Babylon 5's Use of The Internet - Fan Influences

Fan Influences

• The Babylon 5 pilot, The Gathering, originally featured music by former Police drummer Stewart Copeland. After B5 was greenlighted Straczynski solicited suggestions on GEnie for a replacement composer. After some suggested Tangerine Dream member Christopher Franke, that musician was eventually hired.
• Straczynski hired John E. Hudgens, a fan of the show, and later the Babylon 5 section sysop on GEnie, to create promotional music videos for the show after seeing the original one Hudgens did on his own. They collaborated on a total of eight, and Straczynski would often use one as his introduction at convention appearances. Straczynski commissioned the fifth one (Welcome to the Third Age) to be his pitch reel to sell the show to TNT.
• The spatial location of the B5 station itself is stated as “Grid Epsilon coordinates: 470/18/22.” This came about because Straczynski was touched by an outpouring of support from the GEnie Science Fiction and Fantasy RoundTable (SFRT) community in regards to a potential letter-writing campaign that turned out not to be needed after all. He was still grateful, however, and asked how he could show his appreciation. An SFRT participant suggested placing the station at the 3D spatial coordinates corresponding to the GEnie Page (#470, for original SFRT), CATegory (#18, for Non-Trek SF TV Series), and TOPic (#22, for Babylon 5) of the then-only official B5 Topic on GEnie (the strange capitalization of CATegory and TOPic refers to the fact that GEnie was command-line-based and allowed commands to be abbreviated to three letters). Straczynski agreed and added that info to the series bible used by episode writers. The “Grid Epsilon” part was his own touch, based on the first two initials (which were usually both capitalized) of GEnie itself .
• B5 fans on GEnie referred to themselves as "Grid Epsilon Irregulars".
• A fictional chemical substance called Quantium-40 was mentioned after Straczynski conducted a contest online to name the substance.
• A Fresh Aire Restaurant waiter was named David after David Strauss, who came up with the name Quantium-40. Another character was named after a fan who helped raise money when one of the actors had not been paid for his conference attendance.
• Babylon 5 fans on the Internet have popularized the <*> symbol ("The ASCII Jumpgate") as a sort of "secret handshake" to recognize each other online. In 1994, a birthday card for Straczynski was sent around the U.S. to many of the avid posters on the rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon-5 newsgroup. While the card was being circulated, clues were given on the newsgroup, denoted by the symbol <*>, and the jumpgate symbol continued to be used thereafter, even appearing on fan-produced jewelry.