When the original b.s.g came out. Star wars was the hottest property.I wonder if the 78 Galactica could of done at least 3 season s.
If they had been able to deliver good quality stories and SFX week after week, possibly so, but it likely wasn’t possible to deliver anythng close to Star Wars on weekly television in the 1970s. As I remember it, a big part of the issue was that they lacked the budgets to consistently deliver high quality episodes. They recycled the same handful of SFX shots again and again in order to save money, and while there were a few good scripts after the pilot film, there were also a lot of clunkers.
Also, ABC cancelled BSG after its ratings dropped – but one should note that the drop in ratings was likely due to CBS moving All in the Family and Alice into BSG’s time slot on Sunday nights.
Not sure what you saying here. Star Wars came out first. Battlestar Galactica was produced because of the success of Star Wars. So Battlestar Galactica had whatever success it derived from Star Wars.
I was the target demographic at the time: smitten with Star Wars, willing to watch anything set in space.
But even I could see it was a hastily thrown-together Star Wars Lite.
(But to be honest, Buck Rogers deserves that epithet even more. I mean, I’m sure they thought “C3PO was humorous, so let’s foist the Abomination That Is Twiki on the public!”) (Hmmm, BG did have a cyborg dog near the end…)
So, maybe, with better writing and sets and special effects, yes, it could’ve been… but they would’ve had to set their sights higher before they started shooting.
If only the whole show had had the emotional punch of Lorne Greene intoning “That… was my son.”
Actually, Muffit the robot daggit (dog) was in the original pilot film.
What I didn’t realize (or remember) until reading the Wikipedia article on BSG just now – it wasn’t originally planned to be a weekly series. Glen Larson (the series creator) had originally planned it to be a series of three made-for-TV films, but they made a last-minute change into a weekly series, which apparently led to lousy scripts for a time.
It was Crap.
Would *Mighty Joe Young *have been a bigger hit if King Kong hadn’t come first? It’s really that derivative. I watched some old episodes with my nephew back in the 90s and they did not hold up very well.
Where would Planet of the Apes be without the groundbreaking work of Bedtime for Bonzo?
They would never have gotten the budget for better sets and special effects. But they could have worked on better scripts.
Good writing is what made the Battlestar Galactica remake a success. And it’s why there have been eight Star Trek series.
Network executives took the teeth out of it to make it more “family friendly”. It would have been a much better show if the network executives had kept their hands out of it. The network suits saw it as more of a kid’s show, unfortunately.
The writing definitely went downhill as the show progressed. I don’t know how much of that was due to it being difficult to get good writers due to low budgets or how much executive interference killed decent stories (gotta keep it kid friendly), but whatever the reason, the show definitely needed better scripts.
The show was still doing reasonably well in the ratings when it was cancelled. Based on ratings alone, the show could have easily had a 3rd season, but it just wasn’t profitable enough due to its high production costs. Money killed it more than anything else.
The show was on its way down, though. Maybe if the suits had stayed out of it and let the writers have some vision then it would have been better, but one way or another it wasn’t going to last too much longer (IMHO).
…ignoring the quality of the script writing for a second: but the production design, the Vipers, the Battlestars, Basestars and Cylon Raiders, the uniforms, the look and feel of the series, was simply (excuse the pun) out-of-this-world. (And I’d say the same for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, the Starfighters were the best) . All hail Ralph McQuarrie & Co.
And the music! My gosh…the music. The theme-song was one of my favourite things. I listen to it every so often when I need a bit of inspiration. Its majestical.
The original movie was pretty good but once they went to a series the scripts were mediocre to awful. I see that were rushed into production, and it showed.
Note that the person who supervised the production of the first episode was Leslie Stevens, who produced The Outer Limits and had some understanding of the genre. He did not work on any other episode of the series.
I eagerly watched the first episode of the original Battlestar Galactica – Getting good special effects at the time was still pretty rare, and the fact that they used some of the same people who worked on the effects for Star Wars meant that we were going to get that. It was pretty impressive, and the music was good. But the whole thing was kind of hokey, especially that forced “Daggit” (which was played by a chimp in a foam suit with some radio-controlled devices), clearly an attempt to give us a “cute” R2D2-like hanger-on. “Starbuck” was a retread “Han Solo”. It didn’t help that it starred Lorne Greene as the leader, giving it a “Bonanza in Space” vibe. But it was cool that they got Patrick MacNee as a villain, and got Frank Frazetta to paint advertisements for the show.
Mad magazine quickly picked up on the flaws in the series, the way they basically recycled plots from elsewhere. Or that they always showed Baltar lit from underneath (“Have them shut off that light shining up into my face to make me look Evil! It’s driving me nuts!”). Long before that James E. Ford paper pointing out the similarities between Battlestar Galactica and Mormon culture that the Wikipedia article refers to (Glen E. Larson was LDS), the Mormon science fiction writer Orson Scott Card had pointed it out in his Saintspeak Dictionary. He said that the show was clearly put together to make things hard for Mormon missionaries. They’d try to explain LDS theology, and the potential converts would say “I’m sorry, but it all reminds me of the silliest sort of science fiction.” Card pointed out the many similarities.
Anyway, it was clear that Battlestar was aiming at a lower common denominator. And, after you’d seen the full repertoire of effects, there wasn’t much point to continuing to watch it, so I gave up pretty early on the show.
Could it have become the next Star Wars? No way. It started out as a painfully obvious derivative of that phenomenon, and its originality and creativity declined week by week. It wasn’t going anywhere interesting.
I was right there in the beginning. I had high hopes. the production values were very good, for 1978 TV. (They didn’t recycle Viper banking shots over and over and over right away.)
But the stories! The best we could ever say about the show was, “well, that was a little better.” Even the good episodes (The Living Legend, War of the Gods, Experiment in Terra, The Hand of God) weren’t that good, but they were almost there.
Then along came Galactica 1980 and it showed that the good episodes were flukes. Other than The Return of Starbuck (which wasn’t that great - it still had Dr. Zee (insert vomit emoji)), it was all crap.
Star Trek TOS succeed despite poor effects because it had good stories. BG failed because it had good effects but crap stories. Same with BeeDeeBeeDee Buck. You all should read the old Starlog article about the behind the scenes meddling by the network in Buck Rogers. It’s hilarious, and sad.
“Could of”??? 
I’m pretty sure that the intended phrase was “could have” – I frequently see the word “of” mistakenly used for “have” in that context. The “have” in “could have” (or “could’ve”) is often pronounced more like “of,” and I suspect that many people think that “of” is the right word.
I never got a chance to see Galactica 80 when it first aired but I knew full well that it was not good. I did get to see it on Netflix a few years ago and got a chance to confirm how bad it was. Netflix didn’t have the first episode included though for some reason, which I understand is better than the rest of the season and was about a villain from the Galactica going back to the 40s and hooking up with Nazis. The Return of Starbuck was not too bad either but everything in between was awful.
The story I understand of it was that ABC was way overinvolved in the project and they put the show in the Primetime Access slot (7:00 Eastern on Sunday) so they had to be way more family friendly, which meant adding kids to the show and eliminating gunfights and violence. So the stories were watered down and uninteresting to kids or parents.
Yes. I must still have my one of these somewhere, because I would have never gotten rid of it.
The '78 show never would have lasted 3 full seasons. Eventually that one snippet of film showing 3 Cylon raiders descending would have worn out from constant re-use.