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Before serialized television was the norm, J. Michael Straczynski pitched a "novel for television" — one five-year story with a planned beginning, middle, and end, most of it written by him alone. Babylon 5 was the scrappy syndicated space station that proved appointment sci-fi didn't need a Trek badge.
A whole city lived inside a computer, and every time the unseen User loaded a game, a giant cube dropped out of the sky and the heroes had to win it from the inside — or lose the neighborhood. ReBoot was one of the first all-CGI TV series, and its blocky polygonal world felt genuinely alien in 1994.
Mystery Inc. went live-action with a CGI Great Dane, a tropical haunted resort, and one performance nobody has ever stopped praising: Matthew Lillard simply became Shaggy. Critics shrugged, kids showed up in droves, and "like, zoinks" had its biggest summer ever.