Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has announced that all five seasons and 110 episodes of J. Michael Straczynski’s legendary sci-fi series “Babylon 5” will be coming to Blu-ray this December 5th.
The ‘Complete Series’ will include the show’s five seasons and the pilot TV movie “The Gathering”. The press release says the series has been “fully remastered in HD” though what that means isn’t clear.
The most likely scenario is it will essentially be a higher bitrate version of the HD remaster currently available on HBO Max, as opposed to a full top-down remaster, which would require a prohibitive amount of new visual effects to replace the aged CG.
The original series follows the officers and key ambassadors onboard the titular five-mile-long space station during a time of uneasy peace between the five major races. Over the course of the series, both an intergalactic war with the ancient ‘Shadows’, and the rise of a fascist world government on Earth played out.
Unlike most series (especially at the time), the original was conceived with the entire timeline mapped out before and after the events of the show – thus allowing for teases of story and character threads, even single scenes, which didn’t pay off for months or years.
Straczynski himself, who also co-showran “Sense8,” wrote much of the show’s 110-episode run with the show starting out standalone, moving into heavy serialisation and then pulling back to more standalone again. He also built in ‘trap doors’ allowing for actors to exit and timelines to be squished where necessary.
The cast includes the likes of Bruce Boxleitner, Claudia Christian, Peter Jurasik, Patricia Tallman, Mira Furlan, Bill Murray, Jerry Doyle, Andreas Katsulas, Michael O’Hare, Jeff Conaway, Stephen Furst and Richard Biggs.
Source: Twitter@JMS