JMS CIS Digest: 06-May-99 13:37 through 06-May-99 13:37 (2 msgs)

[John D. Hardin]

RFC 1153 Digest of messages from
J. Michael Straczynski <71016.1644 at compuserve.com>
06-May-99 13:37 through 06-May-99 13:37 (2 messages)

WARNING: This digest may contain information about shows
         you haven't seen yet ("spoilers"). Proceed with caution.

Subjects in digest:
        Deep Space 9

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Date: 05 May 1999 06:14:03 -0700
From: IslanderUK <100545.3607 at compuserve.com>
To: J. Michael Straczynski <71016.1644 at compuserve.com>
Subject: Deep Space 9
Message-ID: <forum.babylon5.65405 at compuserve.com>
References: <forum.babylon5.65368 at compuserve.com>

Thank you for taking the trouble to respond, but I feel my initial
statement was infact correct.

The article I referred to was, as you correctly state, not in B5
magazine but was in the Babylon 5 Special of TV Zone No. 30.

In this article you confirm what John Woolf says in his reply that,
after holding the B5 proposal for several months, Paramount then
announced they were going into production on their own space station
series.

The article says this was two days before Christmas in 1992 which I
believe was, as I said, prior to the date that production of B5
started.

I did not mean to imply that DS9 was thought up before B5, merely that
at some stage it was in the pipeline at the same time, infact I think
it first aired about 6 weeks before the B5 pilot.

I can certainly understand you being "devastated" to find out about
DS9 and am surprised, given the penchant for court action in the USA,
that you have never started legal action for plagiarism.

As far as stealing your car is concerned, if your car was stolen you
would not have use of it. You still retained use of the B5 idea and the
fact that it is similar <g> to DS9 did not prevent it being produced.

IslanderUK

------------------------------

Date: 06 May 1999 13:37:02 -0700
From: J. Michael Straczynski <71016.1644 at compuserve.com>
To: IslanderUK <100545.3607 at compuserve.com>
Subject: Deep Space 9
Message-ID: <forum.babylon5.65459 at compuserve.com>
References: <forum.babylon5.65405 at compuserve.com>

"...infact I think it first aired about 6 weeks before the B5 pilot."

      Yeah, they pushed through their post production specifically to
beat us into the marketplace.

"I can certainly understand you being "devastated" to find out about
DS9 and am surprised, given the penchant for court action in the USA,
that you have never started legal action for plagiarism."

      It was discussed with WB for some time, but they felt that it
would be like getting into a protracted land war in Asia, and the
litigation might prevent B5 from getting a fair shot by being embroiled
in a conflict right out of the gate.

"As far as stealing your car is concerned, if your car was stolen you
would not have use of it. You still retained use of the B5 idea and the
fact that it is similar <g> to DS9 did not prevent it being produced."

      Actually, it almost did.  WB came within an inch of canceling
the whole thing because they weren't sure the market could sustain two
space station series.  It also hurt us in that fans thought that *we*
were the copycats, since we aired second.  And Paramount played a lot
of games with the stations to try and keep us off the air so they'd
have the field to themselves.  It took us almost two years to really
recover from the damage, it's still an annoyance that we seem to be
providing DS9 with R&D free of charge, and we still have a lot of fans
who think we copied them since our pilot aired second.

                                                                  jms


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End of JMS CIS Digest 06-May-99 13:37 through 06-May-99 13:37
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