August 10th also happens to be Claudia Christian’s birthday as well as mine.
Back in 1995, I got to visit the Babylon 5 set on my birthday, thanks to Joe. They were filming for the third season episode A Day in the Strife and I got to watch a bit of filming with Claudia, Bruce and Jerry in Sheridan’s office. Nothing overly spoilerly that I saw being filmed, but it was definitely neat to see it happening.
I got to see most of the main sets including the main corridor and sleeping quarters configured for Garibaldi’s room (with lots of Warner Bros. Looney Tunes stuff that was never that visible on screen). I also got to peek into the makeup trailer where they were putting the finishing touches (adding a few spots) on G’Kar’s makeup. Andreas was very impressive looking and intimidating in full makeup.
I didn’t really get a chance to chat with any of the cast, but as we were finishing the tour and heading back towards the offices, I did get to say hi to Claudia and wish her a happy birthday as she was working on getting the soda machine to dispense what she’d asked for (she had to kick it a couple of times to get it to comply).
After touring the set with Joe’s assistant, I got to spend some time chatting in his office (which had a couple of Superman statues in addition to some other fannish things on display such as a signed photo by Joel from MST3K). At the time, the UK was getting to see the last four episodes of the season before the US and the season two finale, The Fall of Night, would screen a few days later in the UK, but wouldn’t air in the US until November. In those days, if you didn’t want to wait, you had to arrange for someone in the UK to tape something you wanted to see and wait for the postal service to deliver it and then arrange for a conversion from PAL to NTSC (unless you had a multi standard VCR). Joe just happened to have a Super VHS tape of that episode and popped it in the VCR so I got to see the Kosh revelation early(!).
So, Happy Birthday to Babylon 5 and Claudia (and me).