For everyone caught up in the Chick-fil-A controversy...

...here is a cautionary tale from 1987. Written by none other than legendary screen and comics scribe J. Michael Straczynski, it's The Real Ghostbusters episode "Chicken, He Clucked"!

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The Star Trek reboot that could have been

With Star Trek still going warp speed at the box office, it's hard to grasp a time not long ago when the entire Star Trek brand had been written off by many people as a thing that had completely run its course. The previous few movies in the series had been severely lackluster and Star Trek: Enterprise failed to garner appreciable ratings on television.

Such was the state of Trek five years ago in 2004. And at the time J. Michael Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5 and writer of the recent film The Changeling on top of many other terrific endeavors) and television producer/writer Bryce Zabel (The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, Dark Skies), recognizing the franchise's foundering, conceived of an ambitious plan to "reboot" the entire shebang. A few years later Paramount handed Trek over to J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot. We already know how much of a stellar success that has been... but what about Straczynski and Zabel's treatment?

Bryce Zabel posted the entire "Star Trek: Re-Boot the Universe" treatment on his blog a little less than three years ago. It's quite an interesting read, especially how he and Straczynski re-defined the "Prime Directive" into something much more proactive and driving as a plot element, along with the entire rationale for needing to relaunch the series to begin with.

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"Sleeping in Light": The tenth anniversary of BABYLON 5's series finale

Ten years ago tonight, the Babylon Project came to a magnificent end as "Sleeping in Light", the series finale of Babylon 5 - considered by many to be the greatest television show of the Nineties - was broadcast on TNT.

I have not written nearly enough about Babylon 5 on this blog. J. Michael Straczynski's soaring, spanning epic about the Babylon 5 space station and the people within it, I can confidently attest, had the most profound impact on my personal philosophy of any work of televised fiction. From the first time I heard about it in an issue of Starlog in the summer of 1992, I knew this would be one to watch for. And it did not disappoint: the shot of the Vorlon fleet coming through the jumpgate in the pilot movie should have been fair warning to everyone that science-fiction television would never be the same.

But the effects, even those from episodes like "The Coming of Shadows" and "Severed Dreams", weren't the reason we stayed faithful to Babylon 5. It was because this was a show about very real characters, as rife with strengths and weaknesses as anyone in our own world. We could identify with the people of Babylon 5. Personally, I think the show's greatest gift was that it demonstrated something that has not been said nearly enough in either fiction or non-fiction: that it's okay to grow and change into something more than what we think we are. That we do not have to be what the world expects us to be.

Has there been anything so profound that has been taught as well on television as Babylon 5 did? If there is, I don't know of it.

Five years of storytelling came to its triumphant conclusion with "Sleeping in Light", an episode set twenty years after the rest of the series. And I don't know of any better way to celebrate this anniversary than with the final five minutes of the episode. If you're new to Babylon 5 and don't know what's going on here, I think that maybe you should watch this, 'cuz it'll ratchet up the "wanna know more" that oughtta leave you wondering what all happened that brought the story to so triumphant a conclusion...

Happy anniversary, Mr. Straczynski and Babylon 5. You fulfilled your mission well. And hopefully there will yet be many more stories to tell from that five-mile long space station burning bright, all alone in the night...

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