Babylon 5 is on Blu-ray. Sometimes, you just have to say it out loud—or type it—to believe it.

Released two days before my birthday on Tuesday, 5 December 2023, I’ve been contemplating a review of this twenty-one disc set for nearly a year.

Succinctly, this is the best Babylon 5 has ever looked and sounded on home video.

Before I elaborate, though, I must warn you about a related matter.

Caveat emptor!

It has been brought to my attention that on 15 October 2024 Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment—because the name wasn’t enough of a mouthful before the merger—has reissued Babylon 5 on DVD in packaging resembling last year’s Blu-ray release.

Given the presence of “Commentaries, Featurettes, Additional Scenes, Gag Reels and More”, this is a repackaging of the DVDs originally issued between 2002 and 2004.

The fact that WBDHE has omitted the 16:9 aspect ratio from the specifications while using packaging associated—for nearly a year—with the new 4:3 high-definition transfers treads very close to false advertising.

Do not buy these DVDs thinking that you are getting new masters in standard definition.

Back to the Blu-rays, by way of preamble:

On 29 March 2022, Warner Bros. Archive released a Blu-ray of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962). This movie is an extraordinary technical achievement, one of only two narrative movies produced for the original three-projector Cinerama format.¹ The Blu-ray features a Smilebox presentation which does a splendid job of replicating the 146-degree curvature of the Cinerama screen, and can be a vertiginous experience as carriages clatter along mountainside roads in the Alps.

While the other movie of this kind, How the West Was Won (1962), was relatively well-preserved, Grimm was in a sorry state, necessitating a nearly prohibitive amount of restoration. Harrison Engle covered the rehabilitation of the film in a forty-minute documentary called “Rescuing a Fantasy Classic”, following the nine negatives—a yellow, cyan, and magenta master for each of the three Cinerama cameras—to Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging, on the other side of Burbank from where I’m typing these very words. There, each frame of the film was scanned…alongside Babylon 5, visible several times throughout the documentary on the next machine over.

The Grimm restoration took eighteen months after the scans were made. No one at WBMPI was wearing a mask, so it seems the Grimm and Babylon 5 scans were being done in 2019, with work on the latter completed in 2020 for debut on HBO Max in January 2021.

When Babylon 5 debuted on the streaming service, a number of errors were reported to HBO Max, including the omission of the tag from “Babylon Squared” (118). These were addressed as they were noted, with corrected masters appearing throughout the early days of Babylon 5’s tenure on the streaming service.

I suspect this was Warner Bros. crowdsourcing quality control.

The Content

When the captions were remade for seasons two and three of Babylon 5 on DVD, a different font was used. This has been remedied for the Blu-rays, with the correct version of Serpentine employed on all the episodes, for the credits and any on-screen legends.

All the variations in the opening titles are intact:

• “Born to the Purple” (104) features Mary Woronov as Ko D’ath rather than Caitlin Brown as Na’Toth.

• “Points of Departure” (201) and “Revelations” (202) feature Lieutenant Commander Susan Ivanova and a full-Minbari Delenn.

• “The Geometry of Shadows” (203) replaces Delenn’s full-Minbari look with the new half-human appearance after it’s been revealed in “Revelations” (202).

• “Points of Departure” (201), “Revelations” (202), and “The Geometry of Shadows” (203) feature the original mix of Bruce Boxleitner’s opening narration, which was remixed and retimed on 8 November 1994, the improved version debuting on “A Distant Star” (204).

• “A Distant Star” (204) drops lieutenant from Ivanova’s rank, acknowledging her promotion in “The Geometry of Shadows” (203).

• “The Long Dark” (205) adds lieutenant to Warren Keffer, acknowledging his promotion in “A Distant Star” (204). According to a deleted scene, Keffer was a lieutenant (junior grade) prior to his promotion, but this was not reflected in the credits for the first four episodes.

• “The Illusion of Truth” (408) drops security chief from Michael Garibaldi following his resignation in “Epiphanies” (407) and transfers the title to the newly appointed Zack Allan.

• “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” (501) correctly omits Claudia Christian’s credit, replacing it with a shot of the Agamemnon emerging from the explosion of the orbital platform. (This was necessitated by Christian’s appearance in “Sleeping in Light” [422], which “Deconstruction” replaced. Contractually, she could only appear in twenty-two episodes, so the title sequence was altered to accommodate the situation.)

• As with the remix of Boxleitner’s opening narration in season two, the season five opening titles were remixed from “Strange Relations” (507). The original mix has been retained for “No Compromises” (502) through “Learning Curve” (506).

• “The Corps Is Mother, the Corps Is Father” (514) features the Psi Corps logo and “Trust the Corps” instead of the Babylon 5 logo at the beginning of the credits, with the Babylon 5 shield and logo added to the “Created by J. Michael Straczynski” text at the sequence’s conclusion.

There were a few idiosyncrasies in the first season’s running order on HBO Max, but the Blu-rays present the episodes in their original broadcast order, five or six episodes per disc. (Technically, there is one exception, which I’ll deal with in the supplemental section.)

The strangest element of this Blu-ray release is the retention of the bumper.

When Babylon 5 was originally broadcast, the commercial break between acts one and two was 4:34, to accommodate local commercials sold by the PTEN affiliate and national advertising sold by Warner Bros. These two blocks were separated by a five-second Babylon 5 logo with a Christopher Franke fanfare, a reminder that you still had a few minutes to get something from the kitchen before the show resumed.

This bumper was technically part of the program, and would be on the D-1 or DigiBeta masters. Such elements are almost universally omitted from home video releases, but WBDHE has opted to retain them for these Blu-rays. It’s an unusual decision, but not an unprecedented one. The bumpers change each season, reflecting the tone of the theme music. They’re not weird or witty like the ones retained for home video releases of Twin Peaks (1990–1) or Moonlighting (1985–9), but they’re not doing any damage to the narrative; there’s already a commercial break, so they’re just…there. Weird, but harmless.

Of more concern is an error that must have gone unnoticed on HBO Max.

Near the conclusion of “Endgame” (420), Maggie Egan’s ISN Reporter makes her post-President Clark reappearance to detail Captain Sheridan’s rescue of the planet from the president’s attempted scorched-earth policy. During the news broadcast, the camera pans to the right of Egan, but the ISN graphic detailing the fleet’s firefight in Earthspace fails to appear.²

It’s a minor error in the grand scheme of things, so much so that I pulled out the DVDs to confirm I wasn’t mistaken.

Despite this error, these Blu-rays remain my preferred method of revisiting Babylon 5. Whoever produced them knew what they were doing and cared about the series.

I wrote to co-producer George Johnsen—who oversaw post-production for the first four seasons—detailing what I’d noticed, explaining my understanding of how the Blu-rays would have been produced given what he’d told me previously, and he outlined three possible ways the error could have occurred, all depending on different factors resulting from the 1997 finishing of the episode.

While the glitch is frustrating, it’s an imperfect world, and the best we can hope for is to strive for perfection in the knowledge that it lies outside our reach, ever upon the horizon. (I say that as the guy who’s haunted by every factual error and typo that crept into a B5 Books publication or Edgeworks Abbey offering issued between 2009 and 2021. Every last one of them pains me, because I know how many times they must have slipped past me in the proofing stages. I must have watched every feature and commentary and subtitle track on the Babylon 5 Cast Reunions three-Blu-ray and four-DVD sets a dozen times each!)

Alas, one broadcast error that could have been fixed but was not is the spelling of Raghesh 3. In the script for “Midnight on the Firing Line” (103), Straczynski spelled the name of the Centauri agricultural colony with two H’s.

Though the prop department included the first H for Universe Today’s “Narn Settle Raghesh 3 Controversy” headline, as seen in “And the Sky Full of Stars” (106), post-production omitted the letter when composing the caption for the opening shot of the debut episode.

The Picture

Before I put my weight on this particular landmine, I want to be absolutely clear about the fact that I am fully in favor of productions being presented in their original aspect ratio. When the Sci-Fi Channel ran a letterboxed presentation of Star Wars (1977) circa 1993, and I saw the shot of Han Solo in the Mos Eisley Cantina framed by his boot, I was sold.

By 1994, I had an expensive LaserDisc habit, and it’s probably been thirty years since I’ve seen a widescreen movie panned&scanned for 4:3 television broadcast.

When I worked at Best Buy in 1997, I expended hours explaining the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen to the early adopters of DVD. I was the Saint Paul of widescreen cinema, writing letters of support to the studios and proselytizing like my life depended on it. (Technically, my enjoyment of movies did depend on it. With DVD banging the last nail in LaserDisc’s coffin, I really needed widescreen to win that little format war.)

Despite the producers’ forward-thinking intentions, Babylon 5 was designed and produced for the 4:3 aspect ratio common to television at the time of its creation.

But I wasn’t there, so I asked John C. Flinn, III ASC, the director of photography for all five seasons of the series.

Davis: Were your compositions were designed for the 4:3 image as far as you’re concerned?

Flinn: Yeah.

The director of photography said he composed Babylon 5 for 4:3, but we must also attend to what he said next.

Flinn: I always like to protect anything I’m looking at.

Babylon 5 was shot on Super 35 film, using three perforations per frame, the red outline below. Thus the exposed negative was 24.89 mm by 13.995 mm, yielding an aspect ratio of 16:9.

This is not the smoking gun it might seem to be.

Because a film is shot in a particular aspect ratio, that does not mean it’s meant to be exhibited in that format. Following the market pentration of television, studio executives sought to lure audiences back to theaters with vistas impossible on the 4:3 screen at home. Cinerama—as mentioned above—Todd A-O, and CinemaScope presented aspect ratios of 70:27, 11:5; and 13:5, respectively, but not every movie could afford those expensive processes. The majority of widescreen movies were shot on standard 35 mm film at the 4:3 aspect ratio. Then they were exhibited in widescreen—effectively 16:9—by use of a matte fitted into the projector to block off the top and bottom for the 4:3 frame.

Effectively, the directors of photography were composing their shots according to guidelines in their eyepieces that indicated the 16:9 horizontal band in the middle of the 4:3 frame that was intended for the audience to see. (With the advent of home video, the full frame of 35 mm film would be exported to videocassette, sometimes revealing elements of the image that were never intended to be seen by the viewer. In some cases, this might be nudity avoided to secure a PG-13 rating or special effects apparatus that would have been matted out of the theatrical exhibition.)

When Flinn said he was “protecting” the frame, he means he was keeping anything extraneous out of the 16:9 frame, but he also said “we had sidelines” in reference to marks indicating the left and right edges of the 4:3 frame in the eyepiece.

Flinn composed his pictures for 4:3 so all the visual information necessary to follow the story is contained within that frame, but he kept the sides of the 16:9 frame clear of anything that shouldn’t be on screen. Everything outside that 4:3 frame is superfluous.

If you’ve seen the 16:9 masters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—where crew and equipment are frequently seen just outside the intended 4:3 frame—you can appreciate how much care Flinn took to keep a clean frame.³

That said, Flinn’s ability to protect the image ended when the negatives were shipped to LaserPacific to be developed.

Sometimes, in post-production, an editor “steals” a shot. If, for example, the producers want to cut away from President Susanna Luchenko’s speech at the press conference to see Captain Sheridan’s reaction to what’s being said, but director Tony Dow didn’t shoot any coverage of Sheridan while Luchenko was talking. In a situation like this, an editor like Skip Robinson might grab a shot of Sheridan listening to Delenn, who followed Luchenko at the podium.

That works in 4:3—which is what the editors were working with on the Avid—but becomes problematic in 16:9, when you can see Luchenko sitting next to Sheridan while he’s watching her talk on the other side of the room.

As noted above, WB MPI scanned the film anew for this restoration. I’m pretty sure they used a wet gate, which immerses the film in a liquid that matches the refractive index of the emulsion, eliminating the numerous scratches that particularly marred the first-season episodes on DVD.

The material filmed on the sound stages at Babylonian Productions looks beautiful. The 1990s was an extraordinary decade for cinematography on television, and every time a series originally finished on videotape at standard resolution gets an HD restoration, it’s a revelation. Details of the costumes and sets you’ve missed for thirty years are suddenly drawing the eye. The makeups by Optic Nerve stand up beautifully to the new possibilities for scrutiny. This Blu-ray release is probably a bit like emerging from successful cataract surgery, seeing the familiar in a whole new light.

The comp-shots remain the weakest part of the show. Those blends of filmed reality and computer trickery are condemned to the standard definition of the D-1 and DigiBeta tapes to which they were originally exported, but whatever process was used to upscale them did a fine job. Yes, you can predict the firing of a ppg by the sudden downgrading of picture quality, but this restoration has significantly reduced the jarring effect those transitions had on DVD, where the resolution of the comp shots was compromised by roughly 50% due to the crop-and-fill approach to that material. The comp-shots on the Blu-ray resemble dissolves or wipes in a theatrical motion picture, where generation loss due to the optical-printing process created a brief dip in resolution until the effect has passed. Scenes with special effects always had that slight softening of quality in the pre-cgi era, before filmmakers were able to tidy up after their tricks in the digital domain.

I recently learned that, when possible, restoration artists working on studio movies with access to the original film elements rebuild dissolves digitally, eliminating the generation loss inherent in the original conformed negative for the films in question. This has been done for Babylon 5, so transitions where one live-action scene dissolves into another don’t even suffer the slight dip in quality a theatrically projected movie of the 1980s would have exhibited.

The scenes of fully computer-generated imagery have also been well-served by the upscaling process. The twenty-five- to thirty-year-old work of Foundation Imaging and Netter Digital will never be as nuanced as modern cgi, but now that it’s presented with its composition intact and its resolution uncompromised by the 16:9 zoomed-in framing of the DVD, you can properly appreciate what the pioneers who created it accomplished at the outset of the series, as well as the extraordinary progress they made in those five years.

The last thing I want to note is the color correction. I confirmed with editor David W. Foster that Babylon 5’s color correction was carried out digitally, the last stage of post before delivering the shows to Warner Bros. By going back to the negatives, WBMPI personnel had to perform color correction on the live-action material without reference to the original post-production notes.

Foster pointed out that scenes cutting between live-action and comp-shots betrayed the lack of proper color correction on the newly scanned film footage. It wasn’t distracting, but it was very evident if you watched for it. This was not corrected between HBO Max and the Blu-ray release.

For completion’s sake, I should note one more thing about the video. (This will get technical, so feel free to skip to The Sound.)

Film is shot at twenty-four frames-per-second (fps). That’s twenty-four pictures every second to fool your eyes into perceiving a moving image.

Due to household electrical current—60 Hz in the Americas and 50 Hz everywhere else—television was designed to work to those standards. In the U.S., television runs at 30 fps, each frame composed of two alternating fields for a total of sixty half-images per second; this format is called NTSC for the National Television System Committee that adopted it.⁴ In the U.K., television runs at 25 fps, each frame composed of two alternating fields for a total of fifty half-images per second; this format is called PAL for Phase Alternating Line, which is a technical description. (There’re variations of both formats, not to mention SECAM, as used in France, but that’s getting too technical for me.)

Twentieth century televisions—cathode ray tubes—depended on an electron gun to “draw” each image on the phosphor dots behind the screen. With 525 or 625 lines to make up each image, depending on where you live, the gun couldn’t manage an entire frame every second. Each frame was broken into two fields, consisting of odd or even lines of the picture. This is why NTSC and PAL are interlaced formats; the electron gun draws one field every 1/60th or 1/50th of a second, filling in the other field in the subsequent interval.

Because of these television standards, 24 fps film footage—each frame a discrete image, now called a progressive frame—couldn’t be presented on television without adaptation. Not only would the speed of images need to be adjusted for the electrical standards, but each progressive frame would have to become two interlaced fields.

For countries using PAL, the fix was simple. The 24 fps video was played back at 25 fps, shortening the run time and raising the pitch of the audio by 4%.⁵ For country’s employing NTSC, the remedy was a process called 3:2 pull-down that involved repeating certain frames achieve the “correct” playback speed. If you’ve ever noticed jerky motion in a movie on 1990s television when a camera slowly pans left to right across a landscape, you’ve witnessed 3:2 pull-down in action.

For me, the greatest boon of the Blu-ray format—and 120–240 Hz refresh rates on high-definition monitors—was not lossless audio or even the higher resolution, but the ability to see movies in their native frame rate.

When you watch Babylon 5 on Blu-ray, you are not seeing the video processed in post-production for NTSC or PAL, but the actual frames captured on the film, at 24 fps, the frame rate established at the advent of sound film in the 1920s. I appreciate that one could argue that we’re back to where this section began—a question of what was filmed and how it was meant to be exhibited—but I will argue that John Flinn was composing for 4:3 and he was seeing 24 fps in his viewfinder.

The cgi was also provided in 24 fps and underwent 3:2 pull-down for integration with the live-action material. That said, I have noticed one visual effects-oriented oddity. Near the beginning of the season two title sequence, there is a composite shot of the two-level bazaar. I am almost certain that shot was created in NTSC and has been converted to 24 fps, causing stuttering motion that is effectively the reverse of 3:2 pull-down.

The Sound

I have previously written that Babylon 5 was originally mixed in Dolby Surround, a four-channel format supporting left, center, right, and monaural surround channels encoded into a stereo signal for broadcast in the 1990s. I also wrote that this Dolby Surround mix was reformatted to Dolby Digital 5.1—splitting the monaural surround into left surround and right surround and adding a low-frequency effects channel—the .1—to enhance the bass for the 2002–4 DVD releases.

George Johnsen told me that is not the case.

Babylon 5 was originally mixed with 5.1 channels. It was then down-mixed to Dolby Surround for broadcast, so the DVDs should have debuted the never-before-heard 5.1 mix.

As with the image, the DVDs failed to accurately present the sound of the series. The center channel—where much of the dialogue is anchored—was mastered substantially louder on the DVD than the other four channels, such that the three-dimensional soundscape of the original mix was inaudible without radically adjusting your sound system.

For the Blu-ray, the channels have been balanced in amplitude/volume. The Zócalo once again sounds like it’s filled with people—indistinct walla surrounding the viewer and “overhead” announcements booming out of the side and back speakers—the oppressive ever-present THRUM of DownBelow is back, and the ships whizz past your ears on their way to the back of your room.

The only audio edit I’ve noted is the omission of the “Babylon 5 is produced by Babylonian Productions, Inc., and is distributed by Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution” voiceovers from the end of all the first season episodes (read by George Johnsen) and the first nine episodes of season two (read by conceptual consultant Harlan Ellison).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor issue, but—for obvious reasons—the loss of Harlan’s voice made me a little sad. I’m now wondering why the voiceover was dropped after “The Coming of Shadows” (209). Presumably, it was a change in policy at Warner Bros.

The Supplements

All the supplemental material produced for the DVDs is missing, even the audio commentaries and episodic promos. Given the era in which the original supplements were produced, it’s unlikely that any of the documentaries were made in HD, so they wouldn’t have taken much real estate on the discs. I suspect they all would have fit alongside the set’s only “bonus” feature…

I find it difficult to consider Babylon 5’s pilot, The Gathering, a bonus feature, tucked away on the last disc in the set, all by itself. It is the beginning of Babylon 5, an integral part of the series, and should not be treated as an afterthought.

The Gathering was the only installment of Babylon 5 that was correctly rendered on DVD. Director of photography Billy Dickson composed it for the 4:3 aspect ratio of the era and it was presented thus on both the initial 2001 Babylon 5 DVD release—where it was paired with In the Beginning—and on the 2004 Movie Collection that followed the fifth season.

For this Blu-ray release, The Gathering, the one installment of Babylon 5 which was never—at any point—intended to be in exhibited in 16:9 has been presented in that aspect ratio.⁶

Neither has the pilot movie been restored. This may be due to the loss of various elements in the Warner Bros. vaults that was discovered when the Special Edition was prepared for TNT in 1997. Still, the 4:3 master used for the DVD release should have been upscaled in a similar fashion to the comp shots in the series, resulting in an accurate, as-good-as-it-gets presentation.

The TNT Special Edition has—for the most part—been the default edit of The Gathering since it premiered on 4 January 1998. The original 1993 PTEN version has had a few home video releases—a Japanese LaserDisc, on VHS as the first installment of Columbia House’s subscription service for the series, and is still available on the German DVD release. My thanks to John Joshua for providing this link to the only extant 1993 version of the pilot available for those interested at procuring a copy. He notes that “They want the standard version, not the UK import.”

Given that the special edition occupies only ninety-four minutes on the bonus Blu-ray, it would have been nice to see both versions of the pilot movie presented. If WBDHE can package five edits of Blade Runner (1982) in one Blu-ray set, two cuts of the Babylon 5 pilot could be preserved for posterity, especially as many of Foundation Imaging’s pioneering effects⁷ were replaced by Netter Digital’s work for the later version.

The Special Edition of The Gathering remains available on DVD in The Movie Collection, where it is accompanied by the four TNT movies-of-the week, none of which have been remastered or issued on Blu-ray.

The Presentation

If you thought the array of supplemental features underwhelming, let’s talk about the packaging. Leaving aside my personal prejudice about extraneous cardboard slipcases that feature the same artwork and information as the trapsheet inside the plastic case—what is the point of showing me the same picture in two places and killing a tree to do so?!!!!—the framework upon which the Blu-rays are stored is a fascinating work of engineering. As someone on Facebook pointed out, the discs fit on the hubs so tightly that you risk snapping them in half when you want to watch one, yet a few in every set manage to break free in transit. Indeed, my framework arrived in pieces, seemingly jostled apart en route. (As with all problematic packaging, I have re-homed my discs for future ease of access.)

The cover artwork—simultaneously lacking the eponymous space station and featuring an engagement between an Earthforce Omega-class destroyer and Shadow vessels that never happened in the series—is not something I’m going to expend any energy upon. I did find it odd that the back of the slipcover features what appear to be individual season sets with the original—and very elegant, I’ve always thought—DVD covers upon them. I suspect they’ll be along over the next year or so, making me wish I’d waited…but would season sets have happened if the complete series didn’t sell well? Catch-22.

The inside of the trapsheet is also worthy of condemnation. It lists all the episodes of each season. It doesn’t indicate which episode of a given season is on which specific disc, nor do the discs themselves feature any information beyond season and disc number. As noted above, each disc has five or six episodes, so the eleventh episode of a season could be on either the second or third disc of that season. It’s a trivial complaint, solved by noting how many episodes are on each disc as you watch through, but it’s nonetheless frustrating that whoever designed the trapsheet didn’t think to make it useful.

If you click this link, you’ll be taken to my suggested viewing order for Babylon 5 and its spinoffs. It’s based on watching the series way too many times and your mileage may vary, but, in updating my list, I also inventoried the DVD and Blu-ray releases for your convenience.

In mapping the discs, I’ve noted that the there’s no prevailing pattern of which episodes are on which disc across the five seasons. I hope the bandwidth of each episode was assessed prior to authoring and that the disc allocations were based on giving each episode the most sympathetic encoding possible.

As has been the case for all WBDHE releases in recent years, the Blu-ray menus are static images—the dubious cover art—and the most basic of interfaces, offering PLAY ALL, EPISODES (with a sub-menu to select them), AUDIO (redundant, given only one option), and SUBTITLES. While I was never keen on elaborate DVD menus with animated sequences that made a saga of getting from the main feature to supplementary materials⁸, this is the opposite extreme. At least there are no spoilers ambushing the viewer in video loops on the menu screens.

The discs are authored such that if you select a given episode, playback will continue through succeeding episodes on the disc without returning to the menu.

The only audio option is a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track sampled at a standard 48 kilohertz. I sampled a few acoustically active scenes in down-mixed stereo and the experience was satisfactory. When I interviewed George Johnsen, he noted that though each episode was mixed in 5.1, every show was played back in Dolby Surround, stereo, and mono during the quality-control portion of post-production, to insure that viewers at both ends of the sound system spectrum—and those in between—would hear everything they needed to for the enjoyment of the series.

Subtitles are available in English only. I sampled a few scenes and found the text to be more accurate than those of the DVDs. I noted one omission and one elision during “In the Shadow of Z’ha’dum” (217), neither of them detrimental to the scenes in question. There are instances of inconsequential walla being subtitled, so I suspect the abridgments were due to rapidly delivered dialogue; both were Garibaldi, and Jerry Doyle could deliver a lot of dialogue in a short amount of time. The name of the Icarus was even italicized, for the punctuation pedants like me.

The Blu-rays played in both my Region A and Region B machines, suggesting the same disc masters were used for all the Blu-ray releases worldwide.

The Conclusion

As I wrote at the outset, this is the best Babylon 5 has ever looked and sounded on home video.

With the exception of The Gathering—which has been banished to the bonus disc in an aspect ratio it was neither composed nor protected for—the episodes look and sound the best they’ve ever done. All the episode-specific idiosyncrasies that might trip up an uninformed home video producer have been correctly dealt with, and—as far as I’ve noticed—only one brief effects shot was missed. (Should I note further errors as I watch through while fact-checking my book, I’ll add them to the appropriate section.)

The product as whole doesn’t make a great first impression, the packaging being simultaneously annoying and uninspired while the extant DVD supplements are absent for no readily apparent reason. Would it be great to have a good-looking package loaded with extra features? Yes, but there’s something to say for the show itself presented at its best and allowed to speak for itself.

If you’ve read all of the foregoing, I thank you for valuing my appraisal.

Despite its length, this is not a detailed review. I’ve yet to make my through the series on Blu-ray. I’ve been too busy writing about how it was made. If I note anything else as I make my way though—checking my work, as it were—I will add to this document with some sort of flag to identify the addition.

If this review has compelled you to purchase Babylon 5 on Blu-ray, may I request that you use one of the Amazon links below, which will earn me a 2.5% commission on the sale that will fund my ongoing Babylon 5 research and publishing work:

Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

Alternatively, I have Ko-Fi for digital tips and Patreon, where you can find some of my other work.

Much appreciated,
JASON DAVIS, Writer
THE MAKING OF BABYLON 5

All images from Babylon 5 are ©1993–8 and 2024 by Warner Bros. Discovery and WBDHE and are used here for purely illustrative purposes.

1. The development of Cinerama and other widescreen formats plays a significant role in the origins of Babylon 5 that I look forward to sharing with you. ↩︎
2. After each episode of Babylon 5 was edited electronically, the negative was cut to conform to those edits. For cgi or comp shots, a piece of black film was spliced into the reel to identify sections that only existed on standard-definition videotape. The camera motion in the shot makes it clear that an ISN graphic is intended to be added, but I suspect the shot wasn’t flagged as a comp shot in the offline edit, the low-resolution computer-based edit. Thus, that section of film was cut into the conformed negative during the online edit—which executes, by cutting the original camera negative, the decisions made during the offline session—and the shot was replaced on the DigiBeta master videotape downstream.
   
   Twenty years later, when the conformed negative was scanned by WB MPI, that shot would have been intact on the reel and the editors working on the project wouldn’t have been cued to retrieve the missing material—with the cgi graphic—from the master videotape.
   
   That’s my theory. ↩︎
3. For years, I’ve seen this image of key grip Rick Stribling lurking at the right-hand edge of this frame from “Babylon Squared” (118):
   
   I do not know where it originated. You can only just make out his toolbelt in the bottom right-hand corner on the DVD a few frames later:
   
   I can only assume the image with Stribling came from a master briefly used on some streaming service or other, but the two images give you a sense of the left/right flexibility of the Super 35 frame. ↩︎
4. Engineers often call NTSC “Never Twice the Same Color” because it was designed to be backward-compatible with black&white transmissions and was thus compromised from its advent. ↩︎
5. The 110 episodes of Babylon 5 are approximately three hours and seven minutes shorter when viewed on PAL DVDs. ↩︎
6. The Gathering was presented in 16:9 once before. When Sci Fi debuted Babylon 5 in 2000, the channel’s principle selling point was the new widescreen transfers, so the marketing personnel were confronted with the awkward fact that their widescreen broadcast of the series commenced with a pilot that wasn’t in widescreen. I feel for the folks faced with that situation and while their solution—cropping The Gathering to 16:9—was not a good idea, it was probably the only one that made sense at the time. ↩︎
7. Foundation co-founder Ron Thornton’s on-camera cameo was also cut from the special edition, though his face is still visible on a monitor illustrating the changeling net’s capacities; it would be nice to have the man and his original work preserved, though. (That’s Rob Sherwood of Criswell Productions sitting with him.)
   ↩︎
8. Approximately three million years of my life were spent navigating the Red Dwarf DVD menus. ↩︎