Battlestar Galactica is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
science fiction television series, created by
Glen A. LarsonGlen Albert Larson is an American television producer and writer best known as the creator of Battlestar Galactica, The Fall Guy, Magnum, P.I. and Knight Rider.-Career:...
. It starred
Lorne GreeneLorne Greene , was the stage name of Lyon Himan Green, OC, a Canadian actor.His television roles include Ben Cartwright on the western Bonanza, and Commander Adama in the science fiction movie and subsequent TV Series Battlestar Galactica...
,
Richard HatchRichard Hatch is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Captain Apollo in the original Battlestar Galactica television series, and also as Tom Zarek in the remake of Battlestar Galactica....
and
Dirk BenedictDirk Benedict is an American movie, television and stage actor, perhaps best known for playing the characters Lieutenant Templeton "Faceman" Peck in The A-Team television series and Lieutenant Starbuck in the original Battlestar Galactica film and television series.-Early life:Benedict was born...
and ran for one season in 1978–79. After cancellation, its story was continued in 1980 as
Galactica 1980Galactica 1980 is a science fiction television series, and a spin-off from the 1978–1979 series Battlestar Galactica. It was first broadcast on the ABC network in the United States from January 27 to May 4, 1980.-Development:...
with Adama,
Lieutenant BoomerLieutenant Boomer, later known as Colonel Boomer, was a character on the 1978-1979 television series Battlestar Galactica and its spin-off series Galactica 1980. He was portrayed on both series by Herbert Jefferson, Jr. Boomer was a lieutenant in the Colonial Service, an officer with a background...
(now a colonel) and Boxey (now called Troy) being the only continuing characters. Books have been written continuing the stories.
Battlestar Galactica is an
AmericanThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
science fiction television series, created by
Glen A. LarsonGlen Albert Larson is an American television producer and writer best known as the creator of Battlestar Galactica, The Fall Guy, Magnum, P.I. and Knight Rider.-Career:...
. It starred
Lorne GreeneLorne Greene , was the stage name of Lyon Himan Green, OC, a Canadian actor.His television roles include Ben Cartwright on the western Bonanza, and Commander Adama in the science fiction movie and subsequent TV Series Battlestar Galactica...
,
Richard HatchRichard Hatch is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Captain Apollo in the original Battlestar Galactica television series, and also as Tom Zarek in the remake of Battlestar Galactica....
and
Dirk BenedictDirk Benedict is an American movie, television and stage actor, perhaps best known for playing the characters Lieutenant Templeton "Faceman" Peck in The A-Team television series and Lieutenant Starbuck in the original Battlestar Galactica film and television series.-Early life:Benedict was born...
and ran for one season in 1978–79. After cancellation, its story was continued in 1980 as
Galactica 1980Galactica 1980 is a science fiction television series, and a spin-off from the 1978–1979 series Battlestar Galactica. It was first broadcast on the ABC network in the United States from January 27 to May 4, 1980.-Development:...
with Adama,
Lieutenant BoomerLieutenant Boomer, later known as Colonel Boomer, was a character on the 1978-1979 television series Battlestar Galactica and its spin-off series Galactica 1980. He was portrayed on both series by Herbert Jefferson, Jr. Boomer was a lieutenant in the Colonial Service, an officer with a background...
(now a colonel) and Boxey (now called Troy) being the only continuing characters. Books have been written continuing the stories.
The series was remade in 2003, beginning with a three-hour mini-series followed by a
weekly seriesBattlestar Galactica is an American military science fiction television series, and part of the Battlestar Galactica franchise. The show was developed by Ronald D. Moore as a re-imagining of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica television series created by Glen A. Larson...
which ran from 2004–9. A feature film remake is also planned for 2013, directed by
Bryan SingerBryan Singer is an American film director and film producer. Singer won critical acclaim for his work on The Usual Suspects, and is especially well-known among fans of the science fiction and superhero genres for his work on the X-Men films and Superman Returns.-Early life:Singer was born in New...
with production input from original series creator Glen A. Larson.
Narrations and theme music
The show begins with a narration, spoken by
Patrick MacneePatrick Macnee is an English actor, best known for his role as the secret agent John Steed in the series The Avengers.-Early life:...
:
The short version of the narration, also spoken by Macnee:
During the narration, the viewer sees scenes of nebulae and other celestial phenomena. Macnee provides the character voice of the Cylons' Imperious Leader throughout the series, and appears as
Count IblisCount Iblis is an alien on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. He was part of the original 1978 series, and was central to the plot of the two-part episode War of the Gods. In that episode, he was played by Patrick Macnee. He did not appear in the re-imagined series.- 1978 continuity :When a...
in "War of the Gods", a two-part episode which originally aired in January 1979.
This is followed by images of the Galactica, the colonial fleet, and other scenes. The
Battlestar Galactica theme plays prominently, an orchestral piece with an emphasis on brass instruments. It was written by Stu Phillips.
The show closes with narration by Lorne Greene:
Plot summary
Humanity lived on
twelve colony worldsThe Twelve Colonies of Man are fictional locations that constitute the principal human civilization in the original Battlestar Galactica television series, the "reimagined" series of the same name in 2004, and in the prequel series, Caprica...
in a distant star system. They fought a thousand-year war with the
CylonsCylons are a fictional race of robots in the original Battlestar Galactica TV series. They are the primary antagonists of the series and are at war with the Twelve Colonies of humanity. The Cylons also appeared in the short-lived 1980 spin-off series Galactica 1980.The Cylons were created by a...
, warrior robots created by a reptilian race which expired long ago, presumably destroyed by their own creations. Having never been commanded to cease fire, these warrior robots waged war against the colonials. Mankind was defeated in a sneak attack on their homeworlds conceived by the Cylons, carried out with the help of the human
quislingQuisling is a term used in reference to fascist and collaborationist political parties and military and paramilitary forces in occupied Allied countries which collaborated with Axis occupiers in World War II, as well as for their members and other collaborators.- Etymology :The term was coined by...
Count BaltarIn the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica television series, Count Baltar was a leading antagonist character who betrayed the human race to its enemy, the robot race of Cylons...
(
John ColicosJohn Colicos was a Greek-Canadian actor. He was a distinguished stage actor in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.-Career:...
). Protected by the last surviving warship, a "battlestar" (the word, presumably coined by Glen Larson, is short for the phrase "line-of-battle starship") called
Galactica, the survivors fled in available ships. The Commander of the
Galactica, Adama (Lorne Greene), led this "rag-tag fugitive fleet" of 220 ships in search of a new home on a legendary planet called Earth. The episodes dealt with the fleet's struggle to survive the Cylon threat and to find Earth.
The era in which this
exodusHuman migration is physical movement by humans from one area to another, sometimes over long distances or in large groups. Historically this movement was nomadic, often causing significant conflict with the indigenous population and their displacement or cultural assimilation. Only a few nomadic...
took place is never clearly stated in the series itself. The implication of the final aired episode, "
The Hand of God"The Hand of God" is an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica television series. This was the last episode of the original Battlestar Galactica TV series...
", was that the original series took place after the
Apollo 11In early 1969, Bill Anders accepted a job with the National Space Council effective in August 1969 and announced his retirement as an astronaut. At that point Ken Mattingly was moved from the support crew into parallel training with Anders as backup Command Module Pilot in case Apollo 11 was...
moon landing in July 1969. The later
Galactica 1980Galactica 1980 is a science fiction television series, and a spin-off from the 1978–1979 series Battlestar Galactica. It was first broadcast on the ABC network in the United States from January 27 to May 4, 1980.-Development:...
series is expressly set in the 1980s.
Larson incorporated many themes from Mormon theology into the shows.
Pilot
The pilot to this series, budgeted at $7 million (the most expensive at that time), was released theatrically (in
SensurroundSensurround is the trademark name for a process developed in the 1970s by Cerwin-Vega in conjunction with Universal Studios to enhance the audio experience during film screenings...
) in various countries including
CanadaCanada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
,
Western EuropeWestern Europe is a loose term for the collection of countries in the western most region of the European continents, though this definition is context-dependent and carries cultural and political connotations. One definition describes Western Europe as a geographic entity—the region lying in the...
and
JapanJapan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
in July 1978 in an edited 125-minute version. (See
Saga of a Star World"Saga of a Star World" is the pilot for the American science fiction television series of Battlestar Galactica which was produced in 1978 by Glen A. Larson...
for information on the pilot).
On September 17, 1978, the full 148-minute pilot premiered on
ABCThe American Broadcasting Company is an American commercial broadcasting television network. Created in 1943 from the former NBC Blue radio network, ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Company and is part of Disney-ABC Television Group. Its first broadcast on television was in 1948...
to high
Nielsen ratingsNielsen ratings are the audience measurement systems developed by Nielsen Media Research, in an effort to determine the audience size and composition of television programming in the United States...
. Two-thirds of the way through the broadcast, ABC interrupted with a special report of the signing of the
Camp David AccordsThe Camp David Accords were signed by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on September 17, 1978, following thirteen days of secret negotiations at Camp David. The two framework agreements were signed at the White House, and were witnessed by United States...
at the
White HouseThe White House is the official residence and principal workplace of the president of the United States. Located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington, D.C., the house was designed by Irish-born James Hoban, and built between 1792 and 1800 of white-painted Aquia sandstone in the Neoclassical...
by Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin' was a politician, founder of Likud and the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Before independence, he was the leader of the Zionist militant group Irgun, the Revisionist breakaway from the larger Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah. He proclaimed a revolt, on 1 February 1944,...
and Egyptian President
Anwar SadatMuhammad Anwar al-Sadat was the third President of Egypt, serving from 15 October 1970 until his assassination by fundamentalist army officers on 6 October 1981...
, witnessed by U.S. President
Jimmy CarterJames Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
. After the ceremony, ABC resumed the broadcast at the point where it was interrupted. This interruption did not occur on the West Coast. The theatrical cut of the pilot was also released in US cinemas some months later.
Lawsuit
In 1978,
20th Century FoxTwentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
sued
Universal StudiosUniversal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
(producers of
Battlestar Galactica) for
plagiarismPlagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
,
copyright infringementCopyright infringement is the unauthorized or prohibited use of works under copyright, infringing the copyright holder's exclusive rights, such as the right to reproduce or perform the copyrighted work, or to make derivative works.- "Piracy" :...
,
unfair competitionUnfair competition in a sense means that the competitors compete on unequal terms, because favourable or disadvantageous conditions are applied to some competitors but not to others; or that the actions of some competitors actively harm the position of others with respect to their ability to...
, and
Lanham ActThe Lanham Act is a piece of legislation that contains the federal statutes of trademark law in the United States. The Act prohibits a number of activities, including trademark infringement, trademark dilution, and false advertising.-History:Named for Representative Fritz G...
claims, claiming it had stolen 34 distinct ideas from
Star WarsStar Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, originally released as Star Wars, is a 1977 American epic space opera film, written and directed by George Lucas. It is the first of six films released in the Star Wars saga: two subsequent films complete the original trilogy, while a prequel trilogy completes the...
. Universal promptly countersued, claiming
Star Wars had stolen ideas from their 1972 film
Silent RunningSilent Running is a 1972 environmentally themed science fiction film starring Bruce Dern and directed by Douglas Trumbull, who had previously worked as a special effects supervisor on such science fiction films as 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Andromeda Strain.-Plot summary:Silent Running depicts a...
(notably the robot "drones") and the
Buck RogersAnthony Rogers is a fictional character that first appeared in Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. A sequel, The Airlords of Han, was published in the March 1929 issue....
serials of the 1930s. 20th Century Fox's copyright claims were initially dismissed by the trial court, but the
United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth CircuitThe United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is a U.S. federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts:* District of Alaska* District of Arizona...
remanded the case for trial in 1983.
Ratings
Battlestar Galactica initially was a ratings success. CBS counter-programmed by moving its Sunday block of
All in the FamilyAll in the Family is an American sitcom that was originally broadcast on the CBS television network from January 12, 1971, to April 8, 1979. In September 1979, a new show, Archie Bunker's Place, picked up where All in the Family had ended...
and
AliceAlice is an American sitcom television series that ran from August 31, 1976 to July 2, 1985 on CBS. The series was based on the 1974 film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. The show stars Linda Lavin in the title role, a widow who moves with her young son to start her life over again, and finds a job...
an hour earlier, to compete with Galactica in the 8:00 timeslot. From October 1978 to March 1979,
All in the Family averaged more than 40 percent of the 8:00 audience, against Galactica's 27 or 28 percent.
In mid-April 1979, ABC executives canceled the show. An AP article reported "The decision to bump the expensive Battlestar Galactica was not surprising. The series ... had been broadcast irregularly in recent weeks, attracting slightly over a quarter of the audience in its Sunday night time slot." Larson has claimed that it was a failed attempt by ABC to reposition its number one program
Mork & Mindy into a more lucrative timeslot. The cancellation led to viewer outrage, protests outside ABC studios, and even contributed to the suicide of Edward Seidel, a 15-year-old boy in
Saint Paul, MinnesotaSaint Paul is the capital and second-most populous city of the U.S. state of Minnesota. The city lies mostly on the east bank of the Mississippi River in the area surrounding its point of confluence with the Minnesota River, and adjoins Minneapolis, the state's largest city...
who was obsessed with the program.
Language
While primarily English, the Colonial language was written to include several fictional words that differentiated its culture from those of Earth, most notably time units and expletives. The words were roughly equivalent to their English counterparts, and the minor technical differences in meaning were suggestive to the viewer.
- Distance and time units Colonial times were incompletely explained, but appear to have been primarily in a decimal format. Time units are millicenton (approximately equivalent to one second), centon (minute), centar (hour), cycle (day), secton (week), quatron (unknown, perhaps 1/4 yahren), sectar (month), yahren (Colonial year), centuron (Colonial century). Distance units were metron (meter), micron (second of time when used in a countdown, but also a distance unit, possibly a kilometer), and parsec.
- Expletives — frack
Frak is a fictional version of "fuck," "shit" or "damn" first used in the original Battlestar Galactica series. It continues to be used throughout different versions of the franchise as an expletive....
(interjection), felgercarb (noun), golmonging (adjective)
- Misc — daggit (dog), ducat (ticket), pyramid (card game), triad (a full-contact ball and goal game similar to basketball), lupus (wolf)
- Figures of speech — there were a number of these used in the series, such as "daggit dribble," a term used to condemn falsehood.
See also
- List of Battlestar Galactica characters
- List of Battlestar Galactica (1978, 1980) episodes
- Battlestar Galactica (ship)
The Battlestar Galactica is a space battleship in the original and re-imagined science fiction television series Battlestar Galactica.The Twelve Colonies of Man in the original television series built a number of Battlestars during their thousand-year war with the Cylons, whose battleships are...
- Galactica 1980
Galactica 1980 is a science fiction television series, and a spin-off from the 1978–1979 series Battlestar Galactica. It was first broadcast on the ABC network in the United States from January 27 to May 4, 1980.-Development:...
- Battlestar Galactica
Battlestar Galactica is an American military science fiction television series, and part of the Battlestar Galactica franchise. The show was developed by Ronald D. Moore as a re-imagining of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica television series created by Glen A. Larson...
, the 2003-2009 reimagined series
External links
- The Original Battlestar Galactica at Battlestar Wiki