J. Michael Straczynski’s ground-breaking sci-fi series Babylon 5 will finally be released on Blu-ray this December.
It may have taken a long time to get here, but Babylon 5 is finally making the leap to Blu-ray. Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment announced today that all five seasons of the iconic sci-fi series will be released on Blu-ray on December 5th.
Babylon 5 has previously only been available on DVD and the image quality wasn’t always the best, so fans have been waiting for this moment for quite some time. You can check out the official box art for Babylon 5: The Complete Series below, which strangely doesn’t feature the titular space station.
All five seasons of Babylon 5 were scanned and remastered from the original camera negative in 4K, with a colour correction and the cleaning of dirt and scratches as well. The many CGI shots of the series have been digitally upscaled to HD, and short of a complete remaster, that’s probably the best we can hope for. After years of cropped, blurry episodes, it will be a thrill to bring this series home in HD.
The official synopsis for Babylon 5:
2258 CE. Five hostile federations dominate the outermost regions of space. Heroes, thieves, and rare and exotic beings find refuge in this time of uneasy peace and the constant threat of war on a lone space station — the last and best hope for peace between a hundred worlds, alien and human alike — Babylon 5
Babylon 5 was conceived as a “novel for television” long before prime-time serialized story-telling was cool and series creator J. Michael Straczynski wrote damn near every episode. The series starred Bruce Boxleitner, Michael O’Hare, Claudia Christian, Jerry Doyle, Mira Furlan, Andreas Katsulas, Peter Jurasik, Richard Biggs, Andrea Thompson, Stephen Furst, Bill Mumy, Tracy Scoggins, Jason Carter, Robert Rusler, Jeff Conaway, Patricia Tallman and Mary Kay Adams. Babylon 5: The Complete Series will also include The Gathering, the original pilot movie.
Babylon 5 is also slated to receive a reboot, which is apparently still in development over at The CW. Described as a “from-the-ground-up reboot” of the original series, the new take revolves around John Sheridan, “an Earthforce officer with a mysterious background, who is assigned to Babylon 5, a 5-mile-long space station in neutral space, a port of call for travelers, smugglers, corporate explorers and alien diplomats at a time of uneasy peace and the constant threat of war. His arrival triggers a destiny beyond anything he could have imagined, as an exploratory Earth company accidentally triggers a conflict with a civilization a million years ahead of us, putting Sheridan and the rest of the B5 crew in the line of fire as the last, best hope for the survival of the human race.”
Once again, Babylon 5: The Complete Series will be released on Blu-ray on December 5th, with the SRP of $99.99.