Battlestar Galactica (1978 TV series)

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This article is about the original television series; for other versions, see the main Battlestar Galactica page or Battlestar Galactica (disambiguation).
Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica intro
Genre Science fiction
Running time 45 minutes per episode
Creator(s) Glen A. Larson
Starring Richard Hatch
Dirk Benedict
Lorne Greene
John Colicos
Maren Jensen
Noah Hathaway
Jane Seymour
Herb Jefferson, Jr.
Tony Swartz
Laurette Spang
Terry Carter
Ed Begley Jr.
Rick Springfield
Anne Lockhart
David Greenan
Sarah Rush
Country of origin Flag of United States United States
Original channel ABC
Original run September 17, 1978–April, 1979
No. of episodes 24
IMDb profile
TV.com summary

Battlestar Galactica is an American science fiction television series, produced in 1978 by Glen Larson and starring Lorne Greene, Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict.

The premise of the series takes themes from Chariots of the Gods and Mormon theology.

The show lasted only one season in 1978-1979, but has since developed a huge cult following, and several books have been written continuing the sagas of the characters, many co-authored by Hatch. After its cancellation, its story was continued in 1980 as Galactica 1980 with Adama, Lieutenant Boomer and Boxey/Troy being the only continuing characters. It was "reimagined" in 2003 by the Sci-Fi Channel (see Battlestar Galactica (re-imagining)).

Contents

[edit] Narration

The opening narration (spoken by Patrick Macnee) is as follows:

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. 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..."

During the narration, the viewer could see scenes of nebulae and other celestial phenomena.

Patrick Macnee played the voice of the Cylons' Imperious Leader throughout the series, and appeared as Count Iblis in "War of the Gods," a two-part episode which aired in January 1979.

[edit] Plot summary

For more details on this topic, see The Destruction of the Twelve Colonies.

Humanity lived on twelve colony worlds in a far distant star system. After fighting a thousand-year war with the Cylons, a reptilian race who expired long ago, leaving only their war robots who, never having been commanded to cease fire, continuously waged war against the colonials. Mankind was defeated in a sneak attack on their homeworlds conceived by these robotic servants, now referred to as Cylons, and carried out with the help of Baltar (John Colicos). Protected by the last surviving warship, a Battlestar called Galactica, the survivors fled in any ship that could fly. The commander of the Galactica, Commander Adama (Lorne Greene), lead this "rag-tag fugitive fleet" in search of a new home on a legendary planet called Earth. The episodes dealt with the fleet's struggle to survive the Cylon threat and to find Earth.

Though it is often stated that all this took place "thousands of years ago", that is not so. The era in which this exodus took place is never clearly stated in the series itself. Various implications on screen in fact suggest the series was taking place concurrently with the broadcast of the episodes. That is, the thousand year war with the Cylons would have started somewhere around the year 978 AD (by our calendar), the destruction of the Colonies occurred around 1978 AD, and the episodes of the series took place in the years 1978-79.

However the later Galactica 1980 series, which was expressly set in 1980, to some extent contradicts that. The destruction of the Colonies had taken place around 30 years before the events depicted in that sequel (i.e. around 1950), even though that was impossible given the events in the final episode of the original series.

The implication of that final aired episode, The Hand of God, was that the original series took place after the Apollo 11 moon landing. Perhaps decades (or even centuries) after, allowing for the time necessary for the propagation at light-speed of television images of the landing, which were picked up by the Galactica.

[edit] Pilot

The pilot to this series, the biggest budgeted (US $7 million) pilot ever up to that time, was originally released theatrically in Canada, Western Europe and Japan in July 1978 in an edited 125-minute version. (See Saga of a Star World for information on the pilot).

On September 17, 1978, the uncut 148-minute pilot premiered on ABC to spectacular Nielsen Ratings (attracting 65 million viewers). Two-thirds of the way through the broadcast, ABC interrupted with a special report of the signing of the Camp David Accords at the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, witnessed by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. After the ceremony, ABC resumed the broadcast at the point where it was interrupted. This interruption, however, did not occur on the West Coast.

In 1978, 20th Century Fox sued Universal Studios (the producers of Battlestar Galactica) for plagiarism, claiming it had stolen 34 distinct ideas from Star Wars. Universal promptly countersued, claiming Star Wars had stolen ideas from their 1972 film Silent Running (notably the robot "drones") and the Buck Rogers serials of the 1940's. The lawsuit was eventually dismissed in 1980 as being "without merit".

[edit] Ratings

As the series progressed, the ratings began to decline, even though the show still consistently won its coveted Sunday evening timeslot. Although each episode had a budget of about $1 million, the show reused so many special effects shots due to budgetary constraints that many critics derided it as "overplayed into tedium."

In mid-April 1979, ABC executives cancelled the still strongly-rated show. Some sources indicate that the million-dollar-per-episode cost led to the show's demise. Others believe that it was a failed attempt by ABC to position its hit comedy Mork & Mindy into a more lucrative timeslot. (The ratings for Mork plummeted far below what they had been for Battlestar Galactica.) The cancellation led to viewer outrage, protests outside ABC studios, and even contributed to the suicide of Eddie Seidel, a 15-year-old boy in Saint Paul, Minnesota who had become obsessed with the program. [1] On May 18, 1979, the theatrical version of the pilot was released in U.S. theaters.

ABC executives have noted that the problem lay not in Galactica, but in the time slot. The four or five shows that filled that slot after the cancellation of Battlestar Galactica never reached the ratings achieved by the series.

[edit] Language

For more details on this topic, see Battlestar Galactica units.

While primarily English, the Colonial language was written to include several fictional words that differentiated its culture from those of Earth, most notably time units and expletives. The words were roughly equivalent to their English counterparts, and the minor technical differences in meaning were transparent to the viewer.

Time units Colonial times were never fully explained, but appear to have been primarily in a decimal format — micron (smallest unit, approximately equivalent to one second), centon (100 microns), centar (100 centons), cycle, secton, quatron, sectar, yahren (Colonial year), centuron (Colonial century)
Expletives — frak (verb), felgercarb (noun)
Misc - Daggit (Dog), Dackat (ticket), pyramid (card game played in the gaming ship)
Figures of Speech -- there were a number of these used in the series, one of the more memorable being "daggit dribble," a term used to condemn falsehood.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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