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Customer Review
- Reviewed in Canada on December 12, 2023These are the remastered Season 1-5 episodes that were streamed originally on HBO Max. As with those, these episodes are now back in their original 4:3 aspect ratio, which is actually a good thing.
There seem to be a lot of misconceptions here about the "widescreen" version of Babylon 5 that was released on DVD, and if that's all one has ever seen I can understand why the shift would be confusing. As was common in the 90s, the show was shot on film with the uncommon effort made back then to protect the filming for widescreen, however any shot with CGI or other compositing was only ever rendered in 4:3. This resulted in a DVD release that frequently flip-flopped between SD 16:9 non-effect shots and cropped and zoomed 4:3 effect shots that were of horrible quality and had vital details cropped out. For an effects-heavy show like Babylon 5 it truly was a horrible way to watch the series. The 16:9 version of B5 was never "HD".
The remaster now features those non-effect shots in full 1080p scanned from the original elements and the effects shots are upscaled from their SD counterparts but now no longer cropped and zoomed, both are a seamless 4:3 as originally aired. The result is a FAR less jarring transition from effect to non-effect scenes. It's not perfect, definitely no Star Trek TNG remaster where they redid everything, but it's the best WB is likely to ever invest in the property and totally worth the buy to get B5 as it was meant to look once again.
The packaging is terrible. If they stop making the cardboard slip covers for this thing to mildly protect it I imagine it'll arrive in a million pieces like all of these other large DVD stack cases do.
The lack of special features is a disappointment but aside from the commentaries I rarely watch them so it's not a huge loss for me. It's baffling though why they wouldn't at least have included the commentary tracks. The Gathering is also presented in the DVD's SD up-scale 16:9 format, it is not remastered and is the TNT Special Edition released in 1998.
