When does Battle Star Galactica, the original series, take place?
In what was then our present. The series closed with the fleet receiving the TV broadcast of the Apollo landing. They finally landed on Earth in time to film “Galactica 1980”, about which no more should be said.
Personally, I thought the Moon Landing reference was moderately cool.
Weren’t they supposed to be the ancestors of the Toltecs or the Mayans?
It went like this:
Take back that filthy lie. No such series was ever made. Next you’ll be claiming they made a Star Trek series with that guy from Quantum Leap.
IIRC, The last season of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (also a Glen Larson vehicle) had Buck on a deep space exploratory vessel named Searcher looking for lost colonies of Earth. That would’ve made a rather tidy crossover situation.
By the time of Galactica 1980 it’d been about 30 years since the destruction of the Colonies. The events of the original series occured over 3 years. Therefore the Colonies were destroyed in 1950 and Apollo & company received the broadcast of the lunar landing in 1953.
Closer to 20 years, if you recall that the character Troy was supposed to be the adult Boxy.
The original BSG underwent many changes between it’s original conception, the script for the pilot movie, and how the series developed, which you get a glimpse of if you’ve ever read the novelization of the pilot. Originally the series featured a humanity that had been spacegoing for so long that it’s origins had been lost in myth and legend. It was ambiguous as to whether Earth was founded by the Colonies, or vice-versa. If the latter, then events would have taken place in the far future.
The series was conceived of as a string of two-hour TV movies released two or three times a year; Larson only reluctantly accepted shoehorning the series into the network’s standard format of 13 one-hour episodes a year. In some of the scripts envisioned for the original concept, there were teasers that there was still some very tentative contact between the Colonies and Earth, roughly along the lines of a lone Marco Polo or two making the journey once every few centuries or so.
Of course, in reality any broadcast of the Apollo landings would take years, if not centuries (depending on the distance) to make its way to another solar system.
I always thought it would have been cool if they had been 300 or so light years away when they received that broadcast and they arrived at our solar system only to encounter the United Federation of Planets and were greeted by the Enterprise…
They boldly integrated every completely contradictory supposition of the Ancient Astronaut school of woo-woo that was currently in vogue-- the zodiac is a garbled memory of the scattered colonies; the Greek pantheon contains trace references to our heroes; the ancient Egyptians’ royal costume was in imitation of Colonial space helmets; the book of Exodus is a rote account of the twelve Colonial tribes’ flight from Cylon oppression… no, wait… so the Colonial Fleet is simultaneously the tribes of Judah and the forefathers of the Egyptians… ummm… and, oh yeah forget all that jibber-jabber that Ben Cartwright was on about with the “there are those that believe that life down here began out there,” because those people were probably just high, or trying their best to evoke “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away” without getting their pants sued off.
Calm yourself, Rhymer. Some scenery chewing actor leapt into that role. All is well.
OP: I go with Lemur’s explanation.
Even as a young kid, I thought Galactica 1980 was one of the stupidest shows on the air. (Which somehow did not stop me from watching it.)
One episode, “The Return of Starbuck”, however was good. Far better than most of the episodes of the original series. So I cannot pretend that the second series never existed.
I just want to say that this is a brilliant idea. Has anything like this happened before?
“McCloud” and “McMillan & Wife” were both part of The ABC Mystery Movies, which ran for several years in the early 1970s.
It has happened before, and it will happen again.
IIRC Lucas actually did sue them on that basis, but lost.
“You say you left a destroyed Earth to look for the colonies? Well, we left the destroyed colonies to look for Earth … aw, FRAAAKKKKK!!!”
Pardon me. That would, of course, have been “Aww, FELGERCARB!”
Nitpick: According to IMDb, the opening sequence announcer was Patrick Macnee, not Lorne Greene.
Apparently, not quite: