Baltar and Lucifer: Overlooked Comedy Duo for the Ages...

>>In reading this review, I wonder if the chemistry between Baltar, the megalomanic human who wants to be Emperor, and Lucifer, the cool and reserved cyborg who wants to learn from him and then out-do him, might not have an echo in the relationship between the Emperor and Darth Vader in the original concept for the "Star Wars" series?<<

Probably not. The SW novelization (Alan Dean Foster, was it?) isn't canon, he was throwing in a lot of stuff to pad out the book. Also: TOG BSG predates "Empire" by more than a year. I think it's just that the thug who attempts to overthrow his boss is a *REALLY* old trope. Satan from the Bible, f'rinstance. I don't think we need to look further than that, as the dude in Galactica is *named* after the dude from the Bible.

>>Considering that "BSG:TOG" was clearly designed to cash in on "Star Wars,"<<

Welllllll.....yes and no. It got on TV as a clear attempt to cash in on Star Wars. The fighter battles were *clearly* to cash in on Star Wars. The Cylons were clearly intended to evoke Stormtroopers (Though far, far cooler than the thing they imitated). The Imperious Leader stands in for the Emperor. Baltar himself is the closest Vader analog. *HOWEVER* the "Lost earth" stuff and the "Ancient Astronauts" stuff and "40 years wandering in the wilderness of space" stuff had nothing to do with SW, and were all unique to TOG. And the 'planet of the week' format in the first 2/3rds of the season were a blatant ripoff of trek. And the Cylon sneak attack was anti-soviet paranoia, so blatant that the Soviet embassy actually complained about it to the state department. Also: I can cite entire episodes that are blatant ripoffs of well-known movies. So *yes* absolutely, totally TOG was a ripoff of Star Wars, but it's a mistake to assume that's all it was. It was a ripoff of everything. It was a great big steaming chowder of knockoffs, and Star Wars were the little oyster crackers.

Also, curiously, Larsen pitched TOG (then called "Adam's Ark") to ABC in 1976. They rejected it.

>>The Cylons probably disappeared from "TOG" due to financial constraints, or maybe the network was getting complaints about the uncomfortably religious overtones of the show (the guy's name was Lucifer!)<<

In large part, yes. They only had so many costumes, and they were *expensive* and kinda' hard/occasionally dangerous to wear (Can't see, falling down stairs, etc) and every time you had Starbuck or Apollo shoot one, the squibs blew a hole in the chrome, or at least smudged it up really bad, so you couldn't use that suit anymore, at least not in the foreground. By halfway through the series, they had to cobble suits together from the undamaged parts of other suits.

Also: the writers were beginning to feel the Cylons were overused, kinda' like the Daleks: if they get beat *EVERY* week, how big of a threat are they, really? I mean, Inspector Gerard and Jack McGee weren't in *EVERY* episode, right? They showed up about every three weeks or so? So they were experimenting with new foes like Count Iblis and the Eastern Alliance. Also, had the show continued, they were going to introduce android cylons indistinguisable from people in the 2nd season opener, an episode called "The Return of the Pegasus."

>>And of course over on that other franchise, things went pear-shaped behind the scenes and the world will never get to see what was really supposed to happen.<<

They'd intended to do 3 or 4 TV movies, several months apart. If that was successful, they'd have done 3 or 4 more the next season, and just keep on doing 3 or 4 a year as long as the ratings held out. If they weren't successful, they'd find Earth in the last 10 minutes of the last movie.

That's high praise indeed! Thanks!

It's a common misconception. I actually thought it was the case myself once upon a time, until someone pointed out to me that no one ever actually says that in the show. For all I know, it's what they intended, and the line was scripted, but never made it to the air. Having re-watched the entire series several times over in the last decade, though, I can honestly say they never say that.

Another thing they interestingly never say is that they're going faster than light. They talk about "light speed" a lot, and "Going back to sublight" and the Terrans talk about "Starspeed" whatever that is, but at no point in the series can we conclusively say that anyone's going FTL, and the whole entire rag tag fleet is pretty clearly going way below light speed.

I always thought that was a big unintentional barn door that could have made for some very interesting retcons - given relativity, it would easily explain why the war lasted a thousand years (a'la Halderman's "Forever War"), yet they meet a guy in the feet who seems to remember pre-war days, and no one finds that remarkable, and of course the one season we saw could easily have taken place over the course of 50 or a hundred objective years.

Another thing interesting about TOG is the deliberately limited number of military ship used. We never see more than 3 base ships at a time, and if they used tankers to send fighters to attack the fleet, that argues that they didn't have all that many base ships to begin with. We can't conclusively say they had more than 5 or 6 total, and the colonies only appear to have had 5 working battlestars at the time of the ambush. When Baltar tells Adama that the Cylon homeworld is undefended, and one battlestar could easily bring them to their knees, he seems to really believe it. Cain seems to have had little problem running a geurilla war at Gamoray for five years or so, as well. All these argue for a very limited number of capital ships on both sides.

With a limited number of ships, and sublight-only travel, the cylon/human game of cat and mouse becomes a whole not more entertaining.

Yeah, though the new Galactica was better in a whole lot of ways, and though I really liked it for a couple years until that last season and a half just betrayed their own story and took a dump on its head, the thing is - even though I was really in to it for a while - it wasn't *my* Galactica, you know? There's a resonance that the originals have with me that their retreads can't have. It's not rational, I was just exposed to the original during a narrow window of opportunity and patterned on it like a baby duck on it's mama.

Cylons were originally to be reptiles wearing armor, but the network decided that was too violent, so they changed 'em to machines at the last minute, and shot an additional expository scene (In the landram, where Boxey and Apollo are talking) after they'd actually finished filming. According to Apollo, the original Cylons were non-humanoid organics from another star system or galaxy or whatever. When they came to Colonial space, they realized that humans were the optimum physical form for a bunch of environments, so they built their machines to resemble us. These organics were not evil, just alien. Eventually the organics died out, but their machines kept going, and eventually went rogue. The reason for this isn't ever explained, but it's implied that Count Iblis was involved in the rogue thing. The extinction of the organics is never explained.

Interestingly, had the show come back, they would have moved to more "Humanoid" cylons, just like the RDM version did, citing the expence of making and maintaining all the traditional cylon costumes, and the difficulty of filming with them. Here, check this out http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Stories_for_Season_Two_of_the_Original...