramount knew about B5 by 1989, and he only ever commented on similarities in regards to the pilot episode. His claims that Paramount somehow manipulated the show runners into ripping off his material didn't hold water even 20 years later given we have ample access to the production of DS9 and it wasn't a show being directed by Paramount from above. The show's similarities are superficial. Berman has extensively commented on how the team adapted the premise of DS9 from the western series The Rifleman, which is far more similar to DS9 than B5 is.

Even the complaint about how 'they both have a shape shifter' is superficial. B5 had a shapeshifter as a throwaway villain for one episode. DS9 had one as a central character. Neither were the first shows to have shapeshifters as characters. You might as well accuse SG-1 of ripping off B5 at that point.

Let it go. We get it. B5 fans can't stand their show didn't hold up very well while DS9 enjoyed a revival of popularity in the age of streaming. Your show is still there. You can like it without being bitter that a similar dueling Sci-fi series ended up more popular in the long run.

I'm pulling my dates from Straczynski's book.

I'm not bitter about the show or popularity contests. If I only cared if a show was popular I wouldn't have enjoyed watching Time Trax (and wouldnt have spent time hunting down a bootleg copy of the series), and would assume that the pinnacle of fantasy must be Hercules and Xena (due to worldwide popularity).

Also Karl Rove and President George Bush said Babylon 5 is the best science fiction show ever.

The only true similarities to me are that they are both space station shows and B5 happens to coincide with DS9 being the first truly serialized Trek series.

Outside of that there overall arcs are pretty distinctly different.

Is B5 streaming anywhere?

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Is B5 streaming anywhere?

Amazon

I think it was on Tubi recently.

I have a couple friends who are currently rewatching B5. I’ll ask them the next time I see the .

Have you seen my forcelance?

Is it okay to discuss the weird, troubled cousin of Star Trek, aka Andromeda, here?

Hey, Andromeda is reasonably good!

Bit repetitive in the early days, outright weird at the end. But still enjoyable.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Hey, Andromeda is reasonably good!

Bit repetitive in the early days, outright weird at the end. But still enjoyable.

It really went downhill once Trance wasn't purple anymore.

That’s when I thought it got good!

Trance not being purple and with a tail was certainly a turning point!

Also they lost the guy doing the Magog who was great, though that was more due to allergy issues with the extreme amount of makeup. Same as the Blue alien in Farescape.

Isn’t that why she stopped being purple as well? Not an allergy, just hated how long the makeup took?

It wouldn't surprise me. That or potentially allergy buildup and she wanted to get out of that before it actually reached the allergy point.


Also now I think on it I think the Magog guy might have had more of a claustrophobia reaction to it all. Kinda like what Jim Carry had to the Grinch costume he had to put on. Though he only had to do it for one film not a prolonged series.

I think the story behind Andromeda is that after season 1 Kevin Sorbo, like, took over the show and got the orignal writer ousted. Indeed I only like Season 1 and think its got some high-minded concepts and the rest of the seasons are mostly Kevin Sorbo getting it on with hot chicks

I don't know if it was season 1 but yeah the show did have a very distinct shift in the writing quality and foreshadowing

Oh Kevin Sorbo, I liked Hercules and such growing up, and now it’s just a name I shake my head at and wonder what idiocy he pulled this time. I do enjoy Lucy Lawless constantly dragging his arse though.

I gave up on Andromeda when after a few episodes it was still like 5 of them in a mile long ship.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Hey, Andromeda is reasonably good!

Bit repetitive in the early days, outright weird at the end. But still enjoyable.

The weirdest thing about Andromeda from what I remember is that it kept changing its premises. Like each season was suddenly a somewhat different kind of show and none of them were bad exactly but it was jarring that the formula constantly changed.

I must have watched about 2or 3 seasons of Andromeda back in the day, then I missed some episodes or seasons, whatever and whenever I tried to come back to the series I just didn’t know what was going on. Basically the opposite of Stargate, where no matter if you were in season 1 or 10, you could bet they're running around on some middle ages planet doing the same stuff .

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
I gave up on Andromeda when after a few episodes it was still like 5 of them in a mile long ship.

Baffled why they didn't recruit all the kids from that space station who clearly had trained themselves up and wanted to be in that military, and otherwise were being horrifically predated on.

Probably cause all the budget went onto CGI and two or three high costume characters. I seem to recall in latter seasons they did have enough to have a whole crew.

But yeah it was odd that Andromeda was running around needing a captain and a crew all the time and yet had enough robots to, you know, actually do all the crew stuff week to week.

Andromeda was a wierd show - some good stuff though. Cool looking ship but the battles were not great.

Stargate on the other hand was awesome at most things.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Hey, Andromeda is reasonably good!

Bit repetitive in the early days, outright weird at the end. But still enjoyable.

The weirdest thing about Andromeda from what I remember is that it kept changing its premises. Like each season was suddenly a somewhat different kind of show and none of them were bad exactly but it was jarring that the formula constantly changed.

Yes, at first it was about rebulding The Commonwealth as a beacon of hope and then....they sort of just forgot about that.

On the battles? I think the biggest weakness was never really expressing just how large the Andromeda was.

Sure, we know the Maru* could land inside it, which does help.

But when it comes to other warships? I don’t think they really got it across.

If I was to remake it? I think I’d just add a space battle to the initial scene setting, and have the Andromeda as this true titan of forgotten/lost technology suddenly returned. Bigger, better armed, more accurate etc.

The scaling is important. Star Wars nailed it (literally the opening scene, and of course the excellent Battle of Endor). Star Trek had some flaws (Klingon Birds of Prey being a scaleable design hurt it) and BSG did it really well by only having limited ship designs.

Heck, even SG-1, which only really featured space battles late on did that well.

Ya, a remake would be pretty cool but it'll never happen. Apparently, there is a "remake" of Stargate coming though.

Did Andromeda have a proper ending or did it just stop?