It was a pretty obvious riff on our show. I think, more pissed off than anything else, Warners decided to go ahead with it. It was trench warfare for a long time and they almost sank our ship. "They're gonna look like crap," they told people, " Babylon 5's gonna look cheap and terrible." They did everything they possibly could to stop us. They figured, "We can take what they're doing at Babylon 5 and co-opt it, and we can sell it and kill their show." They were actually telling stations, "If you buy Babylon 5, you can't have Deep Space Nine." They tried to sink us wherever they possibly could. They're trying to subvert what you're doing and co-opt it."Īt that time, Warners and Paramount were doing different competing networks. He said, "I wanted you to know they're doing a show based on a space station, a diplomatic outpost, jumpgate nearby, commander with a sort of a mystical history and destiny, female second in command and a changeling, which you have in your movie. We almost didn't get there because after we shot the pilot, I got a call from Walter Koenig-who played Chekov on Star Trek -who was having lunch with a guy at Paramount. We pick up the next part of the story with an excerpt from the Babylon Podcast interview with JMS in the book Encounters with J.
Destiny haunted space station movie#
Ironically, one of the places that did understand what we were doing was Paramount Television, which made overtures to us about picking up the project after reading the spec movie and the series bible and treatment.only to suddenly change their minds at the last moment, no explanation given. Their logic was as shortsighted as it was absolutely unassailable. We were told, repeatedly and enthusiastically, that there was no market for any SF series other than Star Trek. Michael Straczynski, Volume 1:įor the five years it took to make and sell Babylon 5, Star Trek was the bane of our existence, the constant stumbling block we had to overcome in nearly every meeting.
Two excerpts from JMS's commentary in the book Babylon 5: The Scripts of J. We present a few excerpts to tell the story of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine controversy.
0 kommentar(er)
