#FreeBabylon5

J. Michael Straczynski has quitely woken up the Babylon 5 fan base with – wait for it, wait for it – a call to arms to show Warner Bros. that there’s interest in Babylon 5 – remastering the existing material for the future, and perhaps doing something new with it down the road – by using the hashtag #FreeBabylon5 on Twitter and Facebook.

This is an excellent idea on so many fronts.

theLogBook.com (and, by extension, its webmaster) was an early adopter of Babylon 5 – it was, in fact, one of the first shows I covered in depth that didn’t have the word “Trek” anywhere in the title, and it was one of those shows to which I’ll admit to giving extra TLC in my teevee promotions career (though there was that other incident too). Unlike those shows with “Trek” in the title, B5 is not currently being rerun, or remastered, or anything – with the kind of rebuilt-from-the-ground-up FX that Classic Trek got, B5 could be *huge* on Blu-Ray (and back on TV in HD).

B5 kicked open a lot of the doors that the Battlestar Galactica remake was able to stride through with confidence. One of the primary things that has probably kept B5 out of reruns is that the look of its CGI dated very quickly, and the DVD releases gave the show an even worse black eye by making the CGI sequences seem “muddy” in the DVD transfers (the 16:9 film was rescanned for the DVD releases, but CGI was rendered in 4:3 from the outset – despite internal campaigning to futureproof the show by rendering CG in, at the very least, 16:9 standard def, and for the want of five grand, and was very sloppily reframed as 16:9 for DVD). Result: space scenes, and any live-action scene with compositing, look “soft” next to crystal-clear, obviously-high-quality film-sourced footage.

Since the live-action stuff was shot on film, this show could be a knockout in HD with new effects (we even briefly discussed, in theLogBook’s own forums, the mechanics of crowdsourcing the rendering work to bring the show up to modern spec).

But CGI isn’t why this show needs to be back in front of eyeballs. The storylines and the issues they raised have gained relevance by the truckload over time. And damn it, your speaker system hasn’t even found its purpose in life yet without Andreas Katsulas’ voice rumbling through it.

So many genre shows that have ridden a long-term story arc into cult classic-dom – Buffy, the aforementioned BSG, Lost, to name just a few – owe a huge debt to Babylon 5. But as often as it’s seen anymore, you’d think it was something that went out with the DuMont network. (Well… then again… PTEN… close enough.)

I’m happy to support the effort to #FreeBabylon5 – I think of this show alongside the original Star Trek and the original Twilight Zone in the “holy trinity” of American-made SFTV. With some exposure, I think a lot of other people would come to view it as that third pillar as well.