The Skinny On Babylon 5's Direct To DVD Movies

'Babylon 5' fans have long lusted after a movie version of the not-nearly-as-popular-as-it-deserved-to-be science fiction series. With the death of two of the franchise's lead actors, series creator J. Michael Straczynski has made it clear that he needs time to grieve before even considering a feature film. But not long ago he announced that they will be making a series of three direct-to-dvd features focused on three separate 'Babylon 5' characters to be called Babylon 5: The Lost Tales.

Today, the first details on those three movies have been announced. In a posting on Usenet, Straczynski revealed that he's written three scripts. The first is about the show's star, Captain John Sheridan (Bruce Boxleitner). The second is unfortunately, about a later on replacement character who no one cares about, Lochley (played by Tracy Scoggins). The third involves Michael Garibaldi and Galen. Apparently time and budget constraints helped determine who the stories would be about. Straczynski says, "I wanted to focus on the human characters initially so we'd have more time for prosthetics R&D for the next one."

Straczynski goes on to reveal more about what's in store: "The stories, as noted previously, were huge...all over the map, from Minbar, to Earth, Mars, the future, the distant past, as well as B5 itself obviously. We're also going to be trying some new production technologies, again trying to stay ahead of the tech curve, the way B5 has always stayed ahead on these things."

One problem though. Apparently even these three smaller movies proved to be too much for them. Straczynski says they'll have to postpone at least one of the three stories. Unfortunately, it's the one that's most interesting. "Given that the Garibaldi story was the most complicated visually and technically, also the most difficult from a CGi perspective, that's the one that got pushed until, potentially, next time," he says. If only it had been Lochley that had been cut. Nobody cares about her character.

For these new movies, JMS says they'll change things up: "Part of what we're doing is to re-think the look of B5 to some degree. The show was created using 1993 technology, video toasters and amigas, and was to some extent limited by the paradigms and production methods we used in that. But it's now 13 years later, and while I will keep the feel of the show the same, and the silhouettes and designs, there's no reason to limit the look of the feel to what we could do six years ago (from when we stopped). So we're going to invest a lot of time, effort and money into really re-imagining some of the visuals at the present level -- looking at shows like Battlestar and the like -- and bringing those tools into B5 while still maintaining the feel of the show." They did a little of that re-imagining for the spin-off, made-for-tv movie 'Legend of the Rangers' and frankly� it kind of sucked. Hopefully they'll do a better job of it this time around.