[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by AeoN2:

quote:

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Originally posted by Owlman:
...But then I always though B5 was a cheezy DS9 rip off.

Actually the truth is probably the other way around in many ways.

What happened is that JMS (creator of B5), was going to many different film studios to try and find someone willing to fund and air his series... since they already had star trek, he decided to visit them first (can't remember what they are called on the top of my head though)

So he talked with them about it, and left them his huge "bible" of B5 material to study, which they did for a month or so...

Then they returned it and said they weren't interested in creating competitors to star trek, so JMS continued his search (ending up at Warner Bros.)

Then, some time later... wham... Deep Space 9 suddenly appears from nowhere... now I'm not saying the creators read all the things in JMS's notes and decided to make a star trek copy, but quite "coincidentaly" it has more than a few likenesses to B5 as mentioned, and it was written after the creators had access to JMS's notes...

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AeoN2

[edit]
And he also considered sueing them for the ripoff actually... but he was more interested in getting his own series aired than starting a huge fight...

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Well, if you won't say it, I will. DS9 was a sleazy, deliberate and obvious attempt to 'stamp out' potential competition to the Star Drek Cash Cow and it definitely used huge amounts of detailed material from JMS own outline submitted to Paramount when he was shopping around. You can see story after story in the DS9 'arc' that appears just WEEKS before the same episodes in B5 using the same material. They were obviously hoping that most people would see the Trek episode first and think that B5 was the rip-off, since most people don't visit fan websites or go to conventions or anything like that. Too bad nearly all serious SciFi fans already knew that Trek was too brainless to have anything like a 'story arc', and they could put 2+2 together when JMS said in the fan forums on Usenet and at the conventions that he had submitted his story to Paramount before acceptance by WB. Paramount also aggressively recruited all of the actors who were working on B5, and successfully stole some of them -- forcing some minor revisions of the story line to cover the gaps, and they even pressured stations which were showing the syndicated B5 to move it to some graveyard shift time slot away from Trek or they'd pull their rights to show Trek.

If JMS had bothered to sue he'd undoubtedly have won big, not only on 'theft of intellectual property' but on anti-competitve business practices for the pressure on the independent tv stations. He might well have won enough damages to force Paramount into major financial peril, but in order to do that he'd have had to abandon the project itself, which consumed just about every waking moment of his life for those five years. If he'd not been able to hold it together against the constant attack from Paramount I guess he'd have had plenty to do for the next 5 or 10 years while the lawsuit worked its way through the system. I went sour on Trek some years before TNG ended, but when I saw the unbelievable sleaziness of Paramount in their cynical exploitation of both Trek and someone else's creative work I was pretty much guaranteed of never liking anything produced by Paramount again.

[ September 09, 2002, 01:32: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]