Desert Words

Well, the Pioneer laserdisc player works great, and I’ve been reminiscing with stuff I either haven’t gotten around to obtaining on DVD, or that just plain isn’t on DVD at all yet. I even found out that someone I know might be able to realign the lasers in the old Sony player, so we’ll see how that works out.

First up, I had to do some comparative research by watching the original cut of the Babylon 5 pilot, “The Gathering” and comparing it to the re-edited version that aired on TNT when B5 made the move to that network between the 4th and 4th seasons. Luckily, I own the Japanese import of “The Gathering”, which for the longest time was the ONLY Babylon 5 laserdisc you could get, so there’s a reason for me to keep a working player around.

Major differences in some scenes, including ones that had been left on the cutting room floor the first time around. There’s also the added CGI use in Kosh’s flashback scene to his attacker, and the huge change in tone and mood that was the difference between the Stewart Copeland score and the Christopher Franke one.

But we’ll be talking about that in more detail over at The Babylon Podcast.

Then there was the suprise of discovering that Shannen Doherty and Wil Wheaton played the voices of the two oldest mouse children, Teresa and Martin, in the animated “The Secret of NIMH”. I never noticed before because I think the last time I saw that movie was before either 90210 or ST:TNG was on TV.