Hello and welcome back to Concept Crash, the blog segment where good ideas come to die. Tonight, I’d like to go back in time to my 80’s childhood. Although many from the generation before me seem to have a negative view of that decade, I have fond nostalgic feelings for it. It had Tape-based video consoles that took 30 minutes to load a 2 minute game, French-anime space operas all over the place, and Jacko wasn’t wacko just yet. But what I really loved about the 80’s, was the SciFi. It really was a golden time for SciFi moves and TV shows.

Amongst it all, was a show that was  Universal Studios’ answer to Star Wars. They came up with something good, and I had loved it while it lasted. It’s just a shame what happened, when they tried to re-launch it.

Tonight’s Crash: Galactica 1980

I like SciFi, it seems to fit well with my other addictions of Anime and gaming. This liking of it started off in the 80’s with the Star Trek and Star Wars movies and then continued on with whatever SciFi I could find on TV. One of those shows was a throw-back from the late 70’s called Battlestar Galactica.

Wow! Wait a minute! Did some of you just think I was talking about the 2004 TV Series of the same name? It really does surprise me the amount of people who know about and even like the newer series, who don’t know that it’s based on an older show. Well for those of you who are surprised, know now that I’m talking about the earlier 1970’s show in this article.

I really did like this show, it was an interesting sort of space opera. Here the bad guys had pretty much won the war, and instead of trying to fight them off, our heros were spending their energies trying to escape. In Battlestar Galactica, humanity is supposed to have started out in deep space, and then branched out making colonies. These colonies joined together to make a nation, and for many years they had been fighting a war with an evil robotic race known as the Cylons.

Things had come to a head, and we join the story at a point were both sides are stuck in a stalemate and are willing to talk about peace. But it turns out that the evil Cylons are….well evil…and they use the chance at peace talks to launch a massive attack. Most of the human colonies and their space fleet are destroyed leaving one last Battlestar and a ‘ragtag’ fleet of civilian vessels to flee for their lives.

After this, Battlestar Galactica (BSG) plays out as a fairly straightforward space opera, with the Humans fighting it out with the Cylons. What worked well for BSG was several different things I feel. The Galactica itself was presented as a hulking capital ship / aircraft carrier, which is a departure from your typical Star Trek style starship. and most of the fighting involved the use of X-Wing-like space fighters called Vipers.

Like a lot of the other shows I’ve enjoyed, BSG also has a good villian. The Cylons are pretty much your typical sci-fi evil robots…it’s actually a few guys in metal suits….they’re that typical. But for some reason they work out to be a lot more effective than most guys in suits.

I can’t really put my finger on it. Is it their red rotating LED eye? The fact they carry swords, even thought they’re got blasters? The way they know the Galactica by name? Their evil looking BaseStars? I can’t really say. They only thing I’m sure of is that they were evil…and pretty damn good at it.

The final piece of the Galactica puzzle was the plot. Not only were the human colonists running from the Cylons…they had a plan too. It turns out that there may be one last human colony way off in deep space somewhere, and so in a brilliant stroke of planning they set out in a random direction, hoping to find it. It also turns out that this colony had a very weird name…known as ‘Earth’.

Yep…they were coming here. Great choice really, since sci-fi has taught me that Earth kicks ass at fighting robots, aliens and various radioactive monsters. Alas, Battlestar Galactica only lasted one season, and so we never really saw them get here…at least not in the context of the original show…

The series was not renewed after it’s first season and spent one or two years in the wilderness before being bought up yet again by Universal.

Although what came back was…a little different.

Galactica 1980…wait a minute…what? A futuristic battle cruiser, and the year 1980? What you see here, is the budget-saving plot catch of the century.

Galacitca reached Earth alright, all full of hope that the local humans could come out in their Battlestars and lend a hand in fighting the Cylons. But instead, it turns out that Battlestar Galactica was set not all that Long…Long…ago….and it wasn’t in a galaxy all that far away either. To their horror, the Galactica crew had arrived during the 1980s.

Sci-fi shows often pulled this trick to save cash. It usually costs a lot less to bring your production to a modern-day setting, than to dress up a futuristic or alien set. Most of the time, this ‘going to contemporary Earth‘ episode is done just once or twice in a sci-fi series run. For Galactica 1980, this was the entire show.

You might be thinking, this in itself isn’t too bad. Sure enough, it isn’t, some good sci-fi shows spent their whole run in modern-day Earth. But since Galactica began life as a space-opera, and then ‘devolved’ into a budget Earth episode, it’s hard to not think of Galactica 1980 as ‘Battlestar Galactica – Lite’.

So, what did they do? They were at 80’s Earth, the Cylons are still coming to get them, and they probably needed to get fresh supplies.

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Did they:

A: Contact Earth Governments, warn them about the Cylons, and help upgrade Earth tech in time?

B: Secretly get the food and equipment they needed themselves and prepare for the Cylon attack?

or

C: Send down all of their kids, dressed as scouts, with only a handful of officers to protect them?

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If you answered ‘C’ you are a moron….and completely correct.

We’re not far into this show, and we’re introduced to the ‘Super Scouts’. Not really what you expect for a sci-fi show huh? Well, you can blame Doctor Zee…It was his idea to send them down as a sort of ‘advance guard’, to test the waters and see what it would be like to assimilate into 80s US society.

Doctor Zee? Who or what is a Doctor Zee? God only knows, is my honest answer. But in a nut-shell, he’s a weird super-genius kid, who despite not holding a military rank, seems to be in charge of Galactica (Adama is his bitch).

So, we had kids on Earth and a kid sort of in charge of the whole thing. Did we even have other adults, apart from Adama (Zee’s bitch)? Well, we did have Cpt. Troy and Lt. Dillon. But wait…wasn’t Troy just the adult version of ‘Boxey’, the main kid character from the first Battlestar Galactica? Oh crap. So…we did have kids on Earth, a kid in charge, and a main adult character was the annoying kid from the last show.

Arg! A lot of 80s sci-fi shows shared this common, fatal flaw. They almost always head-lined an annoying child character somewhere in the cast. Think Weasley Crusher, and you get a mild example of ‘Boxey’ (and really, what kind of name was that supposed to be?!). The whole point of Boxey, was to be something the crew had to often save from almost certain (and welcome) Cylon death. His task was to train a robot Dagget (or ‘Dog’ / Midget in monkey-bear suit) to sniff out Cylons…a task that trained soldiers can’t seem to do themselves it seems. So after BSG, he became a solider himself, and the main lead.

Unfortunately for him, he was the lead of a show where the first major plot arc revolved around some scouts getting stranded, needing rescue, and jumping around in slow-motion to the sound effect from the 6 Million Dollar Man (probably not worth that anymore).

Alright…there were teething issues…many successful series did take some time to get into the swing of things. So, in fairness, what did Galactica 1980 have to offer next?

The Super Scouts…play baseball….

Arg…

It wasn’t looking good. Before this Galactica 1980 did start off with a couple of episodes showing the vessel’s arrival at Earth, but that turned into a strange mess of a time-travel episode where Troy and Dillion meet up their Obligatory 80s Earth Girlfriend (Jamie), and are then shot back in time to the Holocaust. It was all very hamfisted. You would hope that by the 4th episode, they’d have settled into the swing of things….and alas they had…it was called the Super Scouts.

There’s very little appeal in watching a show, where a gaggle of kids spend their time dicking around with Superman-like abilities, when there’s a far more interesting space-opera plot happening back where Galactica came from. Even as a kid, I got no enjoyment out of this and spent my time wondering when the frigging Cylons would arrive.

But they do arrive…all 2 of them….in New York.

Cue hilarity! Locals mistake them for people in costume…and instead of gunning them down like normal, these Cylons just go with it, hoping to track down their prey.

Lame…

2 Cylons? 2 Bloody Cylons?!! Where are the Basestars? Where is the invasion force?!! COME ON! This is the last Human Colony! I want to see a war here. I want to see a huge fight with the Earth forces joining in!

But no…this is just about as much as we get. The series as it stood…fizzled out about here.

There was one last episode, dealing with why ‘Starbuck’ (one of he original leads), wasn’t present in Galactica 1980. It was actually a pretty good episode, and had Starbuck making peace with a stranded Cylon so they could work together in escaping a planet. It felt like something from the original BSG, and probably belonged there. Instead, it serves as the finale for this show. Low ratings resulted in Galactica 1980 being cancelled after only 7 episodes.

So what was the Concept Crash? I feel it was this:

You cannot take a Space-opera, dealing with war and survival, and then replace that with an Earth-opera dealing with super-kids and culture clash. You’re stuck in a sort of demographic limbo there. Sci-fi fans don’t want to see it, regular soap fans couldn’t care less, and kids don’t always want to see their own age-group on screen. Thus, no-one is really happy, and everyone is frustrated.

Battlestar Galactica wasn’t the best Sci-fi show in the world, but was better than this mess.

-Rawr

PS. Why the hell did they even have flying motorcycles? All their vehicles seemed to either fly or float.  Did they expect to arrive at a planet like earth? Always seemed like a plot hole….