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

HelloMcFly 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	Apocryphon 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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gcanyon 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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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ghaff 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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roywiggins 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	wat10000 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.