The Babylon Project was a dream given form. Its goal: to prevent another war, by creating a place where humans and aliens can work out their differences peacefully. It's a port of call – a home away from home – for diplomats, hustlers, entrepreneurs... and wanderers. Humans and aliens, wrapped in two million, five hundred thousand tons of spinning metal, all alone in the night.
Babylon 5, B5 for short, was a syndicated TV show that aired on UHF stations and cable from 1994-1999. It is a space opera set on the space station Babylon 5, which serves as an interstellar diplomatic outpost, a strategic military base, and a center for trade and commerce. "Casablanca in Space" was one early tagline.
There's a lot of say about Babylon 5, in fact there are numerous books written on the subject, so I'm just going to list a few of the high points that made the show stand out.
1) The State of Science Fiction on Television in 1994 When Babylon 5 aired its first episode in 1994, it was a somewhat optimistic time for syndicated television.
Star Trek: The Next Generation was wrapping up its original run on TV, and in the wake of its resounding success, there was a small boom in syndicated TV shows being sold directly to independent UHF stations. Babylon 5 was sold by a fledgling company called the Prime Time Entertainment Network, whose other shows included
Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, and the sci fi time cop series
Time Trax. Other sci fi TV shows on the air included
The X-Files,
SeaQuest DSV,
TekWar, and of course,
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
The boom in independent syndication was soon overtaken by the rise of nationally syndicated networks like UPN, the WB, and Fox. These networks swiftly bought up the UHF stations in major markets, and as the 90s went on, the smaller syndication companies like PTEN lost their footholds in the markets and went out of business.
2) What Made Babylon 5 DifferentAt the time Babylon 5 came out, most TV shows were strictly episodic in format. Babylon 5 was strikingly different. It was conceived of as a single story arc that was planned out to span five seasons, with a beginning, middle and end. Characters grew, things changed, the scope of the story line expanded, and the show made extensive use of foreshadowing, setting up plot threads that would be followed up on in later episodes.
Babylon 5 also pioneered the use of CGI in television. At the time, most sci fi TV was produced using models shot with motion controlled cameras. This produced excellent results, but was expensive and time-consuming. Babylon 5 made a breakthrough by producing its effects on inexpensive Commodore Amiga desktop computers, using the Lightwave 3D package, and the Video Toaster graphics card. This allowed them to do a lot more effects shots on a small budget, within the time constraints of TV production. The downside, though, was that they were on the cutting edge, and some of the graphics work quickly became obsolete. This is quite visible in the first season, where the textures and rendering look blocky and cheap now.
Babylon 5 also made a splash by using solid science and accurate physics in its models. Instead of using "artifical gravity," Babylon 5 was an O'Neill type space station with a spinning cylindrical body that produced centripetal acceleration. The Earth Federation spaceships obeyed the laws of physics. They didn't fly like airplanes or naval vessels, and once in motion, they stayed in motion. This was exemplified by the show's Starfury space fighters, which would spectacularly flip end over end, and shoot at enemies behind them. That was a "Eureka!" moment for us fans, and after that we were on board.
Lastly, Babylon 5 made extensive use of prosthetic makeup for a huge variety of alien species. Some aliens were also done using puppets and CGI, so that they could be completely nonhuman. The results were very impressive for the time, especially for TV, and paved the way for shows that would follow like Farscape and The Orville.
Really, to sum it up, Babylon 5 was something very different than what had come before, in a very good way. For those of us fans who were frustrated by
Star Trek: The Next Generation, it was a huge breath of fresh air.