Unfortunately it is not the original widescreen transfers but the cropped broadcast versions. But it's a start.

https://www.space.com/babylon-5-coming-to-blu-ray-december-2023

Well, not exactly. The picture quality is cleaned up substantially, the film is transferred in HD, and the CGI is upscaled. The broadcast version wasn't really cropped per se, as the CGI was rendered at 4:3 (thanks to WB refusing to pay $5K for a widescreen reference monitor) and the filming was done with 4:3 in mind, while also making sure that it still worked at 16:9. (Unlike some other shows that were technically filmed in widescreen but never intended to be shown that way, such as Buffy.) The Babylon 5 DVDs were widescreen, but in SD and the CGI was cropped from the top and bottom and blown up, which did not look very good. So neither is ideal, but short of recreating all the CGI, the Blu Rays are as good as it will get.

I'd love to get my hands on that one. The last animation movie (The Road Home) re-ignited my love for the series.

huh, thanks for bringing to attention that there's an animated movie. Released just a few months ago at that.

Just out of curiosity I looked up when the Freespace 2 conversion of Babylon 5 was released... 2008. :''D

The broadcast version actually are cropped from the original 16x9s which all live action scenes were shot on film. Only the CGI was done in 1:33 abd actually not shot but rendered in a computer That's why it looks bad when it's shown in the 16x9 versions. Which is why I asked JMS 10 years ago to please do a kickstarter so we could help him fund an SFX remastering for 1080p in 16x9 since Warner Bros had zero interest in making it happen.

If the 1:33s are all they're going to give us on Blu-Ray I'll just do 4k upscales of those really well done 1080p upscales released on video forums a few years back. It may take a few years.
I'll buy the 1:33 Blu-Rays for the improved audio and the extras. . Yup Freespace 2 had the best MODs for Babylon 5. I still have them all somewhere.

Could be worse, for the Robocop TV Series Blu-rays which the show was filmed in 4:3 ratio they cropped out the top and bottoms of the scenes and zoomed in to fit modern 16:9 displays.

I take it it's good then? I decided to put off watching it ntill I have the time to properly rewatch the whole series from the beginning. I'll admit, I treat B5 with perhaps excessive reverence, it being my single favorite tv show of all time. And I had some misgivings about the new film, the animation style isn't exactly something I'm in love with, and the trailers made it seem like there are alternate universes in play, which really didn't sound great to me in context of B5 (though maybe I'm just sick of multiverses in general). I really don't get why people seem to have such a problem with 4:3 that i leads to such idiotic moves just to appease them. So there are black bars on the sides, so what? Five seconds into the film I stop noticing them.

You didn't read what I wrote. I already explained about the CGI, and the live action was specifically filmed for 4:3, therefore calling it "cropped" isn't entirely accurate. It's not like a movie that was designed to be shown widescreen and had a pan&scan job for TV. It works both ways; I guess you could say it's technically cropped but was designed to be. That's essentially what they did to Babylon 5 when it was first shown on the Sci-Fi Channel (as it was called then). The first couple of seasons were basically what was released on DVD, but after that they just slapped black bars over the top and bottom of the screen. I had to stop my rewatch and wait for them to cycle around again, at which time they had gotten their act together and did a proper widescreen transfer, insofar as they could anyway. It did actually have some vertical pan&scan in scenes that have a mix of film and CGI, which the DVDs also suffer from. It's decent, but I didn't think it really captured the essence of B5. One problem is half the cast is dead, and the replacement voice actors are of varying quality. e.g., Phil LaMarr does a dead-on Franklin (not surprising, he's always good), Anthony Hansen does an excellent Garibaldi, but Delenn is off and G'Kar isn't even close. Not to mention that screen actors aren't necessarily great at voice acting, though Peter Jurasik certainly is. I wasn't that keen on the animation style, but got used to it. Yep. There's a reason for it, which, while clever, I have mixed feelings about, but that's spoiler territory.

Honestly, I think Expanse is more uneven than B5. First season is good, seasons 2&3 truly great, then after it moved to Amazon the quality starts to dip, with season 5 being by far the worst afflicted. There's a very noticeable demarcation line between the SyFy and Amazon seasons. Still a great show by any measure, but I feel like B5 was far more consistant in quality (and overall better, though there's obviously a lot of subjective stuff in such comparison).

Firefly neatly sidesteps the issue of consistency by only having 14 episodes :D I rather liked Crusade. Yeah, it's nowhere near as good as B5, but I still found it an enjoyable show, and if it lasted longer it might have been something more too.

I only now came to reading the featured article.

$100 for the blue-ray release ($135 for DVD) that features the series, but not the movies or Crusade spin-off. yowzers, that set is truly for some long-time dedicated fans and not something you might consider purchasing by the side.

Firefly is pretty much the opposite then. TVTropes even has a trope named after this: ''The Firefly effect''

''People don't watch because they think the show will be canceled, and then the show is cancelled because no one is watching it.''

For me, the first season started a bit slow, then it found its rhythm and it was a good ride all the way through, pre-Amazon and post-Amazon.

I find the show manages to transition through a changing set of surrounding characters extremely well (and the circumstances of the surrounding characters that stay evolve interestingly) in a way that might actually happen in real life (where the cast of meaningful characters changes quite a bit).

In a way, it feels a bit like Game of Throne in space, which was a winning formula for me.

Be that as it may, the whole 14 episodes were really strong. Babylon 5 had some filler episodes quite early I recall.

It felt like Firefly was sticking to a tight plan. It felt like Babylon 5 had a plan for a show maybe half its length and needed filler to fill all the space it had.

I recall reading about a show called Crusade after the fact. I guess I should watch it at some point to complete my experience.

I don't know if it is better or worse, but I learned about Firefly years after it was all over (I started backwards watching Serenity, maybe in 2010 and then learned it was based on a show called Firefly).

The actors are kind of old now, but I'm still hopeful that they'll do an animated series with their likeness at some point.

Firefly belongs to Disney now, so I'm not sure if I really want to see them do anything with it. I'm not even in the camp that uniformly hates everything DIsney has done over the last decadde or so, but still, hard to be super optimistic. There actually was talk of a family friendly reboot for Disney + a few years back that would so you can see why I'd be bit sceptical. It seems though that the idea is dod for now or in some development hell.

I assume this uses the film as a master.

That is in fact what The Expanse was marketed as, initially anyway. Actually it was the exact opposite. The original plan was for a show twice as long: 5 seasons for Babylon 5 and then another 5 seasons for a sequel show (not Crusade). However it became clear fairly soon that wasn't going to happen, so the pace was sped up after the first season and the story had some significant changes. Also it was a transition between old-school episodic shows and today's heavily serialized shows, but I can't really call more than a handful of episodes true filler. The majority of them contributed in some way to characterization and world-building, even if they didn't move the main story forward.

Yes, here's a good article on the remaster. This was for the digital release last year, but that's the same source as the Blu Ray.