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Comment by Telemakhos | Hacker News Reader

Having been alive at the time, I can tell you that the effects were amazing then. B5 was one of the first shows to use computer graphics and partially-virtual sets. It wasn't limited by the number of times you could re-composite a handful of models together, so it showed whole armadas of ships. Windows didn't open onto a black felt field of stars but a green screen that allowed ships to pull up right outside the window.

The effects don't hold up to what has followed in the past quarter century, and they weren't preserved in a good resolution, so they'll never look very good on a high-resolution monitor instead of an old CRT. But, at the time, they were amazing.

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I always felt that Ron Thornton and his team at Foundation Imaging were sadly underrated and overlooked in computer graphics history.

B5's SFX had a dynamism and color that was unmatched at the time. I recently rewatched the series, and the later seasons still hold up just fine, graphics-wise (created by a different company, but reusing Foundation Imaging's original assets and esthetic).

And I love how the Star Fury's design was so carefully thought out - even NASA took an interest.

I was an adult at the time. I remember my reactions to the effects, at the time. Most CGI at the time was not good, and Babylon 5 was nowhere near on a par with Terminator 2, say, which had a much bigger budget.

It's weird to compare the 2 hour movie vs. Tv show with 5 long seasons.

Having also been alive at the time, I can tell you I thought the effects looked hokey and cheap.

They were pretty good for the budget. (As someone else noted at least a lot were done on Amigas.) I really liked Babylon 5 at the time but there's a lot about it you need to overlook. I recommended it to someone and they told me it was the worst recommendation I ever gave them.

The acting was a mixed bag from very good to pretty wooden. And the whole will it get renewed or won't it situation led to non-optimal organization of the last couple of seasons.

"Pretty good for the budget" is not the same thing as "good".

It is extremely difficult for me to believe that someone watching Babylon 5 as it aired on a typical sized CRT television thought the effects looked "cheap". Hokey? Okay, maybe, that's subjective enough to be non-debatable. But "cheap" in the context of a television show? The shots were so much more dense and dynamic than what Star Trek was doing at the time, which is the obvious comparison.

It's the season one acting that I find the biggest barrier to entry. It settles in by the end mostly, and the acting markedly improves from Season 2 onward though it always retains some of that campy scifi feel.

The costuming and sets and CGI are impressive, but the lighting is unnecessarily murky and the dark industrial tunnels aesthetic makes me think of Red Dwarf, which I can’t imagine was a very lavish production.

The earlier Red Dwarf episodes were filmed in the BBC cafeteria and other similar locations. The difference is that Red Dwarf was supposed to look grimy. They were on a mining ship with few luxuries. Red Dwarf was more in the territory of Dark Star, and played into that. (Early Red Dwarf tended to use physical models and costumes for a lot of effects. CGI has never been especially great on RD.)

I did watch Babylon 5 when it first came out in the UK. Deep Space 9 definitely had better looking effects, but I preferred B5 to DS9 on the basis of other factors.

I think B5 has a variety of environments, and some of them are quite nice, and I like the moody bustling alien cantina type spaces. But they also have too many dark industrial passages, which doesn’t always fit the scenes and come off rather cheap.

Was there much with better effects on TV at the time?

Star Trek looked much better. They couldn’t do the numbers that B5 could do, at least not until the later parts of DS9. But what they were able to show actually looked realistic. B5’s effects were very, very clearly done on consumer-level computers. They were quite good considering, but didn’t look real. Star Trek was doing things with large physical models and it showed. Ships and stations looked like real objects (since they were!) rather than the smooth curves of everything in B5.

As a young SF devourer at the time, the cheap effects were a major turnoff and one reason I never got into B5.

Star Trek at the time had better effects (including DS9, even though I prefer B5!).

The trick with effects is to make whatever you have look good. There are a few ways of doing that. 2001's effects are genius and still look pretty good nearly sixty years later. They look better than 2010's from the 1980s. In fact, I'm even impressed with Forbidden Planet — yes, there are a lot of painted backgrounds but it does very well with what it has.

In the space of fifteen years we went from Battlestar Galactica, which used those same shots of Cylon ships swerving and getting blown up over and over and over; to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which used models for the ships and was therefore extremely limited in the scale and maneuvers they could portray; to Babylon V which used digital effects, allowing them a freedom of scale, angle, motion, and number of ships that nothing had managed before -- at the cost of being on the cutting edge of computer graphics, leading to a shininess, over-sharpness, and other telltale computer artifacts.

You can say they were too early, but not that they didn't lean in on technology and use it to their best advantage. It had weaknesses, but also strengths.

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