John Hudgens was hired by Joe Straczynski to create official Babylon 5 music videos for him to use at science fiction conventions, and later to promote the show to networks. They produced eight over the run of the series. Now, for the 20th anniversary and after numerous requests from fans, Straczynski has allowed these to be posted online.
Hudgens had intended for the Phantom B5 Video to be his last - it covered the whole series, hit all the high points, but the series was over and Crusade had been sabotaged by TNT.
And then, maybe three weeks before DragonCon in the summer of 2000, the news broke that the SciFi Channel would be picking up B5 starting that fall. And since people had begun to expect something new from him each year, Hudgens had a few ideas and quickly pulled this together, including a very long and unbroken animation sequence to open the video. The music in the second section is from a then-current film, and was fresh in his mind, as the early versions of Crazy Watto (a Star Wars fanfilm of his that would later play at the Cannes Film Festival) used it as an underscore. The first piece of music should be intuitively obvious, once you hear it.
