Galactica 1980

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!

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.

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.

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.

"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.)