"It was the dawn of the third age of mankind. Ten years after the Earth Minbari war. The Babylon project was a dream giving form. It's goal to prevent another war by creating a place where humans and aliens could work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call. Home away from home for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs, and wanderers. Humans and aliens wrap in two million five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night. It can be a dangerous place, but it's our last best hope for peace. This is the story of last of the Babylon stations. The year is 2258.
The name of the place is Babylon 5.
It was the dawn of an age of incredible of science fiction on television. In the 1990’s, we were given the continuing adventures of Star Trek: The Next Generation (which had debuted in 1987), the new adventures of Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager - along with Stargate: SG1. One excellent sci-fi show is sometimes forgotten in that list: Babylon 5. Created by J. Michael Straczynski, the series ran for five seasons, spawned several TV movies and even had a short lived spin-off - Crusade.
Babylon 5 was more known for its complex, interconnected storylines - truly a novel produced as a TV show - not its special FX. The producers chose a cost cutting budgetary move - which is now standard: produce the Bab 5 station, all the space battles and other FX digitally. Computer Generation Imagery or CGI is now how all sci-fi shows and movies achieve their FX, and Babylon 5 was a real pioneer to employ it fully back in the day.
But like the Star Trek shows - produced by taking master film prints and transferring them to the video which TV broadcast requires, getting that standard quality to upscale to HD for today’s tech is tricky and expensive. So, what did the studio, Warner Brothers, do to clean up and upgrade the show?
According to Warner Brothers, "Babylon 5 Remastered" has been scanned from the original camera negative. The film sequences were scanned in 4K and then "finished," or downscaled, back to HD, with a dirt and scratch clean-up, as well as color correction.Feb 3, 2021
Now whispers of the series coming back in some form is heard. Babylon 5 fan? C’mon. Let’s talk about it.
Sci-Fi Podcast: 'Babylon 5' Remastered In HD Will Blow You Away