Today the secret has been revealed: it is a full-length animated film from Warner Bros. Animation.
Fuller details will come in a week: we don’t even have the title yet. But on his Patreon page, series creator J. Michael Straczynski (JMS) calls it “the most Babylon 5 feeling project we’ve been doing since the original series […] not a sidebar story, or an unrelated sequel, or a rehash of something that came before… it’s new, and it’s definitely, downright fun, classic B5 down to the molecular level.
We’ve known for over two weeks it would be today, thanks to JMSs tweet and that Patreon page. We had already seen it a new emblem and a mysterious acronym, B5:TRH. He also told the world last August that the whole project is long overdue — meaning the writers’ strike shouldn’t affect it in any way — and it won’t be debuting. until San Diego Comic-Con 2023which starts on July 20.
Here are some of the best hype tweets he’s generated in the intervening months:
I consider Babylon 5 a fundamental part of my nerd education, one that surpassed Star Wars And Star Trek because it felt more real, with evolving characters and deep political intrigue that are still relevant today.
And while it’s not traditionally celebrated with the same fan fervor, it’s an incredibly influential piece of TV — it arguably single-handedly pioneered TV shows telling their stories over an entire planned series rather than resetting the agenda every episode. Lost and the Battlestar Galactica reboot gets some credit for that, but both Damon Lindelof and Ronald D. Moore borrowed the idea. And don’t get me started on whether Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a rip-off because Paramount executives allegedly stole the entire space station series playbook that JMS pitched.
I’m very interested to see how JMS interweaves a compelling story with the rest Babylon 5 form. While he famously built in “trap doors” into each season of the original show in case his actors dropped out, a surprising number of the cast died after the series ended, including Andreas Katsulas (G’Kar), Mira Furlan (Delenn), Jerry Doyle (Garibaldi), Richard Biggs (Dr. Franklin), Michael O’Hare (Sinclair), and Stephen Furst (Vir). We wrote a little tribute to Furst when he passed away in 2017.