How the shadows were gradually introduced in B5 was a work of genius. Due to fleeting images, use of camera angles and extreme close ups etc. you didn’t get a good look at them so couldn’t tell what they looked like. Each encounter gave you a slightly better look at them. I remember waiting with baited breath for an entire season to find out what they looked like - you couldn’t just Google it back then.) In some ways it reminds me of the original Predator movie, where you gradually got a better look at it, and only found it what it truly looked like at Ghent end.
Same reason why president Clark got so few scenes .. JMS said the more and sooner he would had shown the Shadows the less menacing would seem eventually.. wich is what happent for example in Star Trek with the Borg in Voyager
@@sparrowlt "It was jet-black. A shade of black so deep, your eye just kind of slides off it. And it shimmered when you looked at it. A spider, big as death and twice as ugly. When it flies past, it's like you hear a scream in your mind." - Warren Keffer describing a Shadow Vessel in great detail to fellow Starfury pilot Mitch Harvey (from "Babylon 5" Season 2, Episode 22 "The Fall of Night")
"Where are they coming from?? WHAT ARE THEY???" Showing them appear out of nowhere, completely obliterate everything, and then disappear really built up the suspense and terror. We didn't have any idea how it was going to unfold. We didn't know how they were going to be stopped. We didn't know anything! Such a great story.
I remember watching this for the first time. It's Lovecraftian nature means the only thing your eyes and brain could comprehend, with any certainty, is that whatever that thing was, was utterly lethal.
When I first saw a Shadow Battlecrab emerge from hyperspace I thought it was using a Cloaking-shield of some kind given the way it shimmered into existence.
I loved how the skin of a shadow vessel always seemed to be in motion (even the adapted skin for the advanced destroyer group). It implied a technology totally different from everything else seen so far (although the vorlon ships implied a similar technology)
Also figure that the Raider leader had picked that part of the region because there were no jump gates nearby (their ship had its own Jumpgate generator). So he is figuring his ship is left alone, and even if someone shows up they have plenty of time to spot the emergence 'funnel' and either raid or go dead quiet. So any potential alarm would be the 'Silent Running' alert, letting everyone know to turn off active external emissions unless the Captain says different (i.e. active sensors, beacons, maneuvering systems, main engines, etc). Instead the Shadow vessel emerges from hyperspace with no funnel, and within weapons range. That alarm was likely General Quarters or Collision Alarm, which is never done when they are sitting in the middle of nowhere.
I always wondered how the Shadows managed to destroy the ship without destroying the Eye as well. Granted, the box containing the Eye was visibly damaged. Perhaps it was specially constructed to be super durable.
What B5 did with both the Vorlons and the Shadows was to make them mysterious and menacing. The Vorlons were by all accounts, seemingly benevolent, but there was always this uncertainty and apprehension surrounding what their true motives were and what they actually were. That's epic writing done well. The shadows were shown to be bad, from the previous war with them and a pervasive and almost mythical history shared by many races. But the shadows were not always shown to be outright evil either, closing passive tactics as opposed to outright violence, so it made them questionable and in any narrative, making an enemy multidimensional elevates the characters. They're not evil because they just evil, and the Vorlons are just good guys because they once helped out. To use Sirius Black's metaphors from Harry Potter "the world is divided into good people and Deatheaters." There's shades of grey and colour between the lines. What B5 did was steer clear of insulting the viewers by spoon feeding the true meaning, they left it open for the viewer to interpret and make their own decisions and those conclusions could change when an episode cast doubt on fans beliefs when the story jumped up a notch and the narrative mask slipped on the two auper-powers and you suddenly questioned if what you thought to be true was actually what was happening. B5 was a rollercoaster science fiction story that set the bar for narrative storytelling chiefly because the writer fleshed out the start, middle and end before a single actor was cast. He knew how it ended and wove hints, seeds, doubts and subtly into early episodes thay paid off 2 years later. That's how you write ANY story!
JMS had to shuffle some things around with actors coming and going, like replacing Sinclair with Sheridan. Overall I think he did a great job considering the budget he was working with and the fact that this was one of the very first "this story has a definite ending" type of shows. People were used to episodic shows like Star Trek that could go on forever and always maintain the status quo. If you like those shows you might not like B5. It had story arcs that disrupted the status quo and main characters could be killed off at any time for the sake of the story.
I find the ships are a lot better in details and less blurry, the actors images are also sharper but its not always that clear. I find it is most clear in aliens in make up like g'kar and the vorlons for instance. You can watch the differences on my channel. I am still going through the episodes but the first once you can see are comparable. You can find them in my play lists.
at work someone who worked in animation said they upscalled digitaly so thats why the characters are less upscalled then for instance the special effects and the people in make up. Some kind of algorithm he said.
If they're going to remaster Babylon 5 then they need to do new computer graphics because while the CGI was very good for the time it has aged very badly.
To add to what was already said: the home video DVDs published by Warner Bros forced a weird wide-screen view that wasn't originally featured, which resulted in distorted and degraded visual quality. All of the live-actions scenes were filmed in wide-screen natively, except for the special effects scenes, which were done with the normal NTSC aspect ratio.
They went back to the original film prints and got HD versions. They didn't redo the effects. It DOES look better than it did as the old dvds stretched and blew up the images to fit the widescreen, but overall the effects are a lost cause without significantly more investment than they were willing to put in. The live action shots however look way better now.
