Babylon 5 Season 2 DVD Set

5.21

I'm looking at the packaging, as we're taping the show right now, and my laptop is busy recording the interviews and whatnot. Geez, this thing's big. 6 discs. And its shiny! The box is chromium, or whatever they use to make boxes shiny this week. Uh oh. It says "Presented in a 'matted' widescreen format." But than it says "Enhanced for widescreen TVs." So I don't know if this is anamorphic or not... The case is sturdy enough. Its similar to the case for the uber-edition of the Dune mini-series. I'll look through the pamphlet in a minute.

J. Michael Strazafawnysanzza says that this set is "a hoot". Okay, sounds good. I'm not going to read any more of the pamphlet, as the rest is episode plots.

5.30

Okay, finally watched the first episode. First the good. The menus are quick, the studio logos/ legal info can be skipped, and the disc is anamorphic! Yay! However, the print has been apparently been stored under JMS's bed, as it has unnerving amounts of grain, and many hairs visible on the film. This is something I'd expect from a grey-market film-to-video transfer house (like the good folks at Sinister Cinema), but not from Warner Brothers. I'm a bit confused at the "IN Surround Sound" blurb on the start of every episode. I would have thought that was added later in the show. The SFX look as good as you could hope. A bit jaggy, but effective. As for the show itself. I like it so far. I'm looking foward to watching the rest of the discs. I'm not going to do a plot synopsis of B5, as I'm probably one of the last people on the planet to form an opinion on it. Cpt. Newguy seems to be a good ass-kicker of a captain. I wonder if the "All our soul are belong to you" revelation seemed as goofy if you've seen the first season...

6.3

Episode 2: The Grain Thickens.

The stuff on the print is getting worse. I'm really disappointed in the video quality. By the way, I should let y'all know what I'm watching these on. At the moment I'm using Shin-Toshi, a Toshiba Satellite series laptop using WinDVD to play the discs. The other things I'll be viewing on will be my standard home system: a Pioneer DVL-919 DVD/LD hybrid modified to be region-switchable connected (via Component cables) to a Sony somethingorother with 16:9 widescreen enhanced. That makes it swappable between NTSC and NTSC Widescreen. Pretty snazzy, eh? Awww, Captain Dirk lost his honey... One complaint about the show itself is that it wields its soundtrack like a blunt object. Either there's none or its CLEARLY EMOTING. The show's otherwise good so far. I like all the plotting and scheming. These monster/spaceship things that are after Johnny Iguana look cool. I'll actually try to learn these people's names. Johnny's big speech to Ms. Iguana was nicely foreboding, if a bit Mordor-flavored. A great enemy that was long thought destroyed, and all that jazz. Ooh! Frizzy hair! I guess Space Hair Gel is scarce. But I do like seeing more realistic people, even if it was due to low budget, rather than being intentional. Dude, President Gill so killed President Deadguy! The Narn ships look like WHAT!?! Za'Ha'Dum!? And I was only joking about the Mordor stuff. Anyway, Narn ships look a lot like the ships from Gradius. Oops, here comes Dead Wife... Hmm... I'm waiting for the music... Oh! MUSIC!!! heh. Grrr. The subtitles are not word-for-word. They're "The Deaf can't read" type, where they assume that they have to drop words on occasion. Credits time! Ooh, the music is done by the same guy who did the music for Tenchi In Love.

Episode 3: The Geometry of-- ah, hell. I went past the title too quickly

Hmm... I wonder if the subtitles are from the script, and the dialouge differences are ad-libs. Well, the Centauris seem to make for good villains.

6.5

episode 4: A distant star

This time I'm watching on a Playstation 2 hooked (standard A/V plugs) up to a grubby old Mitsubishi TV that hangs out at the radio station I work at. The grain looks different with this set-up. Not better or worse, just different. I'm glad to see some explantion as to how hyperspace works. Wow, I really like how they don't give a total payoff for Mysterious Hyperspace Varmint. I hope they explain those eventually.

Episode 5: The New Disc

Well, one down, a lot more to go. Ooh! Are they junkies, or psycho? Oh, it was just one nutter on B5. Okay. That monster was SO Dr. Who. I mean, seriously. Ah, so The Eye is gathering its forces in the East, umm, I mean the Rim. At Khazad-Dum. Oh, I meant Zah'Ha'Dum. How could I ever had made such a mistake.

6: mmm... Conspiracies.

7: Okay, I like the cast to this show. I'm probably going to become a proper fan of this. d00d! Daphne! r0x0r!

8: Okay, Chekov totally kicks ass! I knew he played an evil bad-ass, but man, he rocks harder than granite! Ah, his name is Bester. Man, Bester looks really creepy. Well, I'm sold on B5. Aww, I was hoping Blonde had actually double-crossed all the rouge psychics. That could've been cool.

6.6

9: RANGERS!?!?! This is starting to bug me.

11: Heh, Streibs. Like Whitley.

(I'm now on disc 6. I got sucked in.)

I'm getting suspicious about the letterboxing of the show. I'd heard about how it was shot in widescreen, blahblahblah. I saw the endless promos Sci-Fi did in relation to it. However, a lot of shots seem to be missing the tops of people's heads. And a lot of shots have people's arms stopping just above the hands, looking akward. And a lot of shots seem difficult to convert to 4:3 without cutting off half of each actor's bodies. However, there's been one shot that set off alarms of all flavors: in one episode, a fake ad that takes up the entire shot. At the end of the ad, there's a punchline to the joke when a subliminal message pops up for a moment. The last line of text is missing the lower half of each letter. So that's how JMS wanted the show to look? With the text incomplete? I'm going to go check around online to see what I can find out. I don't have much hope for a good answer, as most people are complete retards when it comes to A/V issues. A good example was when the Sailor Moon movies came out in the US. Fans bitched and bitched about how the US release was inferior to the JP one, because the JP one was letterboxed, as the all saw from their fansubs. They were too busy to look up from their bootlegs to notice that the flim was animated "Open Matte", where the animators made a full screen image, then slapped black bars on it for the theatrical release. And the uncut and superior, Open Matte version, was what we got in the US.

I'm back. It seems that the FX shots had to be redone, but reports seem confused at best about anything else.

Final

Well, I've finished it. The official finale was on this week's SFOD, but here's the web edition. The show is quite good. Anyone who says you can't get into B5 from Season 2 is a liar or a moron. I look foward to seeing the rest of the show. While B5 does suffer a little bit from messages, it never got as bad as NextGen's MESSAGES or TOS's MESSAGES. Heh, blink tag. Anyway, The DVD is rather bleh. I'm going to get some LDs of the show, hopefully they're 4:3 format. If there's bootleg VCDs of B5 like I found for Crusade, I might look into those also. VCD's have a lousy picture, but at least they have an excuse ^_^. So, to get to the point: The DVDs seem to be a lot like most things from Manga Entertainment: "As good as you can hope for". Not good, but the best you'll be able to get, due to laziness by various parties. I'll check back as to how the LDs go. B5 good. B5 DVD not so good.