Posted in: Opinion, Preview, streaming, TV, TV | Tagged: babylon 5, j. michael straczynski, jms, Warner Bros, warners

Babylon 5 Future Could Include a Series of Animated Movies

Published Sun, 19 Sep 2021 08:38:40 -0500

Recently, Bleeding Cool reported on a very vague, possible tease by J Michael Straczynski over a continuation of his space opera classic TV show Babylon 5, when asked, simply saying, "Who knows…this might not be so wild a dream as it appears…" So what is going on? Okay, this is just joining up a couple of dots together, that is all.

J. Michael Straczynski Gives Slight Tease For The Return Of Babylon 5 — Babylon 5 screencap

There is a Facebook site called "Babylon 5: Some behind the scenes stuff", run by someone who has interviewed a huge number of the special effects and CGI team from the show. As a result of that, he's still in contact with many of them, and a few weeks ago he posted the following – which may suggest that what we are to expect is a Babylon 5 animated movie or streaming series. And it followed another tweet from J Michael Straczynski, looking for people who had been posting original Babylon 5 model files to YouTube.

Turns out that was the behind-the-scenes guy himself doing that, uploading high-resolution re-renders of the CGI to YouTube after he "just got access to some of the assets a few years back and decided to re-render a few shots to see how they looked without all the conversion do-da which royally screwed with that genuinely important and groundbreaking work from the Foundation Imaging crew." And as a result he learned more on what was being sought and why, "the bottom line is the request from JMA about getting hold of the original 3D models was NOT to do a proper remaster of the show. . . . The models were requested for reference purposes only. . . Someone wanted to get a close look at them basically. There's not a lot of details, and as mentioned the details vary ever so slightly as he was talking to different people but the upshot is WB want to do some animated material set in the B5 universe, movies were mentioned, a series of them was mentioned (perhaps one or two a year). I've no idea if any of the original actors would be brought on for voice work, no idea what "style" these animations will take, and don't know what time period or stories they might touch on. How far along in the development process was also unclear… the requested 3D models are for their animators to use as a starting point to create their own thing – there are no plans for anyone from the original team to be involved, at least not at the time this was all said. WB is apparently pretty keen to do this – which isn't too surprising, but I'm not going to get into all that complete horse hockey about someone at the studio hating the show and how they will never do anything new with B5. By all means view this as gossip, even another bit of speculation – and dismiss it accordingly, but that's the gist of what I was told about why the request for the original 3D models was made a few months back."

So bear all that in mind, maybe, just maybe, it might give JMS' tweet some more context. We are also told that JMS had been hinting about possible Babylon 5 plans elsewhere on his Patreon group. Could "Babylon 5: The Animates Series" be the way forward?

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