Galactica 1980

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.

Galactica 1980 may not have had what the original series had, but it DID bring closure to the series by bringing them to their final destination. The scenes on Earth weren't that great, but the segment on whatever happened to Starbuck was great.

I have great childhood memories of this series. SciFi channel just started running it again and I'm watching it more for nostalgia than as any kind of groundbreaking series. And for that, I guess I'll always love it.

ABC's decision to cancel Battlestar Galactica after one season didn't sit well with viewers, and the show's strong ratings (it out-rated almost every ABC series renewed for 1979-80) easily justified continuation. But with costs rising faster than expected ABC and Universal Studios wanted the show for substantially less than the per-episode costs of the original show, and at a time when SFX technology was not as advanced as today (modern SFX technology allows maintenance of a series' high production values at greater affordability, as well as allowing greater production of original SFX footage), there was no practical argument against the economics angle that hurt the show.

Nonetheless, ABC tried to continue the Galactica mythos on a budget, and regardless of whether series creator Glen Larson was involved. Larson signed on to try and make it work, but the result, Galactica 1980, was a bitter disappointment to all.

The show's weaknesses were extensive, but by far the greatest weakness lay in the deception used in promotion before the first episode aired. Promotions used the footage of Cylon raiders blasting Los Angeles extensively and gave the impression that the Cylon empire had found Earth and was in process of slaughtering the last planet of humanity, a premise that would have given the show a much stronger punch. But this footage was merely part of a "what if?" computer simulation to illustrate why the survivors of the Twelve Colonies cannot colonize Earth - "If we land, we will bring destruction upon Earth as surely as if we'd inflicted it ourselves," as Commander Adama succinctly puts it in one of the show's best lines.

With this premise of real life Cylon predation against Earth thus vetoed, the show begins to suffer, hurt even more by the excessive juvenile angle in the platoon of children rescued from the freighter Delphi after it is ambushed by Cylon raiders and forced to land on Earth, and also in the use of the mysterious Seraph youth Doctor Zee - had Doctor Zee been a Cylon creation (like the humanoid Cylon featured in "The Night The Cylons Landed" or better yet the Cylon IL Lucifer from the original series) that had turned against its masters, this angle would have made more sense - as it was, Zee's genesis did make for the show's best episode and surprisingly one of the best sci-fi episodes of any series, "The Return Of Starbuck." Subsequent graphic-novel speculations about Doctor Zee does make the character more understandable.

The show also suffered from several embarrassing incidents, notably the Halloween angle of "The Night The Cylons Landed" and the general incompatibility of the Kobollian survivors with the culture of Earth, leading to numerous bits of forced comedy that really aren't funny.

But despite these weaknesses, the show did have some superb moments - the Cylon attack on Los Angeles, deception or not, is compelling footage, lasting roughly ninty seconds on-screen and superbly mixing stock matte-FX footage of Cylon raiders over outtake footage from Universal's 1974 disaster film "Earthquake." The sequence thus becomes one the best SFX sequences ever done for television - I especially liked the shots of Cylon raiders blasting the Capitol Records building, Cylon raiders diving into strafing runs then cutting to the Cylon POV shot of a street being attacked, the street being strafed as seen from above then from low angle as a raider flies toward and then past the screen, and the triumphant flyover of Cylon raiders over the now-ravaged city.

The introduction of new Cylons in the human-form combat ILs in "The Night The Cylons Landed" as well as the new command-class AB raider (first seen mixed with the stock FX shot of Cylons strafing the Delphi in "The Super Scouts" but not fully explored until "Night") is also an intriguing look into the evolution of the Cylon empire; not surprisingly this idea was developed to great fruition by Ronald Moore for the 2003 version of Battlestar Galactica.

The arguments between Commander Adama and Commander Xavier (Richard Lynch) in the three-part pilot episode are well done - Lynch's Xavier gives the show as compelling a villain in his own way as John Colicos' Baltar, whose non-presence is particularly missed here. Also well done is the interaction between Troy (Kent McCord) and Dillon (Barry Van Dyke), especially early in the opening episode when we learn something of Troy's background. The presence of Boomer (Herbert Jefferson Jr.) is welcome with no other original cast members available except for Dirk Benedict's appearance in "Return Of Starbuck," and the series does tackle some moral dilemmas (notably the Nazi-Jewish angle in the three-part opening episode) generally avoided in the original series.

By no means is Galactica 1980 great television, but it does have some excellent moments, and the cast deserves credit for trying to make it work.

I enjoyed Galactica 1980 when I was eight years old. Of course I enjoyed anything that had spaceships shooting at each other. Well, I watched the show 13 years later on the sci-fi channel and I could tell it was not the best of TV shows ever written. I was trying to figure out how it correlated with the first season. What had happened to the original crew of the Battlestar Galactica? As for Captain Apollo, Colonel Tigh, Athena,Cassiopia, Doctor Wilkor and Jolly. The final episode was where Leutenant Starbuck was stranded did not make sense. In the final episode of the first season the fleet was in earths solar system and none of the planets were habitable. It was like the fleet backtracked in some area of the galaxy fighting the Cylons.

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.