I remember my parents letting me stay up late to watch the thee-hour TV premiere of Battlestar Galactica on a Sunday night in 1978. Breaking news interrupted the broadcast in its final hour. My folks sent me to bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I just paced back and forth in my room. The nerd was strong in me even way back then.
My dad saw that I was suffering from symptoms of sci-fi withdrawal so he got me when the news was over so I could finish watching the show. Apollo and Starbuck defeated the Cylons and kicked off a brand new TV series. I did a little touchdown dance in my jammies right there in the living room. I was nine. Such was life in a post-Star Wars world.
In the late ’70’s, Star Wars was my primary obsession. The movies. The comic books. The bed sheets. I was all about that galaxy far, far away. But kids can’t live on Star Wars alone. This flick was just my portal to all things sci-fi. My love of Star Wars led me to Battlestar Galactica. Apollo, Starbuck, and Athena were proxies for Luke, Han, and Leia.
If you were a Star Wars nut in 1978, you had to hope it was still playing at your neighborhood moviehouse. Or you could visit a Star Wars-adjacent galaxy every Sunday night to follow the Galactica on a lonely quest for a shining planet. Battlestar Galactica had cyclopean killer robots and heroes with cool suede jackets and sweet feathered locks. This show also had a precocious kid with a robot dog. Hey, Star Wars didn’t have robot dogs. Chalk up a win for TV!
And they were serving up new stories EVERY week. Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict played stalwart heroes while Lorne Greene was the spaceship’s big boss daddy. These guys were primo! Hatch had replaced Michael Douglas on The Streets of San Francisco and Benedict had been in a cheesy horror movie where he turned into a snake. Greene had been the king cowboy on Bonanza, which was the hit western that introduced us to Michael Landon before he built that little house on the prairie and then started hitchhiking on that highway to Heaven.
But who cares about cowboys? Battlestar Galactica had spaceships and laser guns! Apollo and Starbuck kicked Cylon butt every week and I was there for it! My best pal and I would put my tape recorder up against the TV speaker to record every episode. We would listen to those recordings like they were radio shows. In the days before VCRs and VOD, you did what you had to do to get your fix.
We’d also spend hours fighting imaginary battles in spaceships made out of couch cushions while wearing cardboard helmets. In our minds, we were gallant space warriors. In reality, we were kids with diaper boxes on our heads. Fandom is a powerful thing. We owed a good chunk of our fervor to George Lucas, but also a little bit to Glen A. Larson, the impresario behind Battlestar Galactica.
This guy was famous for making TV shows that ripped off popular movies. Would we would have seen B.J. and the Bear if Smokey and the Bandit hadn’t been a hit? And if Burt Reynolds hadn’t played a stuntman in Hooper, would The Fall Guy ever have happened? After Battlestar, Larson is probably most revered for giving us KITT the talking car from Knight Rider. He wasn’t very original, but it was prolific.
While I want to forget so many of these shows (Automan, really? His superpower was turning into a car, and don’t get me started on Manimal), I’ll be forever indebted to him for Battlestar Galactica. Unfortunately, it only lasted one season. The effects were expensive to produce so the show quickly got tedious with recycled footage and thin storylines. The series ignominiously left the airwaves after 24 episodes.
Larson got his money’s worth off the props and VFX by recycling them for the first season of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. But Battlestar Galactica was gone or so we thought. Fan response was so fervid that the network got buried in mountains of fan mail. ABC brought Battlestar back back about a year later with some major concessions. It had been completely retooled, jettisoning most of the original cast to tell a story set 20 years later.
In this new show, Galactica makes it to Earth circa 1980. They spent a lot of time running around Los Angeles, which meant the show saved money on sets and costumes. There were some cool flying motorcycles, but mostly it was lame. When it comes to Battlestar Galactica, I pretend this misfire doesn’t exist and I don’t pay much attention to the celebrated reboot that won fans and awards about 15 years ago. My heart belongs to the original series.
Nothing against the reboot. It’s a decent show. They told bold stories with some good acting, using the sci-fi premise for veiled metaphors about 9/11, terrorism, and xenophobia, but all I wanted to see was folks in cool suede jackets shooting laser guns. There has now been talk about a new series on Peacock, the streaming channel that’s known for Natasha Lyonne’s poker face, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.
I’d rather see them reboot Battlestar for the big screen! It’s due for a major cinematic treatment, but let’s forego the reboot universe. It’s a downer with all that serious sci-fi jazz and “Cylons are people, too” mumbo jumbo. Let’s go Hollywood with a full-on retro vibe and make a ’70’s sci-fi movie with 21st Century effects. Get David Leitch on the phone. He turned Larson’s old Fall Guy show into a kickass movie last summer with Ryan Gosling. He’s got the chops to do justice to a big-screen Battlestar Galactica.
Let’s see Channing Tatum as Apollo and Ryan Gosling as Starbuck, rocking those vintage costumes and some bitchin’ hairdos as they zap some crazy CGI Cylons. It would be so sweet. As you can tell, Battlestar Galactica has a special place in this old nerd’s heart. What started as a substitute for Star Wars turned into the real thing. I recommend that you check it out and immerse yourself in some sweet ’70’s sci-fi. Rent it on Prime or Apple TV or even grab a boxed set of the entire series on Amazon. It’ll be so worth it.
I watched the series again recently and while it’s definitely showing its age, the nostalgia is strong and comforting. Sure, the stories aren’t super original and the dialogue is cringy but the cast is game, especially Dirk Benedict’s Starbuck. He’s like Space Fonzie. The special effects in the early episodes are better than most movies and the soundtrack is bombastically awesome. I urge you to search out this show. We all deserve to escape back to a time when Jimmy Carter was prez, disco was hot, and our space heroes had really good hair.
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Author: Jeff Stanford
Nerd Dad who loves his family, coffee and movies.
