Review: Babylon 5: The Complete Series

This is a fantastic DVD set. Babylon 5 was a cutting edge series when it came out nearly 10 years ago, and to me is still one of the best sci-fi series ever. But this isn’t about the series. Everyone knows the series was great and what it was all about.
The 5 season collection is pretty huge. With 6 DVDs and 22 episodes in each season, it’s a lot of TV watching. Nothing any die-hard B5 fan wouldn’t object to or find overly strenuous, especially since the entire series can be watched commercial free (with pauses for bathroom breaks and food of course)!
The slip cases for each season are nice and colourful and provide a very nice presentation for the series. Each season comes in a book-style cover with disk on each side of a plastic DVD disk holder. My only complaint with the boxed set is that the disk holders are simply glued in and not very solidly at that. Already I’ve had a two of the disk holders pop out of the covers when they got dropped (onto carpet). The cover is creased between each plastic holder to make for easy opening, but doesn’t seem like it will withstand a lot of opening and closing. It’s not likely to fall apart soon, but it seems to me the binding could have been done a little better and more solidly.
There are special features on disks 1, 4 and 6 of each season, which I haven’t had a chance to go through yet. 2 or 3 episodes in each season have commentary from JMS and others. The special features consist mostly of character, equipment and technology background in the form of ‘data files’. Gag reels are included in the last couple of seasons. A few short documentaries are also sprinkled here and there.
The series itself of course I give 5/5 to. The DVD collection I’ll have to give 4/5 to, mostly because of the relatively poor binding quality and ho-hum special features.