B5 / 2001 Space Odyssey - Some Common Ground?

[Recoil]

I'm sure somewhere over the years this has been discussed by someone, but I just noticed a few things and felt like seeing if anyone agrees or if there was more I missed.

Joe D's post about 2001 being broadcast on HD NET enabled me to re-watch the two classics - 2001 and 2010 (ok 2010 is less of a classic, but I still like it). After watching those movies, I realize that JMS probably drew some inspiration from those two films. Here are a couple things I noticed:

* The Leonov looks a hell of a lot like an Omega Class Destoyer. A lot. Omega's inspired by the Leonov?

* The backgroun/space music on 2010 sounds a LOT like Christopher Franke's score in Season 1. Very harsh, lots of keyboard chords. It really did have that same feel. In 2010 when they would show the Leonov in space and have some of that background music, for a sec I thought I was watching a Season 1 B5 episode --- from a musical point of view. Yes, I do know the Omega ships didn't appear until Season 2. But Frankes score and the background score for 2010 sounded similar.

* Everyone's favorite B5 guest character: Zatharas. Inquiring minds might like to know that the famous main theme for 2001: A Space Odyssey is called "Also Sprach Zarathustra" OK, its not exact, but similar. Maybe I'm reaching but it could have inspired his name...

Im sure there are more I didn't catch. I also am sure that this has been discussed at some point, but since I didn't see B5 until it was being rerun on Sci-Fi channel I wasn't in any of those discussions, and I just thought some of those trivia points were interesting.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

1. I suspect that both the Leonov and the Omega-class destroyers were both based on real design concepts for long-range manned spaceflight. There are only so many ways of solving the engineering problem of how to produce spin gravity in a ship that also has to accelerate and change direction, especially ona relatively small ship. (Discovery was big enough to icorporate an internal centrifuge and was only designed to accelerate at that start of each leg of its journey. Both the 2001 space station and B5 are in fixed orbits and not accellerating, so they can simply rotate.)

2. I guess anything is possibe, but I don't think that Franke's music for B5 is that similar to the film from 10 years earlier.

3. I think you're really reaching here. The initial syllables of "Zath" and "Za-ra" don't even resmeble one another. They sond nohting alike,they only look similar in print - and even then not so much. (Unless JMS happens to be dyslexic. )

Can't believe you didn't mention the spacesuits from "War Without End".

Regards,

Joe

 

[B5_Obsessed]

Hmmm, Zathras watch 2001 and did not think that Christopher Franke's music soudings much like Strauss' "Blue Danube Waltz". However, as Joe D. stated, some of the concepts of simulated gravity and space station design are commonly nkown and were used by both Kubrick and JMS for their respective stories. Babylon 5 is an "O'Neill-type" station based on the rotating cylinder design of Gerard O'Neill in the early 70s. In fact, if you rode the the "Horizons" ride at EPCOT back in the old days (Before Mission:Space) you got to fly through a station that looked VERY similar to B5.

Similarly, one might also note that the moonbase in 2001 looked very much like Moonbase Alpha.

 

[Recoil]

Can't believe you didn't mention the spacesuits from "War Without End".

Doh! Good one! That would have worked too!

/Disclaimer this thread is just for fun, no implications here. Besides I think that drawing inspiration from great works of art is OK.

Regarding the music...I was comparing Frankes chords from Season 1 of B5 to the "space" music in 2010 --- NOT 2001. Those two movies definitely have a different sound, and those from 2010 reminded me of Franke, not 2001.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

On the off-chance you didn't know this, I will mention that the spacesuits from "War Without End" were the spacesuits from 2010, very slightly modified. Babylonian Productions didn't have the budget to build their own suit or suits that would only be used for three out of 110 episodes, so they checked what was available to rent around town and that's what they came up with.

Regards,

Joe

 

[GaribaldisHair]

Except, IIRC, after being used for Babylon Squared they weren't then available when it came time to film WWE so they had to make their own suits anyway.

I'm sure I read that somewhere ... or maybe I am going mad and just inventing my own history now!

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

I'm sure I read that somewhere ... or maybe I am going mad and just inventing my own history now!

Well, I wouldn't want to rule anything out.

Regarding the ship designs:

The ships on 2010 and Babylon 5 operate out of the necessity of
traveling without standard SF artificial gravity. These designs have been
discussed among scientists (in general) for ages; so there's no intention
to be close to 2010, but when both are based upon the same scientific
principles, there will be echoes. Form follows function. - JMS on RASFTB5M April 10, 1995

Regarding the spacesuits:

Re: the suit...that wasn't an intentional 2001 nod...we went to
Modern Props to get a space suit for Babylon Squared, and the only one
they had on hand that would work for us was one left-over from 2010,
which I asked the folks in costume to change as much as
possible...though it was pretty much what it was regardless. So that
one wasn't intentional. - JMS on Compuserve Oct 7 1997

JMS doesn't specifically address the two suits used in "WWE", but given that this reply was posted well after the episode had aired, I'm sure he would have said something here if they had been unable to rent them a second time and had to build new ones from scratch. (They probably would have rented at least two even for "Babylon Squared" - a main suit and a back-up or one for O'Hare and one for a stuntman.)

I can't find any references to such an event on JMS News or the Lurker's Guide, in any case. I tend to think you're conflating the story about Beth Toussaint being unavailable to play Anna Sheridan when the character returned with the suit situation and producing an invented memory.

Regards,

Joe