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B5 Animated Movie
- Thread starter Springer
- Start date
crazybillyo
Regular
I ordered mine Saturday and it came yesterday afternoon. It looks like something hit the top of it and the case is bent and cracked. 
I'll see if I can get a replacement later. The disc looks fine though, so I'll probably plop it in the ol' PS4 and see how it spins later this afternoon.
I'll see if I can get a replacement later. The disc looks fine though, so I'll probably plop it in the ol' PS4 and see how it spins later this afternoon.babylonfan
Regular
The casing appears to be rather poor. Mine was damaged as well, but the discs are fine.I ordered mine Saturday and it came yesterday afternoon. It looks like something hit the top of it and the case is bent and cracked.
I guess it’s part of the B5 experience. Remember how dreadful the packaging was of the original season releases?
Looney
Regular
The MOVIES ANYWHERE digital has the BEHIND THE SCENES Video - BABYLON 5 FOREVER. It was great. I do not see it attached to the VUDU or Amazon Digital Versions. It IS on the Blu-Ray Edition, so it is good that the Blu-Ray Edition is with the 4KUHD Disc because it is NOT on the 4K Disc itself.
crazybillyo
Regular
When I tried to open it recently a tear on the case started to form, so they could probably be better. Getting damaged during shipping didn't help. The disc played fine though, so... yay?
Jan
Regular
The featurette and Commentary are also available if you buy it via AppleTV.
Springer
Regular
The composers who produced the music for The Road Home have announced that they're going to release the score on 27th October. No word on whether it's digital only or if there will be a physical release. While I hope for the latter I suspect it may only be the former.
I wasn't that enamoured by the music – it felt a touch heavy-handed in places, not particularly memorable, but sometimes scores come to life when played on their own without dialogue and sound effects over the top. Hopefully this will be one of those scores!
I wasn't that enamoured by the music – it felt a touch heavy-handed in places, not particularly memorable, but sometimes scores come to life when played on their own without dialogue and sound effects over the top. Hopefully this will be one of those scores!
Looney
Regular
SALE PRICES FROM GRUV Entertainment on 4K UHD and Blu-Ray
Babylon 5 The Road Home $16.99
Babylon 5 The Road Home $7.99
Babylon 5 The Complete Series Blu-Ray Set $99.99
Babylon 5 The Road Home $16.99
Babylon 5 The Road Home $7.99
Babylon 5 The Complete Series Blu-Ray Set $99.99
Jan
Regular
Which reminds me of seeing it at SDCC (twice) in huge rooms with many people. It was the first time I'd ever gotten to see anything B5 with more than one person and it was a lot of fun!!One year ago today I placed my first Pre-Order of BABYLON 5: THE ROAD HOME on 4K Ultra-HD from AmazonUK. Yesterday marked the anniversary of me pre-ordering a digital copy, as it was the first thing available to order.Very hard to believe it has already been a year.
Looney
Regular
Yes that would be excellent. I've watched the entire series once with my mother and once with my father. That's about it unless you count seeing the LEGEND OF THE RANGERS: TO LIVE AND DIE IN STARLIGHT (2002) trailer in a crowded movie theater full of people who likely didn't know what it was and were surprised when I cheered.
Hello All,
Interesting thread, agree with the sentiments expressed about The Road Home.
I got the blu-rays and saved TRH until after watching sleeping in light.
That was a big mistake because the series ended on such a high note and I was a bit deflated and underwhelmed by TRH.
After moving onto the earlier TV/DVD movies, I had to conclude that Lost Tales was a better send-off for the show than TRH.
I was stunned at how low the budget was and how limited the sets were for it. It amazed me that JMS made such a good job of Lost Tales despite that.
Interesting thread, agree with the sentiments expressed about The Road Home.
I got the blu-rays and saved TRH until after watching sleeping in light.
That was a big mistake because the series ended on such a high note and I was a bit deflated and underwhelmed by TRH.
After moving onto the earlier TV/DVD movies, I had to conclude that Lost Tales was a better send-off for the show than TRH.
I was stunned at how low the budget was and how limited the sets were for it. It amazed me that JMS made such a good job of Lost Tales despite that.
Looney
Regular
So are you saying that you were just finishing SLEEPING IN LIGHT when THE ROAD HOME was released? I'm just asking because it always interests me to know how people experience the Series. Take for instance my reaction to THE ROAD HOME being very different after waiting from 2007 to 2024 for anything new in the Babylon 5 Universe. LOL
Hi, that's a nice question.
I finished a watch-through of the show last month (after I got the show on blu-ray) and then went straight onto TRH, hoping that it would relieve the feeling of longing, bordering on bereavement, that I get every time from watching the last episode.
I was hoping that it would give me a further continuation of the story of the station, like Lost Tales did, to temper the loss of Sheridan and the station that you see in the last episode.
I purposefully tried to find nothing out about TRH before watching it.
I rather hoped that it would have a rousing and dramatic soundtrack: even if it hadn't been done by Christopher Franke and that it would compensate me for the long-lasting sense of being ill-at-ease that, I find, arises from the way the show itself ends.
But instead, it felt like a somewhat dull-in-places rollercoaster ride, where nothing was really at-stake, other than Sheridan himself, who, we know, lives on after that mishap.
Plus, as I think others have said, he lacked any sense of agency or control over the settings that he was cut-and-pasted into.
It felt like a missed opportunity because the space battle between the starfuries and the shadow fighters seemed like a premise that wasn't likely to be fulfilling, even on paper.
You want to see the starfuries achieving something and at the same time, I think people want to see fleet battles with fighters and larger ships involved at the same time, which sci-fi shows have often tried not to deliver due to the differences in scale and complexity of motion control etc.
That was one thing that Bab5 did well since it was freed from the constraints of motion control models.
They could have given us some fan-favourite Omega class ships, White Stars.
They could even have brought in Excalibur to really put the icing on the cake, if they'd wanted.
I felt like having the starfuries trying and failing to defeat a superior type of fighter was something that I didn't need to see (since you already see plenty of that during the Minbari war).
I wasn't too keen either on the station being menaced by an ugly, Lovecraftian shadow mothership.
The shadow ships are menacing but elegant and that thing didn't achieve the latter.
They also have a sense of efficiency and intelligence and the dumb, undulating space monster didn't give me the impression of having either.
I first saw the show on Channel 4 here in the UK. Before digital terrestrial TV, there were 5 terrestrial channels and the fifth was started in the mid nineties, I would say.
I saw a few episodes back then, when I would've been about 8 or 9. I remember seeing the pilot episode with the assassin's ship attached to outside of the station and I remember the episodes where Sinclair's memory is probed and you get to see the Nial class Minbari fighters in action.
I remember thinking that a 3-winged spacecraft was quite novel and interesting.
I must never have seen anything after season 1 then, because, when I watched the show through properly in 2007/8, when I was working in Germany as part of my degree, I was surprised and, at-first, a bit let down by Sinclair's departure and the appearance of Sheridan.
Watching the whole show must've left an impression because we watch B5 now, my wife and I, every 5 years roughly and we've seen it at least twice before since 2014.
I finished a watch-through of the show last month (after I got the show on blu-ray) and then went straight onto TRH, hoping that it would relieve the feeling of longing, bordering on bereavement, that I get every time from watching the last episode.
I was hoping that it would give me a further continuation of the story of the station, like Lost Tales did, to temper the loss of Sheridan and the station that you see in the last episode.
I purposefully tried to find nothing out about TRH before watching it.
I rather hoped that it would have a rousing and dramatic soundtrack: even if it hadn't been done by Christopher Franke and that it would compensate me for the long-lasting sense of being ill-at-ease that, I find, arises from the way the show itself ends.
But instead, it felt like a somewhat dull-in-places rollercoaster ride, where nothing was really at-stake, other than Sheridan himself, who, we know, lives on after that mishap.
Plus, as I think others have said, he lacked any sense of agency or control over the settings that he was cut-and-pasted into.
It felt like a missed opportunity because the space battle between the starfuries and the shadow fighters seemed like a premise that wasn't likely to be fulfilling, even on paper.
You want to see the starfuries achieving something and at the same time, I think people want to see fleet battles with fighters and larger ships involved at the same time, which sci-fi shows have often tried not to deliver due to the differences in scale and complexity of motion control etc.
That was one thing that Bab5 did well since it was freed from the constraints of motion control models.
They could have given us some fan-favourite Omega class ships, White Stars.
They could even have brought in Excalibur to really put the icing on the cake, if they'd wanted.
I felt like having the starfuries trying and failing to defeat a superior type of fighter was something that I didn't need to see (since you already see plenty of that during the Minbari war).
I wasn't too keen either on the station being menaced by an ugly, Lovecraftian shadow mothership.
The shadow ships are menacing but elegant and that thing didn't achieve the latter.
They also have a sense of efficiency and intelligence and the dumb, undulating space monster didn't give me the impression of having either.
I first saw the show on Channel 4 here in the UK. Before digital terrestrial TV, there were 5 terrestrial channels and the fifth was started in the mid nineties, I would say.
I saw a few episodes back then, when I would've been about 8 or 9. I remember seeing the pilot episode with the assassin's ship attached to outside of the station and I remember the episodes where Sinclair's memory is probed and you get to see the Nial class Minbari fighters in action.
I remember thinking that a 3-winged spacecraft was quite novel and interesting.
I must never have seen anything after season 1 then, because, when I watched the show through properly in 2007/8, when I was working in Germany as part of my degree, I was surprised and, at-first, a bit let down by Sinclair's departure and the appearance of Sheridan.
Watching the whole show must've left an impression because we watch B5 now, my wife and I, every 5 years roughly and we've seen it at least twice before since 2014.
Springer
Regular
To be honest, I've not watched The Road Home since it came out, and I even gave it a good review. I think it's just that I prefer live action at the end of the day.
And I agree the soundtrack is terrible, Chris Franke could have elevated the movie so much. But I think terrible soundtracks is an industry-wide problem at the moment.
I think TRH is good for what it is. I don't view it as a send-off, however, even if we never get any more B5 and it ends up being that. I think this is where the 5-year story versus the extended franchise material comes in. To me, the story of B5 is The Gathering plus seasons 1 to 5, exactly what we got on the Blu-rays, and the send-off is Sleeping in Light. Everything else – the TNT movies, Crusade, LOTR, Lost Tales, TRH, comic books, novels, I see them as extras, tangents to the 5-year story. Some of them are very good, others not so good, but I kind of see them like the appendices in Lord of the Rings. They add details and colour to the B5 universe, but they are not the main story, which enables me to enjoy them separately on their own merits, or lack thereof.
And I agree the soundtrack is terrible, Chris Franke could have elevated the movie so much. But I think terrible soundtracks is an industry-wide problem at the moment.
I think TRH is good for what it is. I don't view it as a send-off, however, even if we never get any more B5 and it ends up being that. I think this is where the 5-year story versus the extended franchise material comes in. To me, the story of B5 is The Gathering plus seasons 1 to 5, exactly what we got on the Blu-rays, and the send-off is Sleeping in Light. Everything else – the TNT movies, Crusade, LOTR, Lost Tales, TRH, comic books, novels, I see them as extras, tangents to the 5-year story. Some of them are very good, others not so good, but I kind of see them like the appendices in Lord of the Rings. They add details and colour to the B5 universe, but they are not the main story, which enables me to enjoy them separately on their own merits, or lack thereof.
I think that's a very good way to look at it, and I suspect your view is one taken by, probably, most people who watch the show, plus all the movies etc that go along with it, whether consciously or otherwise.
Thirdspace is quite a good outing in the movie line-up, (not that has to try immensely hard to beat some of them), but the enormity of the space battle in the movie against a force said to be worse then the Vorlons, at a time when the station is already beaten down from the shadow war and embattled by Earthforce etc, for it never to be mentioned again, comes as a bit of a stretch of credulity.
I seem to recall reading somewhere (I think it may have been on the B5 reddit) that JMS was strong-armed into making those films as a condition of TNT funding season 5, since they wanted a huge TV event for launching the last season.
So, I think that goes some way to explaining why they stick out a bit like a sore thumb in that sense, at least.
The marvel of Babylon 5 comes from the story that was worked out at the start and the fact that it was like an opera acted out as a TV show, which is uncommon.
Most TV sci-fi is written episode-by-episode, with some aims set out season-by-season, as they go along.
When you try to add to that accomplishment without having a massive budget to achieve exactly the vision that you want, or are having to create stories that fit in with it after the fact, then it feels to me a bit like opening up the patient to carry out an operation and finding that you haven't actually got the right transplant organ, or whatever, after all.
There seems to be an enormous lack of quality, competence and performance in the mass entertainment industry in general that has set in quickly, since even before the covid times, and maybe this is why with CGI animation, where they could've done absolutely whatever they wanted, it feels like they were handed an amazing new weapon that could really only be fired once, and they turned and shot the wrong person with it, because the story that they used it on was so weak.
Thirdspace is quite a good outing in the movie line-up, (not that has to try immensely hard to beat some of them), but the enormity of the space battle in the movie against a force said to be worse then the Vorlons, at a time when the station is already beaten down from the shadow war and embattled by Earthforce etc, for it never to be mentioned again, comes as a bit of a stretch of credulity.
I seem to recall reading somewhere (I think it may have been on the B5 reddit
) that JMS was strong-armed into making those films as a condition of TNT funding season 5, since they wanted a huge TV event for launching the last season.So, I think that goes some way to explaining why they stick out a bit like a sore thumb in that sense, at least.
The marvel of Babylon 5 comes from the story that was worked out at the start and the fact that it was like an opera acted out as a TV show, which is uncommon.
Most TV sci-fi is written episode-by-episode, with some aims set out season-by-season, as they go along.
When you try to add to that accomplishment without having a massive budget to achieve exactly the vision that you want, or are having to create stories that fit in with it after the fact, then it feels to me a bit like opening up the patient to carry out an operation and finding that you haven't actually got the right transplant organ, or whatever, after all.
There seems to be an enormous lack of quality, competence and performance in the mass entertainment industry in general that has set in quickly, since even before the covid times, and maybe this is why with CGI animation, where they could've done absolutely whatever they wanted, it feels like they were handed an amazing new weapon that could really only be fired once, and they turned and shot the wrong person with it, because the story that they used it on was so weak.
Looney
Regular
For a Looney perspective, I have seen TRH five or six times. I would say my problem with the music is that it lacks a feeling of connection to the series. Also Franke gave the Series a VERY unique score, as Chen did for Crusade - and really Copeland for the Original Cut of The Gathering. I will say that having Chen do the music for Crusade was a mistake, but we all know Crusade was doomed by no fault of the content included. AND say what I will Chen's music did give Crusade its own unique identity. Getting back to TRH there just isn't much memorable about the score. It is just there. It isn't really good or bad. It is just there.
I feel that if there is destined to be more B5 I'd love to see more offerings like THE ROAD HOME. A reboot series would be fantastic, but Animated Direct to Physical Media releases work for me too. Why not? The recasting has already been established so they should just go for it. I will say that I would prefer we not see more time travel and interdimensional jumping, unless we are going to stick in an alternate time period or dimension. There is sooooooooooooooooo much Universe with B5. There were soooooooooooo many untold tales that could be done with the remaining cast members and new characters. There are sooooooooooooooooo many possible stories of what could have been happening simultaneously with the original arc. There are sooooooooooooooo many stories that could have been told following characters who went through B5 episodes or stories of what happened before they reached B5. We're not going to get live action with the original cast so animation is fine by me, especially given that I felt the TRH animation was pretty good and could be great with more offerings.
I feel that if there is destined to be more B5 I'd love to see more offerings like THE ROAD HOME. A reboot series would be fantastic, but Animated Direct to Physical Media releases work for me too. Why not? The recasting has already been established so they should just go for it. I will say that I would prefer we not see more time travel and interdimensional jumping, unless we are going to stick in an alternate time period or dimension. There is sooooooooooooooooo much Universe with B5. There were soooooooooooo many untold tales that could be done with the remaining cast members and new characters. There are sooooooooooooooooo many possible stories of what could have been happening simultaneously with the original arc. There are sooooooooooooooo many stories that could have been told following characters who went through B5 episodes or stories of what happened before they reached B5. We're not going to get live action with the original cast so animation is fine by me, especially given that I felt the TRH animation was pretty good and could be great with more offerings.
I think TRH demonstrates that they have model that is capable of much more than what they showed us.
I really liked the stylisation and appearance of the characters.
They looked authentic and the look captured a lot about what you know of them from the show, and yet, they looked more stylish and appealing in some ways.
Has anyone ever wondered whether Crusade (what little we ended up getting of it) would be even better, if someone swapped out the klinky klanky music with the score from the Into the Fire game that never arrived - particularly in the action/space combat scenes?
I need to go back and find the original cut of The Gathering. I have seen it but I think that was back when I first watched the show nearly 20 years ago.
I really liked the stylisation and appearance of the characters.
They looked authentic and the look captured a lot about what you know of them from the show, and yet, they looked more stylish and appealing in some ways.
Has anyone ever wondered whether Crusade (what little we ended up getting of it) would be even better, if someone swapped out the klinky klanky music with the score from the Into the Fire game that never arrived - particularly in the action/space combat scenes?
I need to go back and find the original cut of The Gathering. I have seen it but I think that was back when I first watched the show nearly 20 years ago.
