Sunday, March 15, 2009

What The Frack? Galactica Drifts Away Into Outer Space


It's over. Battlestar Galactica has been cut adrift. Have you been watching this show? I'm old enough to remember the original series which aired back in 1978 with Lorne Greene (Pa from Bonanza) and Dirk Benedict (Face from The A-Team) as Lt Starbuck, and Richard Hatch as Captain Apollo (he was on EVERYTHING at one point, Fantasy Island, Love Boat, Riptide, T.J. Hooker, Dynasty, Murder She Wrote). Hatch was omnipresent on television. You can pick up a copy of the 21 episodes of the Battlestar Galactica - The Complete Epic Series on DVD to see what the new series was based on.

In case you don't know, the premise was that a single battlestar, the Galactica, survived after the human race was attacked by a robot race (the Cylons), bent on human extermination. The Galactica, along "with it's rag-tag fleet" sets off to find a mythical place called Earth, where one of the lost tribes of man settled many millennia ago. The Cylons were always waiting to attack and the Galactica and it's crew always lived to stumble on and fight again another day.

Old Lorne Greene and his boys would saddle up and go into town, oops, thats Bonanza. Okay, the "battlestar" was pretty much the Ponderosa in space, and the boys would go and fight the hated Cylons. The Cylons were pretty cool at the time, humanoid robots with a light-emitting diode that went left-to-right and back again across where their eyes should have been, and they always said the same line - "By your command" in a cheesy robot-speak. But, hey, I wanted to have that costume for Halloween sooo bad. Never got it. In the new series, the Cylons were humanoid robots, but they looked human. Not that much of a Halloween choice.

Edward James Olmos (remember him as the intense Captain on Miami Vice?), played the intense Captain Adama on the latest incarnation of the Galactic franchise. James Palmer played his son, "Apollo" Adama, the hotshot starfighter pilot, who didn't see eyeball to eyeball with the old man. Olmos always had a few tricks up his sleeve as the Cylons slowly infitrated the crew as "sleeper" agents. And what was that all about? One day a crew member would realize they were a robot? I missed most of the 73 episodes of the series but there are some people who absolutely swear BG is the best thing on TV these days. That's for you to decide. If you are interested in buying the series, you need to start at the beginning with Battlestar Galactica (2003 Miniseries), the miniseries which breathed new life into the Cylon threat. THEN, watch the season 1-4 in turn.

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