Babylon 5: The Lost Tales (2007)
Considering 90s space-opera
'Babylon 5' is one of my all-time favourite things, a central pillar of my beliefs, it's quite odd that I've never once watched straight-to-video thing
'The Lost Tales' before (two parts of a vague cancelled project). I don't know if it's because I knew that if I watched it, then B5 was truly over, or if after the sad failure and cancellation of the spin-off series
'Crusade', then the p*ss poor spin-off movie
'The Legend of the Rangers', I didn't want to watch this show I loved sink further into the mire. 'The Lost Tales' looked cheap and reeked of a last desperate attempt to keep this franchise on life support by the creator who cared, but with a tiny budget supplied by a studio that never seemed to give two sh*ts about B5. But now with the glossy looking new animated movie
'The Road Home' just weeks away, both those problems have gone away, because 'The Lost Tales' is not the end and the new movie looks like a triumphant return to what made B5 the greatest TV show ever made.
Well 'The Lost Tales' is fine, it's not particularly good but it's got some good dialogue. It feels awkwardly like the A-plot and B-plot of a standard 90s weekly Sci-Fi show separated into two episodes. The B-plot for me was definitely
Tracy Scoggins' Col. Lochley (who I never warmed to) sitting in on a Catholic priest doing an exorcism. The 2nd much better A-plot part features the brilliant
Bruce Boxleitner's President Sheridan facing the
"Would you kill Hitler as a kid?" moral conundrum, when techno-mage Galen tells him a young Centauri Prince will destroy Earth in the future. The space FX have a quite different look to the show, which I'm not sure is an improvement. I'm also unsure about the addition of film-grain, it does help integrate the live action and CGI FX well. I'm glad I waited to watch this and could just appreciate it as another hour I could spend in this world, even if it wasn't a great hour.