…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”!
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 ...
“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....