I think CGI-wise we are just spoiled by the multi-million dollar blockbuster CGI. For the time and the media their CGI is pretty good. And yes, it's not perfect, but completely adequate to the time I think. And I don't think the aliens looked "silly" at all - I saw much worse work on many shows, I think B5 had good variety and depth without going overboard - when you shooting over a hundred episodes, making designs that would take 12 hours for an actor to get into is going to be kinda hard. And to be honest, probably won't add that much to the show beyond the initial novelty moment.

The CGI got comments when I talked about it with friends back then. “Oh that show with the cheesy effects?”

I also don’t think it was too bad for its time, but I think it was too early to rely on CGI to that extent. Great show though.

watching on a small 4x3 TV in the 90s, the CGI didn't bother me.

It was state of the art for 3d CGI during its time, but it also happened at a time when miniature > 3d CGI.

The station still looks pretty great...

The CGI doesn't bother me now, the space scenes are a small part of the show.

This isn't Trek where the Enterprise is a character in and of itself. This is more Deep Space Nine.

Babylon 5 is about politics and personalities, the spaceships and stuff are just the background.

In my opinion, the 30 year old B5 CGI is better than the most recent season of Star Trek Discovery in 2024, which I found to be quite bad, especially in the opening scene of the first episode.

Well, comparing things to the STD is not really setting a high bar on anything IMHO :)

B5 was more tasteful with it. They knew the limitations and steered into what they could do well.

Tom Bakers Doctor Who I think is the best example of using a shoestring budget to tell huge sci-fi stories well. B5 takes a lot from that book.

Yeah I thought about Doctor Who too, and if you look on it over its history the designs there are pretty basic and yet I never felt anything was really missing there. It's not about prettiest pictures.

It's no coincidence that you noticed similarities with DS9 - Paramount ripped off[1] the BS5 script J. Michael Straczynski had submitted to them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtaDXnB1YsA

Wow! Never heard about it. That may explain why I like DS9 the most of all the Trek things.

> "For the time and the media their CGI is pretty good. And yes, it's not perfect, but completely adequate to the time I think."

I watched it then, and i can tell you that NO, it wasn't pretty good for the time nor the media, it was terrible even for that time. Not because their CGI was particulary worse, but because all CGI was terrible at the time. The technology wasn't ready yet to do much, so everyone else at the time relied on practical effects, miniatures, and built full set; but for practicality and cost reasons they decided to use the crude CGI of the time for many things that were not good enouth at the time, and it shown terribly.

In subsequent seasons they walked back that decision slightly, mostly abandoning CGI for indoor scenes in favour of building sets for their actors like everyone else. And the last few seasons had fairly good CGI for external shots of the station and ships, because by that time the tech evolved to be good enouth (that is when you start seeing such CGI being used in all other shows as well).

The CGI was done on a shoestring budget, originally on Amigas and eventually on Dec Alphas. They were using Lightwave3D, which at the time was on the edge of affordable to students or indie producers. So it was neat seeing a tv show doing something you could do yourself on your home PC with enough patience and determination.

It's a remarkable achievement but yes, it does look rather dated sadly.

My main annoyance with B5 is how the alien designs echo human historic stereotypes. A lot of sci fi falls in this trap.

The Minbari are meditative asians. The Centari are a decaying franco-romanesque empire. The Narn are primitive and violent with dark skin and exaggerated facial features. The humans are plucky American go getters. The Vorlons are the only real original alien design, but were deliberately made a blank canvas of mystery.

Mind you in no way do I think it was malicious, just a lazy writing crutch others have used. Star Trek TNG had some pretty glaring examples of the same thing in early seasons. Star Wars patterns the Jedi after Samurai.

Even if there's a universe/plot justification for why all the alien species are humanoid variations too, I think it's a lot more interesting if the writers can come up with unique histories and cultures for the aliens.

> on Amigas

To be more specific, it was done on Video Toaster. Since the Video Toaster effectively guts the Amiga's video system and substitutes it with its own its hard to even call it an Amiga anymore.

And yeah, it has numerous examples of very lazy writing: Minbari (Space Asians), Centauri (Space French), Narn (Space Palestinians) ... but the Vorlons as original? Really? They're the Space Zen Masters, spitting out zen fortune cookies to drive the plot forward.

> I think it's a lot more interesting if the writers can come up with unique histories and cultures for the aliens.

Not everyone can be Tolkien and write 5,000 years of history and a linguistic family tree, so I tend to cut writers some slack even if their fictive cultures are boring stereotypes, as long as they can create characters that aren't. For the most part I think JMS succeeded at that.

Lightwave3D's renderer ran on the CPU as far as I know. The Toaster was for real time compositing effects and analog video i/o.

> My main annoyance with B5 is how the alien designs echo human historic stereotypes. A lot of sci fi falls in this trap.

1) The problem with TV is that you have to cough up an episode every single week on the fly. And JMS wrote a huge number of the episodes for Seasons 3 and 4 (I think all of them, but I can't find a citation).

2) Babylon 5 was specifically engineered to be TV budget friendly and was about $650K per episode. That puts significant limits on what you can do. Contrast to say Farscape at $1M or TNG at $1.5M per episode.

And the first 4 seasons it ran on an also ran network - PTEN - that only had 4 TV series during its entire run.

>1) The problem with TV is that you have to cough up an episode every single week on the fly. And JMS wrote a huge number of the episodes for Seasons 3 and 4 (I think all of them, but I can't find a citation).

IIRC, JMS says so in one of the DVD extras for Season 3 or 4 (one of the JMS commentary tracks).

He wrote 92 of the 110 episodes of the whole series (and all of 3&4). Practically unheard of or repeated as far as I know.

With a bigger budget, I think there would have been more fleshing out of the non-aligned worlds. There were a lot of interesting species there.

While some parts can be pretty corny, let me call out the music as amazing. Each episode has a lot more unique music than I thought!

Yeah, there was a lot about B5 that was good but a friend of mine also told me it was the worst TV recommendation I ever gave them. You had to overlook a lot. In addition to some of the things you list--though I'd argue some of the acting was pretty good--the future of the show was often in doubt so at least the final season was basically vestigial.

Ivanova would personally rip your lungs out /s

I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that the overwrought, corny dialogue is just how JMS rolls. But the man can still tell a good story

Maybe in the not too distant we’ll be able to generate the last two seasons as they were originally intended to be.