A thread for grieving for deceased cast and crew from Babylon 5

Darn shame. I always enjoyed the character he played as well as his own character, the kind of guy that would stuff his sparse acting resume with credits like “Dance Theater of Harlem”. He was as right wing as they come but I never got the sense that he was a jerk about it.

Joe Straczynski, his former boss, wrote a nice tribute on Doyle’s website. http://www.epictimes.com/07/28/2016/j-michael-straczynskis-statement-death-jerry-doyle/

I wish these Babylon 5 actors could stick around a while longer.

Edit: this thread was originally titled “Jerry Doyle, B5’s Michael Garibaldi, dies at 60. RIP”

I always enjoyed watching him on B5.

I guess it is time to cook some bagna càuda and stream some toons :/

I wasn’t a big fan of the show, but he was my favorite character in the cast.

Dammitall, that’s sad.

And no kidding on this. These guys deserved to have half a dozen reunion movies and series to get paid for over and again. Please don’t go :(

Not to derail this thread, but there was a 20th anniversary a panel with JMS and many of the actors in case someone wants to reminisce:

I shouted MEEESTER GARIBALDI in Londos voice a few times in remebrance. RIP.

Aw, man. :( I met him nearly 20 years ago at E3; he was at a party Sierra had introducing their (alas, cancelled) Babylon 5 game. Mira Furlan and Tracy Scoggins were there as well. He was a super-nice guy, and really interested in the game. 60 is way too young. :( RIP.

Nice pictures, Denny. I wish we could have played that game. Aren’t the Full Motion Video scenes stored…somewhere? I wonder if the game would still hold up now that we’re beyond Pentium IIIs and 3dfx graphics cards. Doyle must have especially loved it with his pilot’s background.

I was trying to find a video on my old computer but couldn’t dredge it up. It was another interview with Doyle, talking about his work ethic and how grateful he was to get that gig. Fortunately someone uploaded it to YouTube with the original vintage teeny resolution:

I got the impression he rode the line between being (to paraphrase Henry Sherman) a real sonofabitch and being an asshole, and generally he wound up being a genial SOB. His personality really shone through in another old interview. He had blind spots, but he wasn’t without empathy. I could usually see where his political stances were coming from. He was an interesting, articulate guy.

<CurrentYear> has been rough. :(

Sorry for the update. Apparently, the cause of death was chronic alcoholism.

That’s a shame. I feel like I should be wary about conflating the actor and his character, but that cause of death seems almost fitting in addition to tragic. His Garibaldi character, as anyone who reads this almost certainly knows, was a recovering alcoholic. The dodgy first season of the show had an episode where the character, under a moment of great stress, started drinking again. As a twelve or thirteen year old kid, this blew my mind. I didn’t have much experience with alcoholics (though as I grew up I found that a number of family members were just really good at hiding it); the cliche I was accustomed to from TV was that the recovering alcoholic, especially a heroic one, would bravely stare at the glass or bottle, then manfully pour out the drink. Not today, horrible disease. That’s not what happened. For Garibaldi to fail in a personal crisis, to actually get drunk when this stuff was supposed to be Deadly Poison was incredible to me. Even more incredible was the fact that, by the episode’s end, he still had a job. He still had friends. He wasn’t done working that much harder to keep the good things in his life. On that show, there was a Reset Button, but unlike so many other shows of the time, all it reset was how many days in a row he had been sober. Some days it was impossible to not push that button.

If it’s dangerous to compare an actor to the character he played, it’s probably even worse to compare his silly sci-fi show to the real world, but one thing I liked about the show was that humans were fallible, they had foibles, they were fuckups, they were frangible. Even though they rode in spaceships and shot laser guns (or phased plasma guns) , they were human. Even in the future, they weren’t perfect, but there was still something worthwhile about them. They struggled to overcome their problems, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, no matter how hard they struggled.

Just like now, we send probes to distant planets, we have our computers talk to other computers on the far side of the globe, we find cures and vaccines to terrible diseases, and sometimes we are still our worst enemy. It’s the future, but it’s never quite paradise.

That poor guy.

Babylon 5 is so amazing. I watched it for the first time couple years ago, after I played the Mass Effects, it kinda blew my mind how well written it was, and how much ME ripped it off :)
And then I read about all the actors who already left us…so damn sad. Garibaldi was brilliant…now I feel like rewatching it again.

Maybe this needs a new thread, but Ron Thornton, original CGI wizard for Babylon 5, passed away at 59. He was the guy that figured out how to use a Video Toaster and an Amiga to pump out hundreds of Vorlon ships for the B5 pilot. Maybe the primitive CGI wasn’t realistic, but it was able to get around the expensive and rigid model work that had been the only game in town. Suddenly going into space to blow up stuff was freer and more dynamic.

There was an interesting interview with Ron on a mirror of a “lost history” kind of B5 fan site, where the interviewees could get into incredible technical detail and the knives could come out to settle scores. Getting this stuff made was a wild time.

Was that one of the E3s in Atlanta? I remember hearing about the Starfury game and was just thinking about it the other day. Would have been wonderful to have that released. Kills me that in an age where everything is getting a revival B5 seems to be chronically overlooked. I’d be so on board for a reboot, even if it largely paralleled the original arc.

So sad we’ve lost so many of the people behind B5, on- and off-camera. :(

The effects were both crude and marvelous at the same time. Seeing all of that - the hordes of Vorlon ships in the pilot, or the massive Mbari fleet at the tail end of the Earth Mbari war, where we see Sinclair’s attempt to ram what happened to be the mothership - made you giddy about what the future might hold. And look where we are now.

Babylon V was the first time live action TV did big fleet engagements right, even if we often only got tantalizing glimpses. Deep Space 9 followed.

Thorton will be missed.

So sad to hear. :( I was working for OMNI Magazine when B5 came out (and watched it come together prior to that with JMS’s posts on GEnie) and as an Amiga journalist I was always amazed with that that team managed using Lightwave. Thornton and his team did wonders with that early equipment.

Yep, that was Atlanta. The game was going to be much larger in scope, too. Unfortunately Sierra cancelled it. :( I flew out to Coarsegold write a preview of the game, but I think they cancelled it before the preview was published.

Well, JMS announced two years ago that he was working on a B5 reboot movie. But not a peep about it since then. Babylon 5 (reboot) | The Babylon Project | Fandom

I had no idea Doyle was there – I eventually met him later but it would’ve been cool to see him at E3. It was my first E3 and it was pretty overwhelming – I kind of bounced around and didn’t have any sort of plan (other than when I had to man my company’s booth). I wonder if a alpha / beta of the Starfury game exists anywhere, would be great to play that. Do you remember much of what you saw?

Oooooo, there is hope after all!

There were sooo many E3s they all blur together, so I really don’t remember specifics outside of the times I got to meet the B5 (Sierra) and TNG (Spectrum Holobyte) casts. :) All of who were really friendly, gracious, and funny.

And now, Stephen Furst at age 63. RIP.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/local/obituaries/stephen-furst-flounder-in-animal-house-dies-at-63/2017/06/17/5bcd6d5a-53b4-11e7-b74e-0d2785d3083d_story.html