Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/02/07/deleted-scenes-from-the-best-o.html
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Cain, you say?
The original BSG is the show I liked as a kid. The new series happened when I was an adult. I know some people didn’t like how bleak the new one was, but they both started with the same premise. They both have their individual charm. It’s almost a shame that such a good series was mostly an attempt to stick close to the original premise of another show.
But of course, the reboot might not have happened if it hadn’t been for this guy hounding the studio.
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Everyone always forgets Galactica 1980! (or tries to)
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the main thing i remember about Galactica 1980 was the halloween episode when the microwave oven at a party takes ou the cylon, lol
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I loved the original Battlestar Galactica as a child. Or rather, I was pretty sure that I’d love it, if I ever got a chance to watch it properly.
See, it was one of those shows that never really aired in a regular time slot; It was well into (and past) reruns, and would just get squeezed into the broadcast schedule at random times when they had a space, and you never knew which episode would even be shown.
And as a result… I have to confess… to this day I’ve still only ever seen one episode of the original Battlestar Galactica. I’ve seen it about five different times, but every single time I’d be excited to discover that I’d stumbled over a broadcast of it, it’d turn out to be that same single episode which I’d already seen so many times. I don’t know the name of the episode, but I remember it was chiefly about a fire on the Galactica, and had interminable scenes of that robot dog travelling back and forth through absurdly large air ducts.
Is it worth tracking down to actually see properly, now? Or is it something that you kind of had to be a kid for, to enjoy?
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Wow. That last shot.
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Follow-up: I mentioned this conversation to my flatmate, and within seconds he had produced a box set of DVDs of the original Battlestar Galactica.
So… um… I guess I’ll soon have an answer to my question about whether it’s a show which can be enjoyed as an adult, without the benefit of nostalgia. Crossing my fingers!
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I once tried to do a rewatch of the original Galactica. I could not even get through the entire TV movie/pilot. It was so utterly awful, the writing made my head hurt, the acting wasn’t very good, and the whole thing had aged so very poorly.
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I remember liking the show on its first airing, but 14-year-old me wasn’t that fussy. Recently, thanks to Netflix, I’ve discovered that some of the things I liked then are almost unwatchable as an adult. Some childhood memories are best left undisturbed.
It is my understanding that the new version is more suitable for an adult viewer, but I’ve never been able to get into watching it due to the intolerable level of shakeycam.
I think one of the best things about the new series is that they tweaked the premise slightly: in the original series the origin of the Cylons was obscure. In the new series the Cylons were created by humans.
That we were unwittingly sowing the seeds of our own destruction is pretty powerful stuff.
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And that tagline: “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.”
Not just that we unwittingly sow the seeds of our own destruction, but that we can’t help but do so.
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I’m sorry, the original series was total dreck. I hated it then and age has not improvd it.
So I just watched the original Battlestar Galactica pilot. Tele-movie. Or whatever we’re supposed to call it. The DVD packaging calls it episodes 1-3, but has it as a single full-length movie thing on the DVD menu, so I don’t know. Flatmate tells me that here in Australia, it was screened in movie theatres when it was released. So… maybe ‘movie’? Don’t know.
Obviously, spoilers for a forty-year-old television show follow. So if you care about such things, look away for the next few minutes. 
I had it playing on the second screen, while I “worked” on the main screen. So I heard the whole thing, and watched much of it. I suspect I may not have made it through if I’d been giving it my complete attention.
Notes: Definitely feels like they’re following on Star Wars’ coattails, in this first episode/miniseries/movie/whatever-it-is; a lot of it feels like a bit of a remix of the plot of A New Hope, really. I mean, right up to the dramatic climax where they destroy the Death Star by blowing up Alderaan.
Acting was hammy; kind of par for the course for television from this era. No one will ever accuse it of being written by Aaron Sorkin. But to me (as somebody who admittedly wasn’t 100% exclusively focused on it), it didn’t seem terribly much worse than classic Dr. Who or Thunderbirds, or similar early television targetted at early teenagers.
The special effects were a mixed bag. The model work still holds up, I think. The other effects… well… they look like they came from a television show (/movie/miniseries/shoe polish/floorwax) from four decades ago. Which they did. So it’s hard to complain about that.
Boomer as a male character surprised me. I would have liked to see a little more diversity in the cast, and particularly stronger female characters. But again, difficult to argue about that in a show from back then. By their standards, and in science fiction, this… well… it’s not progressive, but it’s no worse that Kirk’s womanising. But there’s no badass Princess Leia analogue here.
There was a scene with a few alien singers, who had amazing prosthetic heads; four eyes, two mouths. I don’t know if I’ve seen that done so well with prosthetics. I wonder how difficult it must have been to perform in those things, and how they rigged them; who was operating the extra two eyes, how the second mouth was set up to move, etc.
Overall, I can see the attraction. I’m sure I’d have loved it if I’d encountered it at the right age. Not sure how much of it I’ll watch now, though. Kind of feels like a fascinating time capsule visit, more than something I’d watch purely for entertainment, these days.
For those who’ve watched the whole series, does it evolve much in style/scope as the series goes on, the way that some shows take a while to find their feet and figure out what the show is actually about? Or is it basically this, the whole way through?
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It’s like that all the way through.
If you liked the model work, great! Because every episode uses the same shots.
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And Wolfman Jack.
Siffy aired every last episode of BSG ever made back in 2006. I was painting my livingroom the week they aired Galactica 1980. I kinda wish I could forget that.
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oh god, that’s RIGHT! i forgot – he worked at the radio station that they were trying to get into for some reason… needed to send a signal to the Galactica, maybe? that episode was so insane.
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And I now know that this episode is episode number 14, (perhaps predictably) entitled “Fire in Space”.
Even if I do end up watching the rest of the series, I might skip over that episode. I’ve seen it too many times, already.
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You’d think the Cylons would eventually get an upgrade to deal with the “brake and go behind them” maneuver, or refit their ships with seatbelts so they didn’t have to do that slow roll and dive.
I would have maimed for one of those Tektronix displays.
