Babylon 5

[Ray Hardgrit]

More Babylon 5 was definitely a good idea on paper, but it hasn't worked out so great in practice. Though I suppose part of the problem is that they were never able to continue the threads that had been set up, with each new project ignoring what the last had been doing.

 

[FredH]

More Babylon 5 was definitely a good idea on paper, but it hasn't worked out so great in practice. Though I suppose part of the problem is that they were never able to continue the threads that had been set up, with each new project ignoring what the last had been doing.

I personally think that slightly too strict control over the property probably had something to do with it. Trek and Wars and Who were very much kept afloat during their “fallow years” by both is-it-canonical-who-cares tie-in continuations and, at least in their base fandoms, increasingly prolific fan-generated stuff, fanfics and fan audios and films. B5 had almost no post-series tie-ins after the three book trilogies, and while there was and is fanfic, my understanding was that early fan productions in other media were fairly quickly shut down (I can think of one quite good audio continuation with Julian Bane that definitely was). So it wasn’t allowed to “percolate” the way the other IPs did.

Or I could be completely wrong, of course.

 

[David cgc]

That sounds right, I remember JMS taking a dim view of fanwork. I guess since he was never as interested in the “hardware” aspects of sci-fi, the CG fan-art scene escaped his ire. That community stayed pretty active for about a decade following the end of the show, but it also started to disperse eventually as people moved on and, surprisingly often, went pro. Hell, Rhys Salcombe just won an Oscar for working on Dune II.

 

[Booji]

Legend of the Rangers and Lost Tales sucked. Road Home, for a non-fan, is meh. That is why B5 is dead right now. JMS simply did a shit job whenever presented with an opportunity to continue things and his excuses have become eye rolling.

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

It's his franchise, if he doesn't want to support "Fan Works", it's his perogative.

We all saw what happens when the other major franchises allows "Fan Works" to happen and we see what happens to B5's long term popularity when it's not allowed.

 

[DonIago]

Legend of the Rangers and Lost Tales sucked. Road Home, for a non-fan, is meh. That is why B5 is dead right now. JMS simply did a shit job whenever presented with an opportunity to continue things and his excuses have become eye rolling.

I really wanted Road Home to rekindle my interest in the franchise a bit more than it ultimately succeeded in doing.

 

[FredH]

I really wanted Road Home to rekindle my interest in the franchise a bit more than it ultimately succeeded in doing.

True. I enjoyed it well enough as a one-off, but it seemed written entirely for us olds; I can’t imagine someone new to B5 being drawn in by it — which makes the apparent intention for it to maybe kick off an altered separate-timeline series even more odd. (Frankly, if you’re writing for the olds I’d have been more interested in a continuation of Lost Tales. Heck, I could see a good series with David Sheridan and Prince Vintari as the protagonists, on Minbar and possibly as Rangers.)

 

[DonIago]

I know they had to make it under certain constraints, but I didn't like it when those constraints became too obvious within the film, I very much didn't care for the way the Shadows were arguably refactored, and I found the ending intriguing but also a bit WTF in terms of the impact to the larger timeline that would ensue. IIRC there were also times when the humor probably should have been dialed back a bit.

I did, overall, find it very watchable...but not watchable enough that I've watched it more than the two times (one normal, one with commentary). It feels more like a pretty good S5 episode than a gripping S3 or S4 episode, I suppose you could say.