This might be more for the Trek thread but I'm watching Babylon 5 on Roku, which uBlockOriginLite also seems to block the ads on. It's the "remasters" which aren't to be thought of like Star Trek or other actual remasters. It's just the original masters re-transferred to digital instead of downgraded to 480i/p like it was on DVD or whatever. So it looks slightly more crisp than it did before 2020 when they did this but not as good as real film transfers generally do. They did however scale the CGI up, which in the space scenes does look better but in any composited green screen looks far worse because there's a resolution contrast now. Ironically, this is why there's no DS9 remasters, the Trek people aren't willing to scale the CGI up compared to re-rendering it at a higher resolution. In B5's case, the CGI was never as good and there's probably no way they could ever find the original models to do that so just scaling it up is fine. They probably should have only scaled up the space scenes though, a lot of the green screen stuff was just expanding sets and putting backgrounds that were already out of focus, scaling up changed none of that except now it contrasts against the rest.
Apparently there's some significant confusion about rights to all this, which explains why it's only on Roku of all places. They were trying to post the show to YouTube but if you go to the account only the pilot movie is on there but you can see lots of comments about how all the episodes are gone because they did a big announcement about them being posted free to YouTube. They got yanked since then for some reason.
The pilot movie there and on Roku is the "special edition" which is better edited and uses music from the guy who did the series instead of Stewart Copeland. I looked into the original and Copeland's music on there, much like on Dead Like Me, sounds exactly like Spyro The Dragon's music. That amuses me, the guy apparently writes a single kind of soundtrack.
The fighting between this and DS9 is funny retrospectively to me, especially because people took such hard lines over it for years on the internet. I don't think B5 is obviously better than DS9, not any more clever or "gritty" or whatever else you always heard about these. In fact, I'm more amazed by just how the same they are in terms of where the plot goes in the broad sense. I'm nowhere near done with B5 so I'll hold off on deciding which ultimately is better until then. I'm not saying it's not good and I'm not enjoying it, just that from the years of internet fights I'm so used to people taking hard line stances of how B5 is so obviously objectively better or DS9 is.
My biggest complaint is that I'm not exactly understanding why anyone takes the Earth Alliance seriously as the show suggests their technology is significantly worse than everyone else's in the galaxy. Yet everybody is like "oh yeah they're so important" at the same time they're talking about how backwards Earth is. They're an "important" member of the anti-Shadow alliance yet they couldn't take out more than a handful of Minbari ships during that war and lost it in every single way possible. The Narn similarly have a unclear place in the galaxy, at the start of the show it seems like they're the Centauri's equal and superior to Earth, but by the start of the third season the entire civilization gets curbstomped inbetween a couple episodes.
One of the things I appreciated about the Dominion War plot was how futile much of it was with the major operations being legit major operations on a unheard of Trek scale. The Breen attack on Earth matters because they were daring enough to do it, a purely punitive attack nobody would expect for no reason but to hurt the enemy. Something the Klingons or Romulans for all their centuries of being enemies with each other and with Earth had never even attempted despite having cloaking technology. DS9 ends not with an actual victory but the barely holding it together Allies taking advantage of the sudden Cardassian situation. Everything else about the war was them delaying, blocking the wormhole, trying to stop the Dominion from establishing in the Alpha Quadrant, etc. They basically weren't ever really winning, the Dominion was and remained a superior foe. And they probably wouldn't have even won at Cardassia if they hadn't poisoned the Founders. That's fucking bleak when you actually think about it instead of the fact that they're our heroes and so are always depicted that way on the show.
One of my premature concerns about B5 then is that it won't be as effective because DS9 was doing that against the entire Trek canon which had been so perfect and pristine forever. B5 is pretty shitty from the start. I appreciated that they eventually actually did start talking about the fact that there's a whole part of the station that seems to consist of homeless people and criminals. Yet nobody seems to really give a shit, that at Earth's BEACON TO THE GALAXY they have all this crap going on. It's all handwaved with "Earth's problems travel with us" and like no, they don't really have to, there's only 250K people of all races on B5, with thousands of that being military. It could be a little bit nicer than Earth, especially since it's only five miles long.
Don't get me wrong with any of this, even to this point in where I've watched I'd still recommend it to anybody who liked DS9. Even if it comes out worse than DS9 in the end, that's still really good. And it's definitely not bad by any means. Though having read a lot of his comics I will also see I can see some of JMS writing in it, especially these grandiose things he thinks are mindblowing but hasn't thought out at all. (There's probably an associated reason he doesn't finish most of his comic runs and almost didn't finish B5.)
Anyway I wrote all of this so I can link this LinkedIn profile someone made from something in an episode: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abrahamo-lincolni-1217741ab/
Apparently there's some significant confusion about rights to all this, which explains why it's only on Roku of all places. They were trying to post the show to YouTube but if you go to the account only the pilot movie is on there but you can see lots of comments about how all the episodes are gone because they did a big announcement about them being posted free to YouTube. They got yanked since then for some reason.
The pilot movie there and on Roku is the "special edition" which is better edited and uses music from the guy who did the series instead of Stewart Copeland. I looked into the original and Copeland's music on there, much like on Dead Like Me, sounds exactly like Spyro The Dragon's music. That amuses me, the guy apparently writes a single kind of soundtrack.
The fighting between this and DS9 is funny retrospectively to me, especially because people took such hard lines over it for years on the internet. I don't think B5 is obviously better than DS9, not any more clever or "gritty" or whatever else you always heard about these. In fact, I'm more amazed by just how the same they are in terms of where the plot goes in the broad sense. I'm nowhere near done with B5 so I'll hold off on deciding which ultimately is better until then. I'm not saying it's not good and I'm not enjoying it, just that from the years of internet fights I'm so used to people taking hard line stances of how B5 is so obviously objectively better or DS9 is.
My biggest complaint is that I'm not exactly understanding why anyone takes the Earth Alliance seriously as the show suggests their technology is significantly worse than everyone else's in the galaxy. Yet everybody is like "oh yeah they're so important" at the same time they're talking about how backwards Earth is. They're an "important" member of the anti-Shadow alliance yet they couldn't take out more than a handful of Minbari ships during that war and lost it in every single way possible. The Narn similarly have a unclear place in the galaxy, at the start of the show it seems like they're the Centauri's equal and superior to Earth, but by the start of the third season the entire civilization gets curbstomped inbetween a couple episodes.
One of the things I appreciated about the Dominion War plot was how futile much of it was with the major operations being legit major operations on a unheard of Trek scale. The Breen attack on Earth matters because they were daring enough to do it, a purely punitive attack nobody would expect for no reason but to hurt the enemy. Something the Klingons or Romulans for all their centuries of being enemies with each other and with Earth had never even attempted despite having cloaking technology. DS9 ends not with an actual victory but the barely holding it together Allies taking advantage of the sudden Cardassian situation. Everything else about the war was them delaying, blocking the wormhole, trying to stop the Dominion from establishing in the Alpha Quadrant, etc. They basically weren't ever really winning, the Dominion was and remained a superior foe. And they probably wouldn't have even won at Cardassia if they hadn't poisoned the Founders. That's fucking bleak when you actually think about it instead of the fact that they're our heroes and so are always depicted that way on the show.
One of my premature concerns about B5 then is that it won't be as effective because DS9 was doing that against the entire Trek canon which had been so perfect and pristine forever. B5 is pretty shitty from the start. I appreciated that they eventually actually did start talking about the fact that there's a whole part of the station that seems to consist of homeless people and criminals. Yet nobody seems to really give a shit, that at Earth's BEACON TO THE GALAXY they have all this crap going on. It's all handwaved with "Earth's problems travel with us" and like no, they don't really have to, there's only 250K people of all races on B5, with thousands of that being military. It could be a little bit nicer than Earth, especially since it's only five miles long.
Don't get me wrong with any of this, even to this point in where I've watched I'd still recommend it to anybody who liked DS9. Even if it comes out worse than DS9 in the end, that's still really good. And it's definitely not bad by any means. Though having read a lot of his comics I will also see I can see some of JMS writing in it, especially these grandiose things he thinks are mindblowing but hasn't thought out at all. (There's probably an associated reason he doesn't finish most of his comic runs and almost didn't finish B5.)
Anyway I wrote all of this so I can link this LinkedIn profile someone made from something in an episode: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abrahamo-lincolni-1217741ab/