TNG used (the same old) physical models. B5 used CGI. Guess what the industry norm is now and what kind of SFX DSC will use. B5 was ahead of its time besides of how dated it looks today.
Would you like looks, uniforms and such re-imagined?
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For years CGI looked much worse than good model work. They weren't ahead of the times, they were trying to save money.
It still does.
It still does.
Up until just a few years ago I would've wholeheartedly agreed. But the last few years have finally seen some really good stuff that didn't hurt my eyes. I used to hate CGI but these days it's done well at times.
Just to put B5 vs Trek into perspective, one episode of Star Trek: Voyager cost as much to produce as an entire season of Babylon 5.
Not really. In those days Trek was returning the ad dollars to justify its budgets, and the studio rightly considered part of its appeal to be its production values. A B5-budgeted Voyager would have looked like...well, like B5. Come on, they had their pride. 
B5 wasn't just trying to save money; the series pitch was successful based on a budget proposal and breakdown that promised a Star Trek-like series at a cost that fit Warners' plans for their PTEN first-run syndication package. B5 would never have aired if it cost nearly what Trek did, because WB had no expectation of getting the ad rates that Paramount was getting. What jms proposed, to give him full credit, was eye-opening and, yeah, revolutionary for the market at the time. It was also bound to happen, "steam engine time," as it were - seaQuest DSV premiered the previous year (though B5 was in development first) and within a few months of B5's premiere you also had Space: Above and Beyond showing up, both using the same technology. Both of those network series could spend a bit more on effects and made more plausible use of CG than B5 could.
B5 wasn't just trying to save money; the series pitch was successful based on a budget proposal and breakdown that promised a Star Trek-like series at a cost that fit Warners' plans for their PTEN first-run syndication package. B5 would never have aired if it cost nearly what Trek did, because WB had no expectation of getting the ad rates that Paramount was getting. What jms proposed, to give him full credit, was eye-opening and, yeah, revolutionary for the market at the time. It was also bound to happen, "steam engine time," as it were - seaQuest DSV premiered the previous year (though B5 was in development first) and within a few months of B5's premiere you also had Space: Above and Beyond showing up, both using the same technology. Both of those network series could spend a bit more on effects and made more plausible use of CG than B5 could.
Not really. In those days Trek was returning the ad dollars to justify its budgets, and the studio rightly considered part of its appeal to be its production values. A B5-budgeted Voyager would have looked like...well, like B5. Come on, they had their pride.
I think you totally missed @cultcross' point, old man.
Of course it did, because it was 90+% motion-control. CGI didn't come around until the tail end of TNG-era shows. It also surfed on inherited properties (like the Klingon BoP, Excelsior, Miranda-class) from the movie era (a sunk cost). So I have to judge B5 on a sliding scale. B5 was also just plain more ambitious than Trek. It tried pulling off non-humanoid aliens with CG (like the Shadows). How often did Trek do that? B5 was doing CGI back in 1994 and the Trek shows were what, close to 5 years later before they started dipping their toes in the water? So if the CG effects shots in Trek were better, maybe they owe it to some of the pioneering that was being done at Foundation. The technology was going through rapid change at that time. Something produced one year could have been done much better the following year because of this.
And why isn't B5 being done on a budget a feather in their cap rather than a source of criticism? James Cameron got his start building models for Roger Corman, for instance, and his early work like T1 were geniuses in bang for buck. To me, the worst sin is being given an astronomical budget and producing something that looks (designwise) like shit. nuTrek is the poster-child for that, and Discovery is set to follow suit if they don't get their act together.
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I understand all this. Trek looked better because it was done with different techniques that did cost a lot more. No one is disputing this, merely the notion that B5 had great effects, while it objectively didn't.
B5 effects weren't bad. But at the budget they had, vfx looks far more dated than in late TNG or DS9. I loved B5, but you can't deny the visuals were just a bit cheesy. It was part of what appealed to me, and if they ever do a reboot (not impossible) the effects will have to be done better to get the necessary eyeballs.
In that case, I've been living with misinformation for a very long time, and apologize. Trying to figure out where I read it originally.
B5 first aired in January 94 (not counting the initial airing of The Gathering in February 93) whilst S:AAB first aired in September 95. Hardly a few months - 21 months at a minimum. Just shy of two years. SeaQuest DSV debuted in September 93, so a much more contemporary example - though the CGI process on SQ episode 'Knight of Shadows' for the cruise liner, the King George, ended up being used as the basis of the Titanic in the movie.
It wasn't till about 2000 that CG became a viable alternative to practical effects. Going back to even the early 90's - many of the Starfury scenes in B5 were hand-animated, many of the artists were also programmers who wrote their own algorithms or programs to make things work the way they wanted to.
Even Generations and First Contact can look a little dated (but having the budget to hire a professional effects house like ILM to do the grunt work did wonders for the end-result).
Even now, it's only the last few years that CGI has really reached that next threshold of being cheap enough and realistic enough.
Even Generations and First Contact can look a little dated (but having the budget to hire a professional effects house like ILM to do the grunt work did wonders for the end-result).
Even now, it's only the last few years that CGI has really reached that next threshold of being cheap enough and realistic enough.
The point is that Babylon 5, like Tron and The Last Starfighter before it, showed the shape of things to come.
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