Battlestar Galactica 1978

Fleeing from the Cylon tyranny, the last Battlestar, Galactica, leads a rag-tag fugitive fleet on a lonely quest -- a shining planet, known as Earth.

Plot summary

Humanity lived on twelve colony worlds in a distant star system. They fought a thousand-year war with the Cylons, 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 Count Baltar (John Colicos). 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 exodus took place is never clearly stated in the series itself. The implication of the final aired episode, "The Hand of God", was that the original series took place after the Apollo 11 moon landing in July 1969, almost certainly centuries later, allowing for the time necessary for the propagation at light-speed of television images of the landing to be received by the Galactica. In "Saga of a Star World" the President of the 12 Tribes states "as we approach the seventh millennium of time". The later Galactica 1980 series is expressly set in the 1980s.

Pilot

The pilot to this series, the biggest budgeted ($7 million) pilot to that time, was released theatrically in Sensurround in The United States. It was also released theatrically in Canada, Western Europe and Japan in July 1978 in an edited 125-minute version. (See Saga of a Star World for information on the pilot).

On September 17, 1978, the uncut 148-minute pilot premiered on ABC to good Nielsen ratings. Two-thirds of the way through the broadcast, ABC interrupted with a special report of the signing of the Camp David Accords at the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, witnessed by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. After the ceremony, ABC resumed the broadcast at the point where it was interrupted. This interruption did not occur on the West Coast.

Lawsuit

In 1978, 20th Century Fox sued Universal Studios (producers of Battlestar Galactica) for plagiarism, copyright infringement, unfair competition, and Lanham Act claims,claiming it had stolen 34 distinct ideas from Star Wars.Universal promptly countersued, claiming Star Wars had stolen ideas from their 1972 film Silent Running (notably the robot "drones") and the Buck Rogers serials of the 1930s.^{[citation
needed]} 20th Century Fox's copyright claims were initially dismissed by the trial court, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit remanded the case for trial in 1983.

Ratings

Battlestar Galactica initially was a ratings success. CBS counter-programed by moving its Sunday block of All in the Family and Alice an hour earlier, to compete with Galactica in the 8:00 timeslot. From October to March 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 position its number one program Mork & Mindy into a more lucrative timeslot.^[8] (The ratings for Mork & Mindy plummeted far below what they had been for Battlestar Galactica.) 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, Minnesota who was obsessed with the program.^[9]^[10]^[11] On May 18, 1979, the theatrical version of the pilot was released in American theaters.In later years, Universal would recut the entire series into a series of two-hour telemovies.These were then syndicated internationally.

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 (possibly a kilometer but also sometimes confused with a unit of time), and parsec.

Expletives — frack (interjection), felgercarb (noun), golmonging (adjective)

Misc — daggit (Dog), ducat (ticket), pyramid (card game), triad (a full-contact ball and goal game similar to basketball)

Figures of speech — there were a number of these used in the series, such as "daggit dribble," a term used to condemn falsehood.

Video releases

The series first saw selective release on VHS videotape from Universal Studios Home Entertainment in the 1980s and 1990s. The full series was available in PAL format on VHS in the European and Australasian markets. In the North American (NTSC) market, selected episodes were released - the theatrical edit of the series pilot episode, "Saga of a Star World," plus all one-hour episodes except for "Take The Celestra." Universal later added two of the two-part episodes, "Lost Planet of the Gods" and "The Gun on Ice Planet Zero", as well as the feature film "Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack" (a theatrical edit of "The Living Legend" and "Fire In Space"), the Galactica 1980 feature film "Conquest of the Earth" (composited from "Galactica Discovers Earth" and "The Night The Cylons Landed") and the Galactica 1980 episode "The Return of Starbuck". Universal never released the remaining two-part episodes - "War of the Gods" and "Greetings from Earth" - for North America in any form. Series fans in America had to wait until the 2003 DVD release in order to purchase the complete series.

Universal test-marketed a VHS release of the uncut series pilot movie, "Saga of a Star World", in parts of North America. The only major differences between the regular and extended versions are the background color of the box and the listed running time of the movie.

Three of the feature film edits had a limited release on Pioneer's laserdisc format. These were "Battlestar Galactica", the theatrical edit of the series pilot; "Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack", and "Conquest of the Earth". In the case of the pilot movie, time compression techniques were used to squeeze the movie onto a single laserdisc.

In the 1990s, Playback Video of Great Britain released a limited edition VHS box set of what was supposed to be the entire series. Fans who bought the set found that three of the one-hour episodes had been replaced with two-hour syndicated telemovie edits. These were "Space Prison", "Space Casanova", and "Curse of the Cylons". Also included was the telemovie version of "War of the Gods," with extra footage. This marked the first time that a series episode had been released on video with additional footage that was not part of its original broadcast format. However, the syndicated two-part version of "Greetings From Earth" was included instead of the original television movie edit. This VHS boxset proved popular with fans. Fan reaction subsequently prompted Universal to secure prints of all of the telemovie edits, along with their extra footage, for a future DVD release of the series. The Playback Video VHS box set has since been discontinued but can still be found in aftermarket channels. As present, it marks the only release of any of the syndicated telemovies in any form.

The full series was released on Region 1 DVD in 2003 as Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Epic Series which was packaged in a limited edition "Cylon head" box set with six double-sided discs. For the first time ever, the original, uncut ABC broadcast version of every single episode was released in a retail format. Extras for the Region 1 release included an episode guide and collector's book, more than three hours of deleted and alternate scenes, new interviews with television series creator Glen A. Larson, a 45-minute documentary on the making of Battlestar Galactica, a featurette on scoring the television series, a featurette on the creation of the Cylons, an audio commentary for the television pilot episode with Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, and Herbert Jefferson Jr., and previously unreleased photos and concept drawings. It also featured the original television movie edit of "Greetings from Earth." This set is available in two packaging styles - one with an oversized "Cylon head" box, and one with a smaller, bas-relief "Cylon head" embossed on the front of the box. The series was also released on Region 2 DVD in 2004 on seven single-sided discs. This set included all of the episodes but omitted some of the extra features.

"Mission Galactica" made its DVD debut in 2008, in a plain-vanilla format without extras but digitally restored to the same level as the series. As of 2009, "Mission Galactica" is only available in PAL Region 4 (R4) format.