Galactica: Astronave de Combate

Battlestar Galactica is one of those fine and cheesy sci-fi shows of the past that still shine bright: like the Buck Rogers show and movies, Space: 1999 or the Planet of the Apes stories, the original Battlestar Galactica (like the remake) has one main feature - for its time well done special effects and settings (now looking dated of course, but in a good way, at least in my opinion) and strong casts and characters. Everyone who grew up with that kind of sci-fi (including the first Star Wars movie and Star Trek original series) will never forget characters like Starbuck or Apollo. After all those years, besides a few too cheesy episodes, Battlestar Galactica is still an epic adventure.

Yeah yeah, so it may be considered a Star Wars ripoff by some. Who cares? As a kid in the 70's, I loved nothing more than the movie and then the subsequent ABC TV series especially with all of the special effects that kids love to see after Star Wars came out. And when the Scifi Channel started to show the series again, I couldn't get enough of it. An underappreciated scifi series in my opinion.

Only in the last five years or so has "Battlestar Galactica" begun to emerge from the unfair stigma that was attached to it for so many years as a "Star Wars ripoff". Although a lot of people don't know this, based on what gets written by BG bashers in their histories of sci-fi TV, George Lucas's lawsuit against Universal was dismissed on all counts and found to be without merit. Indeed, considering how Lucas had "borrowed" from so many other genre stories of the past his lawsuit claiming Galactica stole from Star Wars was the biggest case of hypocrisy ever.

For me, "Galactica" continues to age well and is even better than it was when I first experienced it as a child in 1978. Unlike the Star Wars series, which increasingly came to be about FX at the expense of characters, BG's appeal has always lied in its characters. The characters of Apollo (Richard Hatch), Starbuck (Dirk Benedict), Adama (Lorne Greene), Sheba (Anne Lockhart) and even the wicked Baltar (John Colicos) were fascinating and multi-dimensional. And unlike Star Trek, there was a semblance of continuity and character development whereas the former was entirely self-contained from week to week with no development in the characters.

Was BG flawed? Certainly. But it also attracted a larger audience in its one year on ABC than any Star Trek series ever has in syndication. What can't be forgiven is ABC's quick dismissal of this show and then insulting the intelligence of us all by bringing it back in a bastardized version known as "Galactica 1980".

Hopefully, Galactica fans will one day get the last laugh if there is a successful revival with the original cast. It's a show that deserves another chance even more than Star Trek did.

Battlestar Galactica protects the surviving ragtag convoy of two hundred plus refugee ships from the Twelve Colonies after the devastating conquest by the Cylon Empire. Commander Adama (Lorne Greene) leads the search for the mythical thirteenth colony Terra. Captain Apollo (Richard Hatch) and Lieutenant Starbuck (Dirk Benedict) are the leading Viper pilots. They struggle to escape the traitor Baltar (John Colicos) and his Cylon cohorts under Lucifer.

This Star Wars inspired franchise stumbles from time to time but at the end of the day, this is good sci-fi TV especially for its day. The biggest stumbles are the various human settlements that the convoy encounters. It puts the central premise under problematic rewriting. The basic premise is that these are the last of humanity looking for salvation. That's the drama. All these other human populations punch holes in that premise. They could stop at these places or gather up these survivors. It doesn't help to have unicorns either.

The best episodes are probably Battlestar Pegasus and Fire in Space. The human settlements episodes are repetitive and degenerative. I'm also not a big fan of Boxey and Muffit. The Ship of Lights is memorable and could be expanded. The idea for Ice Planet Zero is classic but flawed at its core. It's a stationary weapon after all. There are quite a bit of recycling in the action FX sequences but that's to be expected for TV. One does grade on a curve and this is one of the better ones in its era.

The original Galactica was in my opinion, good, but the reason why it only lasted one season in my opinion are as follows:

-The effects did not look original, so it was seen as a Star Wars Ripoff.

-It was seen mostly as something for kids at the time, so adults felt no use in watching it.

-The sociopolitical sitcoms of the time(All in The Family, Sanford and Son, The Jeffesrsons, etc)were winding down and prime-time soap-operas like Dallas and Knots Landing were starting to get big, so it was doomed from the beginning since most people at the time would rather watch a prime-time version of daytime drama like Dallas than a sci-fi epic series on television. Dallas debuted at the same time period as Galactica.

-No such thing as "first-run syndication" existed at the time. It probably would have gone on longer if it had. I don't think frist-run syndication existed until Star Trek: The Next Generation came on the air in thae late 1980s.