Good time to plug my current
Babylon 5 Rewatch, which is approaching the end of Season 4
What be helpful to this series id if were back on the air in syndication somewhere . Perhaps on the Syfy Channel even Tv Land. Its an important tv series .
Babylon 5 has been airing on the US Go90 service for the last year or so, and has been airing on Pick TV in the UK for the last two months, so it's available. Not on anyone's platform of choice, true, but it's out there. It's also, er, freely available on a certain very popular video-sharing site and has been for years. WB seems content for it to be there, as they could have taken it down whenever.
JMS: In reverse order: no, you hear wrong, there's no issue with rights on the show. It's owned by Warner Bros. Always has been, always will be.
Possibly the reason is in the second part of his answer (the question concerned making a HD video transfer available)?
The problem is that the show was shot 16-9 but the efx were rendered in regular aspect ratio due to an issue that I was unaware of at the time. I'd assumed all cgi and comp shots were being rendered at full size. So transferring isn't a solution as they would have to be cropped and re-sized and that simply doesn't work as we've seen. (As I understand it, the DVDs are actually copies from PAL/laserdisc transfers because WB didn't want to pay for another run.) The only way to get HD versions of the episodes would be to re-render every single CGI and comp shot, and Warners will never, ever pay to have that done.
But would it need to be transmitted (i.e. in syndication) in HD?
Having consulted widely on the
Babylon 5 issues on a continuation/reboot/remaster, here's where things lie:
A Remaster
This is almost certainly never going to happen. As mentioned previously, all of the CGI for the show was rendered in standard aspect ratio rather than widescreen, because WB refused to pay $5,000 for a widescreen reference monitor for Foundation Imaging. With the cost of rendering images in widescreen significantly higher than standard ratio, Foundation Imaging decided not to bother, a decision apparently signed off on by Doug Netter (who was handling business matters for the show, leaving JMS free to focus on the story). For the DVDs, every single CG and composite shot - every shot with the Garden in the background, a PPG being fired or even text going across it - is therefore cropped, so you lose information from the top and bottom of the screen (sometimes farcically so).
The cost of remastering
Babylon 5 is
insane.
Babylon 5, at 5 seasons, 110 episodes and 4 TV movies has almost three times as many effects shots as
Star Trek: The Next Generation (at 7 seasons and 178 episodes). The cost of remastering
Star Trek: The Next Generation was just over $20 million. The project began in 2012, was completed in 2014 and apparently only just broken even through physical media sales and foreign sales of the reruns (apparently the massive international Netflix deal is what finally pushed the remaster into popularity). And that's for the single most successful and popular space opera TV show ever made.
According to the information I was able to gather, a conservative estimate for a remaster of
Babylon 5 is $40 million, for a show that is considerably more obscure than
ST:TNG. Personally that sounds a bit low to me, as the volume of CG in
B5 is insane, especially given its low budget. Re-rendering it in 4K, or even just 1080p, is going to be a big job even before considering how many CG models have to be rebuilt in a higher level of detail and fidelity. The other problem is that blowing up the standard footage to 1080p will expose problems with sets, wardrobes etc, all of which on
B5 was done at a fraction of the budget of
ST:TNG.
ST:TNG looks utterly amazing in HD because they put a huge amount of time, effort and money into it back in the 1980s and 1990s.
B5, made on between half and a third of the budget, had to cut a lot of corners which will suddenly show up if you increase the fidelity.
A Continuation
This has been shot down by everyone: too many castmembers have passed away (most recently, Jerry Doyle and Stephen Furst) to make this really viable.
A Reboot
Warner Brothers have, astonishingly, been considering a full-fledged reboot of the show instead, possibly in partnership with a streaming service. However, they've run into a major problem: Straczynski is not interested. JMS has instead been developing a
feature film reboot of the series, telling a much-truncated version of the same story through a series of films. Apparently there was even talk of him working on it with the Wachowskis after their collaboration on
Sense8. JMS has the exclusive film rights to
Babylon 5, so Warner Brothers can't do anything about it. WB don't want to cause confusion by having two different canon reboots going on at the same time, and they fear a degree of fan backlash if JMS isn't involved, so they've put their TV reboot idea on ice. Fortunately (as I don't think a cut-down
B5 reboot on film is what anyone other than JMS's bank manager wants), the movie talk has dried up. JMS has been asked repeatedly about doing a TV reboot and he keeps rejecting the idea, but you have to wonder if he will be tempted back by the idea of doing
B5 with far more resources and budget than what he had back in the day.
With everything else being continued or rebooted, my feeling is that
B5 will return in some form, and probably not too many years down the line either.
