Galactica 1980

"Galactica 1980" was someone's bad idea to rejuvenate the "Battlestar Galactica" series that had been cancelled the previous year but still had strong viewer demand.

It would have made sense to simply take up where the old series left off, but no, they went for a loop. All the old cast is gone except for Lorne Greene, and the Galactica has found Earth. However, she only hangs around in orbit, not revealing herself to the primitive earthlings.

The first question that comes to mind is how long could this last? The answer was not very. There's only so many soap opera turns you can make with a scenario like this. Thankfully the series was short lived. The only episode worth watching was the final one, which explains what happened to Starbuck. (And no, he didn't open a chain of coffee houses.)

The worst series in the world....ever!

After the events of the REAL Battlestar Galactica and series, this troll of a series came along. Gone are Starbuck and Apollo and replacing them are Troy and Dillon. Wannabee heroes who can't act. They might as well have cast Troi (StarTrek TNG) and Dillan (Magic Roundabout) for all the effectiveness they have.

Lorne Greene must have had a mortgage to pay off or something, because I can't see any other reason he'd want to be on board this turkey.

There's a new character, in the form of the obnoxious Dr Zee. A child genius who basically tells Adama what to do. I couldn't help thinking that maybe Adama had gone senile and Zee was his nurse - he always dressed in white, anyhow. It certainly seemed like Adama was senile, he didn't seem to be able to make a decision without consulting the boy-wonder. A far cry from the confident, decisive war veteran of the original Galactica series.

Anyway Troy and Dillon get to inact it up a little and go to Earth on repetitive boring missions. There's none of the interesting space-going malarkey from the original series (even though a lot of it was stock footage) and I don't think I ever saw a starfighter. No budget for anything remotely interesting.

The only gadgets on display were the flying motorcycles (I kid you not) that the heroes use now and again. The special effects of them flying through the air are particularly guffawful, reminding me of those old rear-window shots of roads in black and white films, where the road movements in the background bore no correlation to what the driver did with the wheel.

A truly awful series and not at all like the original. Only one episode is remotely worth watching. Entitled "The Return of Starbuck" it focuses on what happened to Starbuck and has a kind of "Enemy Mine" plot involving a Cylon. Mercifully, it features only very few scenes of Dr Zee and Adama talking and none at all of Troy and Dufus. Nearly all Starbuck.

But, apart from this one episode, the rest of the series is just awful.

You know, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA was an ambitious show that had some problems due mainly to the fact that it was very expensive to produce. So rather than address that, the TV execs in their usual brilliance decided to fire most of the cast and crap on the fans. The result, GALACTICA 1980!

Horrid, putrid and eye-bleedingly wretched are terms that only begin to describe this odious obscenity that was obviously cobbled together in the wee hours the morning of it's premiere.

The surviving cast members from BG (Lorne Greene and Herbert Jefferson) both appear in old age make-up (did the producer's think they could connect with the 80-something viewers?). Seems that after years in space (gosh, seems just like last year.) that the Colonial Fleet has finally found Earth, BUT, they decide it's better if they don't actually land on Earth because that might alert the Cylons who want ot destroy all humans. Makes sense...for about 10 seconds until you realize that the Cylons cost too much to appear in this series! Enter Warriors "Troy" and "Dillion" who make many scouting missions to Earth. They don't really do anything much, they stand around and talk, and worry and fret. Meanwhile Adama and Col. "Boomer" stand around and talk, and worry and fret about whether Troy and Dillon will survive their latest mission. I think if they're so worried, maybe they should send someone else, seems these two warriors are the only two who ever see any action, if you can call it that. There's also some earth-chick they pal around with for some reason that I can't remember. They also now have on board "Dr. Zee", a supposedly brilliant child who gets to tell Cmdr. Adama what to do, when he's not getting beat up by the cool kids over on "The Rising Star" I mean. Seems to me they had some flying motorcycles, HELL they probably had flying monkeys too! It's just that BAD!

Word is that there's a revival of Battlestar Galactica in the works and that it continues the series from the first series and ignores the GALACTICA 1980 continuity, as it should.

GALACTICA 1980 is the worst series since SUPERTRAIN!

At least this attempt at trying to revive BG still retained the FUN of the original series. I saw this series when it first came out, boy was I excited! My disappointment at the time was the lack of ninety some percent of the original cast. Other than that, as an eight year old kid, I didn't care.

Then through the years I read about the crap that it contained. I read that BG fans the world over don't consider it canon and that it's a conspiracy. I can agree with them on that, too!

(I've said this before, I'll say it again, poor Barry Van Dyke has the dismal honor of being cast in two failed revival shows, the other being Airwolf. Both shoes were on the premise of some revival, though the 1987 Airwolf was done mostly to get the show on the syndication market, and both had writing problems, continuity errors, and very limited budgets.)

Fast forward to 2008 when IMDb started having viewable episodes on site. Despite the cheesiness, corniness and continuity errors, the show is STILL FUN TO WATCH! While I still agree the G1980 was utter crap, at least it's still watchable in my humble opinion. Other than comedy, so called "serious" shows today (whether they be SciFi or Drama) lack the fun of both BG and G1980.

This was a poor execution of the right idea: meaning that we BG fans wanted it back on the air, but got less than stellar results. Too bad bickering over the years and other factors got in the way of making it "right." It's a shame the new incarnation wasn't a continuation (I enjoy it by the way. They really put their effort into the stories and characters, even if the fun is gone and it is a dark series.) While it is a superb series in its own right, the fans were just completely ignored IMHO. It didn't really have to retain the fun, but continuation would have been nice, even if it's darker. But that's another story.

Galactica 1980, crap fest? Sure. But I give it credit for retaining the fun of the original. Makes it watchable if you don't pay too much attention to all the things against it.

After Battlestar Galactica was canceled, the network decided to try and wring some more dollars out of the series by giving us this low budget thing. It was incredibly childish, featuring a bunch of little kids who could jump really high, like up into trees. I think they could turn invisible as well. They used these powers to throw apples at bumbling cops and stuff like that. The cops would look around, all confused, like "Where are the apples coming from?! I can't figure it out!". You get the idea. Then there were the two main characters who gave comically bad performances. When they first got to earth, they couldn't figure out what a phone booth was, and had trouble with our vocabulary. It could have been done in such a way as to make it realistic, or perhaps even funny, but the way it was done just came off as these two guys being idiots. And yes, they were the stars.

Plots were very much like a Saturday morning cartoon of the '70s, like Isis or Shazam. Packed full of "educational" material (did you know that cars have internal combustion engines?) and environmentalist schlock - the same guys who didn't know what a phone was got upset that people didn't like environmentalists.

Then there was Dr. Zee, the little kid who was supposed to be really smart. But because he was so smart, he spent a lot of time staring off into space, almost as if in a coma, and spoke his lines as if reciting from a cue card. Definitely in the top 10 most laughably bad character I can remember in any TV show right now.

I have to say this thing rates extremely high on the "so bad it's good" scale. I mean, you just can't help but laugh at it.