Legend of the Rangers Questions?

I didn't get to see this the first time it was on but I got to see it a couple of years later.

Overall I thought it was pretty good.

My questions though.

1) Is it available on DVD or even VHS anywhere?

2) Anyone have any idea about how the story was to be continued after that? Especially given aliens which were supposed to be even more powerfull than the shadows.

3) Whats the general opinion among the B-5 fans regarding it?

I didn't get to see this the first time it was on but I got to see it a couple of years later.

Overall I thought it was pretty good.

My questions though.

1) Is it available on DVD or even VHS anywhere?

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DVD - yes.

Amazon Link

VHS .. I don't think so.

2) Anyone have any idea about how the story was to be continued after that? Especially given aliens which were supposed to be even more powerfull than the shadows.

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I don't think there has been much revealed there. Or the kind of fan interest that Crusade generated.

3) Whats the general opinion among the B-5 fans regarding it?

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Basically, I think most of us are/were so dedicated to the show that we appreciated it quite a bit .. with all its flaws.

I'm not sure how many people thought so, I didn't create statistics, but I believe many people liked the premise, liked the cast, but thought that the idea of the "Hand" - even more powerful than the shadows, ooooh - was lame.

I didn't get to see this the first time it was on but I got to see it a couple of years later.

Overall I thought it was pretty good.

My questions though.

1) Is it available on DVD or even VHS anywhere?

2) Anyone have any idea about how the story was to be continued after that? Especially given aliens which were supposed to be even more powerfull than the shadows.

3) Whats the general opinion among the B-5 fans regarding it?

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1. Available on DVD (Amazon, local stores, etc.).

2. No info. of that specifically. The show was going to be used to wrap up the Crusade storyline.

3. It's my least favorite part of the B5 universe. In it, Dulann, Na'Feel and Firell were my favorite new characters. David Martel was so-so. The rest were not very good.

2) Anyone have any idea about how the story was to be continued after that? Especially given aliens which were supposed to be even more powerfull than the shadows.

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Of course, that was a claim made by an admitted agent of that, so you can believe as much of it as you want to.

The series would have overlapped with the time period of Crusade (the pilot took place in 2265, just after the end of the Telepath War, about two years before "War Zone") JMS's plan seemed to be to get the Rangers series up and running on The Sci-Fi Channel. Assuming it succeeded (and the B5 rerurns had done very well) he may have had a chance to actually get Crusade back on the air. (Either as a continuation of the first incarnation or as a reboot of S1 that ignored the 13 episodes already produced.) Barring that, he could have continued at least part of the Crusade story as originally conceived - pre-TNT interference - in which the Rangers did the advanced scouting for Excalibur in its search for the cure and (my speculation) later supplied Gideon and company with covert (and plausibly deniable) aid after they went renegade. So at least part of the planned Crusade arc (if not all of the character development and story arcs) could have been wrapped up in a Rangers series if need be.

Given what we now know about "Voices in the Dark", you have to wonder what was happening on Mars during those 72 hours that would tied into the IA's celebration and involved Mr. Garibaldi. Perhaps he, too, would be coming to B5 for the party.

I wonder if JMS will shoot it as planned when the time comes, or rewrite it to fit in with the other stories in the 2nd disc. If the latter, I hope he publishes both versions of the script.

Regards,

Joe

2) Anyone have any idea about how the story was to be continued after that? Especially given aliens which were supposed to be even more powerfull than the shadows.

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Of course, that was a claim made by an admitted agent of that, so you can believe as much of it as you want to.

The series would have overlapped with the time period of Crusade (the pilot took place in 2265, just after the end of the Telepath War, about two years before "War Zone")

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Yet, the official WB website is saying 2264.
http://www2.warnerbros.com/babylon5/store.html
<shrug> Could be that the marketing types got it wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.

I love the Ranger movie!

Yet, the official WB website is saying 2264.
<shrug> Could be that the marketing types got it wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.

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No, it wouldn't. JMS has said that the Teep War started in 2264 and ended in 2265, and he's also said that Rangers took place after the end of the war. (A statement reinforced by G'Kar's oblique reference to Lyta's death.)

Regards,

Joe

Hi, Dayton3. I liked the Rangers pilot just fine. It certainly stood up as well as the B5 pilot, "The Gathering," and looked to be a promising starting point for an interesting series. While it definitely had its flaws, I don't think that you can make too much of the bit about "the Hand" claiming to be more powerful than the Shadows. We only saw the tippiest tip of the iceberg -- and this is JMS writing the script, after all -- just because the Hand said they are more powerful than the Shadows doesn't necessarily mean that they actually are. It just means that they're keenly aware of their PR. My guess is that they were going to turn out to be big ol' fluffball wannabes, not at all as scary as they claimed.

Amy

If the alien agents we saw looked upon The Hand in any sort of semi-religious sort of way -- and Kafta did seem quite reverent when he spoke about them -- they very easily could be falling to a "my god is bigger than your god" method of thinking. But what Kafta thought and believed wouldn't necessarily be reality.

Maybe it's just me, but the Hand screamed MCGuffin and classic JMS misdirection to me. The reaction a lot people had to them, "oh, another super powerful race, that likes to operate from the shadows, uses a lot of other races to fight by proxy, has lain dormant in a sense but is now coming back, but without all of the careful buildup B5's main enemy forces had" might very well have been the intended reaction. JMS seems to like to intentionally court clichés in beginnings, so that he can twist them around later to greater effect. Of course, without a continuation doing this will fall kind of flat, but I can sort of see what he might have been trying to do there.

Maybe it's just me, but the Hand screamed MCGuffin and classic JMS misdirection to me.

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Exactly. It was like all the pre-Crusade whining about how "There's no suspense, we know how the show ends" and "JMS is just ripping off Starblazers/Battleship Yamato." (One of the reviews of the DVD set even took JMS to task for not "admitting" where the idea for the show "really came from." )

The funny thing is that this would happen on every new B5 project, and every time JMS made some change in the series, altered a character, what-have-you. (The new doctor/XO/station commander was going to suck. The whole show was going to hell. The sky was falling.) It happened at the start of the first three seasons.(where's the arc, these are just a bunch of stand-alone episodes.) I've lost count of how many times over the years I've read some variation of the following from JMS:

"Hey, guys, trust me. I have a track record. I haven't suddenly become massively brain-damaged or forgotten how to write. You're reacting to rumors and fragments of fact. You don't know the big picture, only I do. And it is nothing like what you're imagining." And still, when "The Hand" came up in Rangers there was the same old Pavlovian response, right on cue. In some ways it is kind of reassuring, like spring following winter.

Regards,

Joe

3) Whats the general opinion among the B-5 fans regarding it?

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Virtually without exception fans deeply hated the weapons system - and, let's face it, with good reason.

JMS's script called for a spherical projection chamber beneath the bridge. The Weapons Officer's chair would have dropped into the center of it, and the sphere would have rotated around the chair to present different views to the gunner. It was the Minbari 360 degree holographic command center taken to the next level.

Unfortunately somebody did the math wrong in estimating what it would cost to build the thing and when they arrived in Vancouver they realized it was going to put them substantially over budget. Neither WB nor The Sci-Fi Channel was prepared to kick in any extra money (at that piont they were bogged down in negotiations over the series deal and neither side was feeling generous.) So JMS and company literally looked around at what was on-hand at the soundstage, found a "Peter Pan" style flying harness and tried to figure out a way to do the weapons sphere without the chair. JMS tried to sell the result as a control system that have never been seen before in film and (somewhat more plausibly) tried to connect it to current trends in ergonomic design and control by body movement, but in the end there was not enough lipstick or way too much pig.

But I'm confident that if a series order had been placed JMS would have found a way to get his preferred console built and they would have replaced the pilot version on screen with some tongue-in-cheek comments as they did with the original Grey uniforms in Crusade.

The other thing even people who liked the film (and I'm one of them) tended to agree on was that if we never heard the phrase "we live for the one, we die for the one" again before we die that this would be perfectly fine with us. Some people also objected to the whole "Die rather than retreat" Ranger philosophy and said it a) made no sense and b) was never established in the show. To take the second point first - I don't think we saw enough actual full-scale Ranger combat to say one way or the other. Certainly suicidal bravery did seem to be an element in the Ranger code, and I don't think we saw anytihing to contradict it. (And we did see things, like Delenn's attack on the Drakh fleet after barely escaping with her life, that tend to support it.) On the first point - yes, it is kind of stupid. And outmoded in the modern age of the IA. I think that was kind of the point. The Rangers series would have explored how the ancient Minbari organization was fundamentally changed by the influx of brash young aliens who didn't blindly obey every belch and hiccup of Valen's. (And who would, ironically, thereby honor the memory of the real Minbari more than those who did.) JMS had to establish what Martel was rebelling against as well as show the flaws in the otherwise noble organization in order to have something to reform, much as G'Kar had to be something of a villain at the start in order to be reborn as a hero.

Regads,

Joe

^Fully agreed about the weapons system. At first I thought it looked like a rather cool idea.

But then it started to look ludicrous with the weapons officer seeming to gyrate their in space when multiple weapons fire was required.

I'd rather see the ship firing than weapons fire coming our of the hands and feet of the person

It was a lighter, more action orientated affair, in the same way that SG1 is. It should have had a pop at a series, especially given the excellent young cast. There were script issues, imho, and far too much 'dying for the one'. Yes, the weapon's system sucked, especially when it could have been so awesome.

As for Rangers acting sucidally, we do see quite a few Whitestars making suicide runs, especially in the whole Proxima blockade battle. That seems odd, given that those ships are in short supply...

I don't remember them losing many White Stars at Proxima. The battle where they really lost a lot was against the advanced destroyers with all that Shadowtech. And there they kind of had to, or all the normal EA destroyers on their side would have been blown out of space.

The Rangers were used for recon and so would find it neccesary to flee from combat in order to deliver information,their mission goal.

Would the Shadows not find it strange that the Whitestars were trying to escape when they were set up with false information.Four Whitestars did escape I believe so it would appear mission objective would be the priority.

I had always took it to mean that they wouldn't break but Rangers blew away that theory although G'kar pointed out the obvious flaws in such an attitude.

Was the only part of the film I didn't like apart from the daft weapons system.Any military behaving with suicidal tendacies like that would lose far too many ships and personel over needless causes.

One crashed into an Omega, when it (or its crew, at least) could have bailed.

They did loose a lot against the Shadows. One thing that JMS said later on, but that I never picked up on in the series, is that once they had alienated the Vorlons, there was a finite supply of these ships. This is why we hardly see Whitestars in Legend of the Rangers. It took a while to get something similar working again (The 'Bluestar' smaller ships we see in Sleeping in Light)...

I think it would have been cool to see a couple of Whitestars in the Ranger movie.

The Rangers were used for recon and so would find it neccesary to flee from combat in order to deliver information,their mission goal.

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But avoiding combat, which covert recon units or spies would do, is different than running away from a fight. So is withdrawing part of a force under orders while another fights a rear-guard action to allow the rest to escape. (Which Martel is ordered to do in the film.)

For most of the last 1,000 years the Rangers have been basically a recon unit. They aren't the primary Minbari military, the Warrior Caste is. But during the previous Shadow War the Rangers, made up mostly of Religious Caste and Workers (to the great scandal of the Warriors), were full-blown combat troops and ship's crews. That's probably when they developed the philosphy of "never run from a fight", which hasn't been much of an issue in the intervening millennium of raids and recon.

One thing that JMS said later on, but that I never picked up on in the series, is that once they had alienated the Vorlons, there was a finite supply of these ships.

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The Vorlons left almost immediately after we alienated them, so it was their absence, rather than their attitude, that caused the problems with the White Stars. They apparently provided actual components, not just technical know-how, because the Minbari could not build the ships on their own.

Sheridan and Delenn talk about exactly this problem a couple of times in the series, so it isn't just something that JMS mentioned post facto. Sheridan also realized that the White Stars were being used to fill the roles of too many different ship types, and that the IA needed to build a fleet with more specialist vessells. The advanced destroyer project that produces the Victory and Excalibur is a direct result of their recoginition that the IA needs something to replace the White Stars.

This is why we hardly see Whitestars in Legend of the Rangers.

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The reason we see hardly any White Stars in the Rangers pilot (and those from a distance) is that Warner Bros. lost all the B5/Crusade CGI files and there was no time to build detailed ship models of anything not directly involved in the plot.

Regards,

Joe

One crashed into an Omega, when it (or its crew, at least) could have bailed.

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That took place in a few seconds, during a pitched battle. That Whitestar crew wasn't acting suicidal, like the Enfali crew (sans weapons) would have been if they'd consciously decided to pursue the raiders. When the Whitestar crashed into the Omega, it had just taken a hit, lost a bit of control, and then if you momentarily lose track of where all the other ships are, you can have collisions. I think it's a huge stretch to label that Whitestar crew as suicidal. They just didn't have time to get to the lifepods.

This is why we hardly see Whitestars in Legend of the Rangers.

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The reason we see hardly any White Stars in the Rangers pilot (and those from a distance) is that Warner Bros. lost all the B5/Crusade CGI files and there was no time to build detailed ship models of anything not directly involved in the plot.

Regards,

Joe

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I was about to post that, almost verbatim.