Battlestar Galactica
Posted by 7th on April 25, 2005

Way, way, WAY back, I started my illustrious Whatever-Dude.Com writing career with a post about Knight Rider, which led to a multi-post tribute/attack on the career of TV producer Glen A. Larson. I had originally intended to cover every single Larson show ever brought to the small screen, but found that such a task was quite daunting, much like trying to use the Hubble to map the face of Andy Richter. Before long, I forgot about Mr. Larson and his atrocities, and moved on to making fun of shitty movies and ripping Mickey Mouse a new poop hole.

And then last year, the Sci-fi Channel premiered a Sci-Fi mini-series, which has now led to a new Sci-Fi series… a “new” series entitled Battlestar Galactica.

Shenanigans! Shenanigans, I say! It was bad enough that this piece of shit was forced down our throats as children. Now we get to sit through it again, only with ILM Z-Team quality, barely beyond Babylon 5 Era F/X! I thought to write Sci-Fi a scathing email, which would’ve no doubt forced them to halt production immediately, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the blame lay in the laps of two parties: Glen A. Larson himself, and the fucking idiot Galactica fans who demanded the show’s return in the first place.

Now don’t get me wrong. I know how one’s memory of a given show can fade over time, and after a while, one remembers more of what the show made them feel, and how much fun they had watching it as a child, rather than how good it actually was. I understand completely that some of you out there may still look back on this putrid Sci-fi glop of rat sputum with rose-tinted glasses, and that any disparaging remarks could potential damage those fond memories… To which I can only reply…

So either sit back and have a laugh, or go back to the basement you still live in and build up a few more calluses stroking the Yoda saber to old Buck Rogers re-runs.

Back in 1977, Star Wars hit the big screen and caused a national sensation. Suddenly, sci-fi was a viable genre in movie making, a genre once considered all-but-dead or relegated to el-cheapo Saturday morning kiddie fare. Star Wars hit the U.S. like a photon torpedo, and a young TV producer in Hollywood named Glen Larson took notice.

Battlestar Galactica debuted on September 17th, 1978 as part of ABC’s new fall lineup, a mere year and four months after Star Wars was released theatrically. The show was a moderate hit, leading Larson to release the two hour pilot as a theatrical film, which also grossed a fairly decent amount of greenbacks (a practice he repeated a few years later with the pilot for Buck Rogers.) The quest for Earth had begun, though it wasn’t as much of a Star Wars clone as some had imagined from the preview commercials. Much like the second season of Buck Rogers would do a few years later, Battlestar Galactica stole more from the Star Trek franchise than it ever stole from George Lucas.

"There are those who believe... that life here... began out there. Far across the universe. With tribes of humans... who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians... or the Toltecs... or the Mayans... that they may have been the architects of the Great Pyramids... or the lost civilizations of Lemuria... or Atlantis... Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man... who even now fight to survive... somewhere beyond the heavens."

Each episode began with the same cryptic intro, not unlike James Kirk’s “Space, the final frontier” opener. The concept was even more of a “Wagon Train To The Stars” than Gene Roddenberry had envisioned back in the 60’s. Here’s the gist. Mankind has been around for 7,000 years of recorded history. Twelve planets in a multiple-star system comprise the Twelve Colonies of Man. According to legend, these twelve worlds were colonized by a race of people that left their homeworld of Kobol. There was a thirteenth tribe, but for unknown reasons, they fled to another planet, called Earth.

For the last thousand of those seven thousand years, mankind fought against the Cylon Alliance, a race of cyborgs bent on galactic domination (think Borgs who look like shiny Storm Troopers, who walk like Herman Munster and talk like Shockwave from the Transformers and you start to get the picture.) As the pilot opens, High Commander Cain, the Battlestar Pegasus (think Empirical Star Destroyer/Enterprise hybrid) and the entire fifth fleet are presumed destroyed by the Cylons during the battle of Molocay. A council member named Baltar supposedly strikes a peace agreement with their sworn enemies. He convinces President Adar and the rest of the council to buy into it. The only one to not believe Baltar’s promise of peace is Adama (think Biblical Adam with an A on the end of his name, who is also the galactic equivalent of Noah, minus the tendency to galavant about his ship in a naked drunken stupor whilst screwing his own offspring) captain of the Battlestar Galactica.

So the entire Colonial Armada heads out to make peace, (ie be reduced to their component atoms,) with the Cylons. Meanwhile, Adama has convinced several clans of humanity that it’s all a ruse, and leads them away from the coming slaughter in a longshot hope to find Earth, the last free human settlement.
The Colony planets are defeated and occupied. Only afterwards do the Cylons realize that one ship has escaped unharmed. The send Baltar to track down and destroy the Galactica before it reaches Earth.

What followed were the adventures of Adama and his space convoy exploring strange, new worlds, seeking out new life forms and new civilizations, and going boldly where only William Shatner (and a pre-Jesus Jeffrey Hunter) had gone before.

Oh, the show had its Star Wars elements to be sure, enough for 20th Century Fox to file a lawsuit over. Most of each episode was taken up with space battle between the Colony “viper ships,” think (X-Wing fighters with the wings clipped off) and the Clyon’s whatever-they-called-their ships-ships (think TIE Fighters with the wings ripped off and then smashed flat with a large space mallet.)
Adama’s son Apollo filled the young brash hero mould of Luke Skywalker, while his bestest space buddy, Starbuck, played the Han Solo “hardened space dog” part into the ground.

The “robotic comic relief” role was filled by Muffet, a “daggit,” or large robotic dog. If you stop to imagine what the huge puppy on Sesame Street would look like if he were assimilated by the Borg, you’d get Muffet. Muffet barks. Muffet has comedic misadventures. Muffet is a poor, lonely man in a robot dog suit. And Muffet sucked. Muffet was the Jar Jar of his day, and added a sense of unbelievability to the show that even its laughable scripts could not outpace.

The thing you have to consider about Galactica is that it wasn’t intelligent writing like on the original Trek. In trying to modernize the Trek concept, Larson assumed that having the focus be more on action would bring in the Star Wars crowd. What he ended up with was severely dumbed-down scripts. The budgets were staggering for a 70’s era show (1 million per episode, twice the average) but the writing was geared towards children. As per the norm with 70’s TV, the concept of multi-tiered plotlines was practically unheard of. Contrary to later shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation or The X-Files, the scripts in Galactica were more of a “get the stars from point A to point B” variety. There were no subplots, no on-going storylines, outside of the general quest for Earth. The entire series was nothing more than one long, long, LOOOONG and drawn out chase scene, with an eventual pay-off that would have many of its former devotees abandoning it in droves, so much so that it’s 3rd season is mostly forgotten… but not forgotten by ME.

In 1980, the show returned to television as Galactica 80. Adama is the only surviving original protagonist, the other characters having been replaced by their younger (and cheaper) “offspring.” They finally reach Earth, only to find that they’ve arrived in the 70’s, where technology is far inferior to theirs, and where everyone who isn’t named after a coffee shop or a Greek myth is in deep shit at the hands of the Cylons, whom have been led to Earth like sex offenders to the Sunshine State.

But the WORST aspect of the show’s “reinvention,” (besides the fact that the show’s former popularity was based on Star Wars-style space battles, something one cannot have if they aren’t IN FUCKING SPACE) were the damned Super Scouts. The Super Scouts were a new breed of human, the next step in human evolution, which just so happened to have taken place a few years before the Galactica and friends reached Earth. These kids had super powers. They could leap thirty feet in the air, had super strength, and so on. One particular episode had them trouncing a little league baseball team (an episode that, coincidentally, took place during the heyday of the Bad News Bears franchise.) With the advent of these ridiculously bad child actors, the removal of space battles, and the addition of flying motorcycles, the show died faster than a new Sienfeld castmember sitcom.

The show vanished, and we as educated mammals breathed a sigh of relief and moved on to even dumber television feces. Starbuck became Face, and helped Hannibal get B.A. Barracus on the plane and Murdock out of the nut ward every week. Adama became suddenly obsessed with the mating practices of wilder beasts and talked about them for an hour every Saturday morning, keeping me from my beloved Transformers reruns until he finally spent the last years of his life selling dog food. We moved on, and we healed, thanks to intelligent sci-fi shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Flash forward to today. The show is back. And it’s not really gotten any better.

In this new rendition, Adama is played by Edward James Olmos, known best for his role as a giant walking pock mark. Starbuck is still the same fly-by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants, hard drinkin’, hard smokin’, hard screwin’ scaliwag, only he is now a she, so instead of being a gallant bed-hopping rogue, Starbuck is now a ginormous rough-necked space whore. I've seen others chatting about her in chat rooms, talking about how "hawt" she is. I look at her, and all I can think of is what rascally trap Kevin McCallister is gonna pull next.

The Cylons are still the Cylons, only now, when not in Cyborg of Death mode, they can mimic the appearance of humans, stealing an aspect from the equally dismal 80’s sci-fi crapfest known as “V.”

Shit, besides the moderately improved special effects, the only positive change is the total lack of a daggit. For Christ’s sake, they even stole a page from Star Trek: Voyager, of all things, by copying the character of Borg-turned-Starfleet centerfold Seven-Of-Nine for the “intelligent T&A factor,” by having one of the Cylon mimics running around as a scantily-clad blonde. Her name?
Unit Six. Could they have been any more obvious?

In some ways I can’t blame Larson for this, as he has nothing to do with this new production. He tried to get a new show started with Fox a few years ago that would have been a reunion of the original cast as their old characters in their 50’s. It was co-written and produced by on of the original Galactica producers and Bryan Singer, the director of the X-Men movies. But Singer was pulled away by X-Men 2, and without Singer, Fox balked at a sci-fi show starring old 50+washed up actors and went with the failed Josh Whedon show Firefly instead.

Richard Hatch, the original Apollo, now the successful author of a series of Galactica books (that attempts to explain much of the history and mythology that the original show’s writers never bothered with) tried to get a new Galactica film/series started back in the late 90’s, going to far as to self-produce a 4 and a half minute “trailer” for the non-existant series/film that also featured the original actors, along with many of the original props and uniforms (this trailer can still be found for download on the web.) Fox went with Singer instead, and now Hatch has “officially endorsed” this retelling show, hoping beyond hope to get a cameo to keep his wrinkled face on the tube and stretch that fifteen minutes juuuuuuust wee bit farther.

I know I’m an E/N writer, and that I deal much of the time with nostalgia, but I’ll be damned if I’m not sick of these “reinventions.” We have a Dukes of Hazard movie coming out. We have Eddie Murphy mulling over a Six Million Dollar Man “action-comedy.” All of them are big budget re-hashes trying to put a “new spin” on crap that’s still running in syndication on cable and is being re-released in DVD box sets. All it’s good for is to depress you when you watch it and realize that it’s not as great as you remember. And all the new renditions do is make you homesick for a show that exists only in your memories. What’s next, Sanford and Son starring a couple of white guys? Lassie as a cat? The Monkees as a band that plays their own instruments? (Oh wait, they did that in the 80’s and it ALSO sucked.) Of course, any production tht DID involve Larson would've ended up much worse. After all, had it not been for Galactica, there might never have been one of these:

It seems that all TV Land can dish out these days are reality shows that are rooted in more non-reality than Anna Nicole Smith’s conscious mind or shitty rehashes of old schlock shows that weren’t any damned good to begin with. Give me new ideas! Give me characters I can care about! If you must give me rehashes, let them be rehashes like the Next Generation, which at least took an existing premise into a new place with new characters. Don’t give me shit like Battlestar Galactica. If I wanted to watch repugnant comic book kiddy shit disguised as a sci-fi drama, I wouldn’t watch Battlestar Galactica, I would watch Battlestar Galactica, You get what I’m saying?

Now go back to your Battlestar fansite. I shall await your hate mail.

-=7th=-