JMS on more bloopers

So this means that he could release all of them as extras spread out throughout the 5 seasons.

Ah! Calling a rose the Romeo Flower would not stop it smelling as sweet, but it could get past a lot of legal restrictions.

So this means that he could release all of them as extras spread out throughout the 5 seasons.

Click to expand...

Probably not, certainly not if you mean the entire edited blooper reels that were created for the cast parties - cut to music with all the swear words intact. Two such reels were created each season, one for the party held when production broke for the mid-season holiday break, one for the end-of-season wrap party. There are several reasons these won't be included on future DVD releases:

1) The music rights would cost way too much, and it would be impossible to find public domain music that matched the tempo of the existing films - not to mention that the lyrics would not make any sense in relation to the images, which the current music always does.

2) The actors would have to approve, even if they don't have to sign new contracts. Some of them may not want their mistakes preserved for all time, or may not want to be seen obviously swearing (even if the swear words are "bleeped" out.) If you want an actor to participate in the interviews and commentaries, you give that actor an effective veto over what footage goes into the blooper segment.

3) Most of the blooper material probably doesn't exist in a form the could be used for the DVDs. The original VHS tapes are now ten years old and deteriorating, even if they've never been played. Unless someone has digitized them and transferred them to a computer the only copies are later generation dubs off the originals, which will also be deteriorating. The bloopers floating around the nets are dubs several generations away from the original, in at least a couple of cases seem to have been dubbed from a PAL original onto an NTSC copy (hence the lack of color.) They are also small, lo-res files. They couldn't possibly be used as source material for the DVDs. The problem is that the VHS tapes that are closer to the original source may not be that much better.

With the time-stamps etc. visible on the clips used on the S2 DVDs, I would guess that we are looking at Avid editing files that someone preserved, rather than excerpts from the finished S2 gag reel. So what we see for future sets may be limited to whatever still exists somewhere in that form, meets with the actors' approval and - perhaps - doesn't contain any swearing. (Warner Bros. either didn't have or didn't use anything that required "bleeping" of language in the current set, but I believe there are clips from some of the same scenes where the actors swore.) If they've made a concious decision not to use anything with swearing (on the theory that the series itself is not "R" rated) then they won't have that much material to choose from, from what I've heard.

I don't know if there isn't any material from S1 or if they only cleared the legal and other hurdles in time to do this set. I also don't know if they even have any more source material to do bloopers on subsequent sets. Maybe one of the editors who worked on S2 happened to have saved some files for his personal amusement and there aren't any more. I hope that we do see more stuff, and that anything surviving from S1 is either included on the S5 set, or is used as a extra for a special edition re-issue of The Gathering, one with a 5.1 sound re-mix, digital image clean-up and commentary tracks by JMS and Michael O'Hare. I'd buy it again if it had all that.

Regards,

Joe

i'm probably one of those people who downloaded the b5 bloopers on the net, and yeah, the quality is TERRIBLE x.x!!! too bad that it seems like jms is not going to release these bloopers in good/high quality .....but how about the bloopers tape that's being sold in ebay? i checked it out, and it says that it has all the seasons' bloopers O.O! aaaaah...can't wait to get my hands on that ^_^!!! has anyone heard of this tape or has seen it?

Well, with the music, they could just take that out. I don't think anyone would complain.

But the other stuff would be a problem. Personally, I think it's a bit silly for an actor to be so tight-ass as to not want folks to see an honest-but-funny mistake, but whatever.

What they're selling on eBay (and at some SF conventions) are bootlegs, of no better quality than what can be downloaded from the 'net. They are all 5th through 10th generation copies. The people doing the selling are making a profit from the work of others.

Regards,

Joe

I agree with G'Kars Eye, I certainly don't think less of actors when I see their mistakes. I kinda like it.

I do see how actors might not like having people in charge of casting seeing their mistakes, especially if they do lots of them. I mean 47 takes can get pretty expensive after awhile.