Happy New Year, and a great big thank you to everyone who’s contributed to making this website a success. We initially went online with tests and some minor content in late December of 2008, but we really consider today to be our first anniversary, if we may be disingenuously allowed to commemorate the occasion the training wheels came off, and not the actual day we got the bike.

Today we're speaking with Joe Straczynski, the creator, producer, and main writer of "Babylon 5," and "Jeremiah." Mister Straszynski has created and/or produced a half-dozen TV series, he's been a radio host, he's a comics writer, he's a novelist, he's written the best damn book on Screenwriting you'll ever read, he's been nominated for a BAFTA, and won two Hugos, a Saturn, a Bradbury, an Eisner, an Inkpot, and he's the only person I've ever spoken with who has an asteroid named after him. Mister Straczynski, thank you very much for being with us today. It's a huge honor.

STRACZYNSKI:

Mr. Straczynski contacted me personally just a few minutes ago to politely inform me that I'm begging for a Cease and Desist from Paramount for posting this here, and requested that I take it down. He apologized - not that he needed to - and was very complimentary about the ammount of effort that I'd obviously put in to it.

Yesterday we discussed the “Original Plan” for B5, which differed pretty wildly from what we saw. It’s not fair to judge an original concept we didn’t see based on the heavily altered version we did see, though it is fair to say that the original seemed like much less of a crowd pleaser.

Despite it’s slow start, low budget, faltering ending, and low ratings, Babylon 5 was unquestionably the best Science Fiction series of the 1990s. While many other shows may have had individually better episodes, B5’s average was consistently higher than any other show it competed with.