After news of Keonig’s revelation spread throughout the internets, Straczynski issued a clarification:

“I am not in negotiations with WB to develop more Babylon5.”

That should but Koenig’s words to rest, but it’s not a straight up denial. Koenig’s and Straczynski’s statements can both be true. If you’re negotiating with Warner Brothers to purchase the Babylon 5 copyright, it’s unlikely they’re the guys you want to contract with to develop more of the IP (intellectual property) you just bought from them.

That’s my (overly optimistic) take on what’s going on. Given that Babylon 5 has been out of circulation for so long, creator ownership is probably the last, best hope for a franchise long abandoned by the studio system.

He told me that he is in negations to re-acquire the rights to Babylon 5 and it looks pretty good. Now what that portends I am not entirely sure. It could be a new series or it could be a feature film, but he was quite animated about it. He seemed very excited and Warner Brothers is dealing with him in good faith. So you might see another Babylon 5 in the not too distant future.

Creator control can be a blessing (The Guild) and a curse (Star Wars prequels). However, I think Babylon 5 was always at it’s the best when there was little studio executive interference. Here’s to hoping for a bright future for the Third Age of Mankind.

Learn more at Trekmovie.com

One result is a three-way mixup between Babylon 5, South Park and Zelda with “It’s Dangerous to Go All Alone in the Night! Take This.” The shirt features Koshi, Captain Sherman and a long range nuclear device — the only way to save the galaxy in style. Available in a myriad of Men’s, Women’s and Children’s styles and colors.

Click here to order yours today!

Click here to order yours today!

A special premiere edition will be available at San Diego Comic Con (with a $10 discount no less). The first 50 copies are signed. Patricia will be selling advance copies of her book on Friday, July 22, from 10am to 2:30pm (Table AA10) and on Saturday from 3pm to 4pm (Table AA1).

The book will be available for general sale in August through Cafepress.

I enlisted the aid of a musician/artist friend from high school for the musical score. Shawn Roberts also provided a few voices as well.

For more information on Episode Zot, click here.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Poor spoo – he’s still depressed despite his cosmic adventure and tasty frosting.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Nyan Spoo is also available as a t-shirt!

Here is the GIF version:

(and yes I know that spoo don’t move that fast!)

Prosumption is not exclusively an interpretive activity, however. In some cases, viewers and fans literally produce their own cultural products to be consumed by other fans. As I have noted elsewhere, “Episode guides, character biographies, production schedules, fanzines, fiction, and artwork represent just a few of [fans'] varied products” (Ott 2003b: 227). These cultural products frequently reflect high production values and develop their own cult followings. The creators of “Babylon Park,” for instance, have transformed the principal characters on the syndicated series Babylon 5 (1992-7) into cartoons that appropriate the animation style and scatological humor of the characters on South Park. “Babylon Park” videos — “The ultimate crossover epic, blending the labyrinthine story lines of Babylon 5 and the limitless fart jokes of South Park” — are sold online for as much as $24.95. The apparent homology between hyperconscious television and fan art would suggest that fans are learning techniques of cultural production from the shows of this genre. The self-reflexivity of hyperconscious television operates as a sort of tutor for fans who want to produce their own art, be it images or fiction. In a landscape of semiotic excess, it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the endless bombardment of signs. In fostering a logic of prosumption, however, hyperconscious television collapses the distance and distinction between producer and consumer. The thunderous downpour of images and information that make consumption impossible is thus reinvented as a bottomless lake of resources for prosumption and for cultural production.

On a personal note, I already had an academic level of training in media production when I started Babylon Park. By the time Grudgematch was in the can, my team and I had all learned far more. We learned by doing and not by staring at the TV screen. Not to say the Mr. Ott is wrong in his assumption, there are countless “prosumption” projects from all aspects of media production you can find on the web. And some are even really damn good.

OK, you say, but what the fuck is “prosumption?” Mr. Ott’s central idea seems to be that unlike traditional shows whose plot is based a logical (or mostly logical) series of events in time, shows like The Simpsons and South Park have a loosely defined plot based on association. Or to try to put it even simpler, an episode of South Park has more in common with googling “anal cyst” and then clicking through several web pages until you end up at “topless Martha Stewart” than your typical episode of “Castle.” And because of it’s nonlinearity, the show challenges you (albeit rather crassly in some cases) to “get” the associations in a kind of metagame of Trivial Pursuit. And because the show is causing you think about it, this may lead some to, at a low level, talk about the show on a forum or on Twitter, or to write fan faction, or produce their own works.

But you don’t have to take my word for it:

The book tries to be very serious business by putting all the fart jokes in the back of the book in the chapter titled “Travels in the South Park Cybercommunity.” Chapter author Professor Brian L. Ott disappoints in the fart joke department, instead devoting his pages to examining in minute detail hypertextuality, nascent social networking and internet marketing in relation to Comedy Central’s South Park. In the section titled “Originality,” Babylon Park gets a mention:

The Web authors at Comedy Matrix (formerly Babylon Park) write and produce digital cartoons that combine South Park with various other media texts. In 1998, a simple internet joke, “Oh my God(sic), They killed Koshi!” gave birth to the sci-fi spoof Babylon Park, which in the words of its creators, “is the ultimate crossover epic, blending the labyrinthine story line of Babylon 5 and the limitless fart jokes of South Park” (www.infinicorp.com/babylonpark/). The first two episodes of Babylon Park — “Spoohunter” and “Episode 000″ — were both available free for download as RealVideo in 1998. Within a year, Babylon Park became so popular that the authors released “Frightspace,” a spoof of the Babylon 5 made-for-TV-movie, “Thirdspace.” “Frightspace,” which could be purchased on VHS for $24.95, sold out quickly, and the authors created still other videos, such as the recent title “Grudgematch,” which, for a mere $21.95, pits the crew of Drek Trek: Forager against the characters of Babylon Park. The characters in the “Grudgematch” video are a cross between the flesh and blood actors from the sci-fi television series Star Trek: Voyage and Babylon 5 and the characters of South Park; the videos are animated in the crude stop-motion “style” of South Park.

Mr. Ott goes on the theorize that Babylon Park and other websites that parodied South Park are a postmodern response to entertainment composed of “intertextual allusions and sound bites” instead of a typical narrative. He then goes off on a tangent on how teenagers with South Park-themed websites measured their ePeens (for the record, not something I took part in) and comes to the conclusion that “the television show and its online fan following are intricately interwoven, neither one existing ‘outside’ or ‘before’ the other. They simultaneously function to cross-promote and cross-animate one another.” A veritable zen master is he.

It’s somewhat gratifying to get a mention in an overpriced college text considering how many I had to buy to get my degree. And Mr. Ott does makes a good argument that shows like “South Park” are essentially burritos made with sketch comedy filling with a thin wrapping of plot that can cause consumers to fart out works that go one, two or three steps further in both homage and as creative media works in their own right. It’s interesting to note that 8 years after this book was published, this whole idea circles back on itself with the “Family Guy” Star Wars specials, where the original content producer is creating an intertextual work on its own instead of by a third party fan.

Really though, it was just hella fun to do at the time and no one in their right mind was worried about how postmodern their allusions were being.

But you don’t have to take my word for it:

Is it petty to pick on the small errors? Because the production company name I used at the time was called Infinicorp Transgalactic, not Comedy Matrix, and the original quote was “By G’Quan, they killed Kosh!” which was later changed up for the show.

Anyway, I was talking with some friends about the jobs we had and the things we’ve done and, in the usual one-upmanship these conversations bring, I mentioned that quite by accident I created a meme which turned into a mashup which let to my being invited to cons, hanging with celebrities in their posh hotel rooms, and lecturing at universities (ok, maybe I exaggerated a little) for a couple years at the turn of the century. I was informed such absolutely preposterous claims required proof.

After rummaging in a closet, I managed to produce a VHS tape of Frightspace. And I don’t own a VCR anymore. So I dug out an old external hard drive I store the Babylon Park files on… and all the video files were in .rm format. No one uses that anymore, even RealPlayer doesn’t recognize the decade old codec.

So I am on a quest to re-render these old videos and release them out into the wilds of the internet tubes. If only to show that while a lot has changed since 2000, the off-the-wall performances given by Wayne Alexander, Robin Atkin-Downes, Maggie Egan, Pat Tallman and Jeffrey Willerth are classic.

Christopher