The Original Battlestar Galactica

[chrism]

MeTV is going to air the original series starting this summer on Saturday nights at 7:00 EST. I know I'll be watching! Did Estes ever get that Cylon Raider ever to fly? Nope!

[tbzep]

MeTV is going to air the original series starting this summer on Saturday nights at 7:00 EST. I know I'll be watching! Did Estes ever get that Cylon Raider ever to fly? Nope!
Won't do me any good. We only get a partial feed of MeTV until 6:00 pm on weekdays, then it goes to CBS programming at night.

[dlazarus6660]

Does anybody have Monogram Plastic Viper and Cylon Raider model kit?
I have both kits, unbuilt.

[ghrocketman]

I have a built Monogram Colonial Viper somewhere and a built Battlestar plastic kit as well in storage somewhere. Needless to say they are NOT in the same 'scale'.
Never built the Cylon Raider or Cylon 'Base Ship".

I get MeTV 24/7/365 on 2 separate 'local' over-the-air stations. 4.3 Detroit, 12.2 Flint. I think it may be on 38.2 or 5.2 as well in Michigan.

Neat they are broadcasting it, but have owned the complete BSG Original DVD set since 2001 along with the AWFUL "Galactica 1980" as well.
The only episode of Galactica 1980 worth a hoot is the last episode titled something like "Starbucks Return" that originally was supposed to air with the original series.

[astronwolf]

I remember when America rejoiced after that annoying "cute" robot dog got blasted off the program. They cut the scene before they made it to the airlock. Man, that was a hoot.

[Rob Campbell]

Star Trek should have done that with Wesley Crusher!

[astronwolf]

Star Trek should have done that with Wesley Crusher!
He was literally escorted off of the show by a space leprechaun. They froze everything, and he walked off the set "to a much larger world" outside of TNG. We were so proud of Wesley.

[ghrocketman]

Wesley Crusher was one of the BEST characters on ST:TNG.
One of the worst character-wise was the mamby-pamby empath Deanna Troi.

[luke strawwalker]

Wesley Crusher was one of the BEST characters on ST:TNG.
One of the worst character-wise was the mamby-pamby empath Deanna Troi.

Yes, but Deanna was hot and had nice jumblies...

Wesley was just annoying...

Later! OL J R :)

[Randy]

The best comment I've ever heard about Crusher was on Big Bang: "Wesley Crusher, the Jar Jar Binks of Star Trek."

Perhaps, in my next book, I'll do a segment where Rocket Babe goes rogue, crosses multiple dark matter barriers in the Bootes Void and ends up eliminating Crusher AND Mr. Barclay with a Sirius Eradicator. On the way back she takes out Jar Jar as a bonus, before landing on the Galactica and ending Boxy and the dagget.

:chuckle: :chuckle: :chuckle:

Randy
http://www.vernarockets.com
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HHJHOK6
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O14ET8K
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CX1UPCG

[mycrofte]

It really is sad the TV executives had no idea what sci-fi should be. I remember an interview with Gil Gerard saying he wanted "Buck Rogers" to be more serious like Star Trek but they wouldn't listen.

Must have been the same people running Galactica...
___________________________________________

[jadebox]

Back around the time that BSG aired, one of my friends used to complain about sci-fi shows being "kidified." If they did not start out with a kid in the cast, they soon added one. And the stories also became "kidified" (dumbed down). It did happen all too often.

[Joe Shockcord]

...I remember an interview with Gil Gerard saying he wanted "Buck Rogers" to be more serious like Star Trek but they wouldn't listen...

The second season seemed to be a little more serious when they were on the Searcher, but ugh, those robots.

A few years ago, Gerard and Erin Gray had appeared as Buck Rogers' parents in a clip of a Buck Rogers fan film by Cawley Entertainment of Star Trek: New Voyages fame. Sadly, the project fell through. It had intended to replicate the look and feel of the original comic books.

[chrism]

Does anybody have Monogram Plastic Viper and Cylon Raider model kit?
I have both kits, unbuilt.

I used to have those, Moebius Models has many newly tooled BSG models.

[luke strawwalker]

The best comment I've ever heard about Crusher was on Big Bang: "Wesley Crusher, the Jar Jar Binks of Star Trek."

Perhaps, in my next book, I'll do a segment where Rocket Babe goes rogue, crosses multiple dark matter barriers in the Bootes Void and ends up eliminating Crusher AND Mr. Barclay with a Sirius Eradicator. On the way back she takes out Jar Jar as a bonus, before landing on the Galactica and ending Boxy and the dagget.

:chuckle: :chuckle: :chuckle:

Randy
http://www.vernarockets.com
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HHJHOK6
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O14ET8K
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CX1UPCG

Hey now... don't put Reginald Barclay in the same boat as Wesley Crusher...

After all, Reginald Barclay, despite his many faults and foibles, turned out to be an important character and a brilliant engineer in Star Trek Voyager, and redeemed his character, in large part.

I found Barclay's character interesting... Being a wallflower myself, it's nice to see that even in the future, when "everything is perfect", there will still exist (and be acknowledged) that some people don't quite "fit in" and will be awkward socially... Basically, that people will still be people. It made the "Trek future" that much more believable. And, of course, there will still be people who think there's something "wrong" with people that don't quite fit in, are uncomfortable with them, and who want to "change" them. Human nature...

I'll agree that Barclay could be rather annoying at times, but most of that was how the character was written, the situations they wrote for the character. Dwight Shultz was absolutely brilliant in how he portrayed the character-- he made it believable and even created a certain level of sympathy for the character...

Wesley, on the other hand, came very close to being a "cartoon character". While Wil Wheaton did a good job portraying the character, I never felt the writers really knew what to do with the character... he started out as the enthusiastic young teen, boldly going where no teen had gone before, and providing an insight into shipboard life and exploring the galaxy from someone "outside the ranks" as it were... not just a civilian, but a civilian KID... as a high schooler when TNG came on, that was a very interesting idea and created a lot of excitement over having "kids on the ship" so to speak. BUT, they never really figured out what to do with the character... they morphed him into some kind of "wunderkind" (even using the term in one episode) and had him "saving the ship" like some sort of Trekkie comic book superhero... about the most interesting thing they ever did with the character was the episode about the planet Aldea, where the Enterprise children were kidnapped by an advanced but sterile species, and the episode where Wesley is playing ball with some alien kids on their planet and lands in a greenhouse planter and is sentenced to death for violating their laws... (leading to Picards first of many violations of the Prime Directive). Other than that, nothing much interesting (or believable) happened to Wesley (well, other than his "date" with the chick that could turn herself into Chewbacca with googly eyes...)

Anyway, I was glad when they finally wrote Wesley out of the show... they'd kept him around far too long... (although I SO wanted to be Wesley when he was hanging around with a SUPER-HOTT young Ashley Judd (Ensign Robin Lefler) and his character had basically just drifted... His exit to explore "higher planes of existence" was as laughable as most of the other things his character had done in the intervening time...

Later! OL J R :)

[luke strawwalker]

The second season seemed to be a little more serious when they were on the Searcher, but ugh, those robots.

A few years ago, Gerard and Erin Gray had appeared as Buck Rogers' parents in a clip of a Buck Rogers fan film by Cawley Entertainment of Star Trek: New Voyages fame. Sadly, the project fell through. It had intended to replicate the look and feel of the original comic books.

The second season was basically a remake of "Trek"... Buck Rogers on the "Enterprise" if you will-- in this case the "Searcher", instead of "boldly going where no man has gone before", it was "to the stars through adversity" and looking for the "lost tribes of Earth" (explained as aliens having "looted" Earth in the centuries following the nuclear holocaust at the end of the 20th century, and evidently humans getting their hands on the technology that enabled them to leave the ruined radiation and fire and blast ravaged Earth for "greener pastures" among the stars... most of which had "lost contact" with Earth in the intervening centuries since.

The show took such a sharp turn in the second season due to production problems and changes in personnel... and as a cost-cutting measure. That's always been the bane of TV sci-fi space shows... production costs soar due to the heavy special effects... Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica had pushed "stock footage" sequences beyond the breaking point in an effort to reuse shots and reduce costs... so much so that battle scenes of the ships in space were very predictable...

The fact that they turned the show over to Fred Freiberger, whose changes to Star Trek in the third season basically ensured its cancellation, was equally the kiss of death for Buck Rogers. Gone were Dr. Huer, Princess Ardala, Kain, and the threat of the Draconian Empire... in its place we got the irascible and unlikable "Admiral Asimov", the irritatingly geriatric Dr. Goodfellow, and Criton the robot (which should have been jettisoned with the garbage in the first episode) along with a revoiced Twiki (who at least in the first season had the benefit of some comic relief in the form of funny one-liners, his predilection for 20th century slang and jargon picked up from Buck, expertly delivered through the voice talents of Mel Blanc).

Sadly, the writing for the second season was simply AWFUL... What started out fairly promisingly with Buck's encounter with the "bird-man" Hawk, (though that character was always rather funny to me, but the idea was interesting) just degenerated from there... Buck turns into a satyr due to some wolf-virus (why not turn into a wolfman?? I guess that would have been a third season episode if they'd had a third season!) and even gets jealous of the affections Wilma shows for Spock's Dad Sarek, played by Mark Lenard (as some sort of weird alien diplomat) who can remove his head and leave it on desks and rocks and wave it around in the air at will to ward off superstitious alien natives... Buck goes hunting for red crystals to power the ship's warp drive on some planet and ends up finding some hott little alien cutie and a space mummy who tries to kill them, and a number of other wacky nonsense shows...

The only real "jewel" in the second season was one of the last shows, "Testimony of a Traitor", where archeologists on Earth excavating a 20th century military bunker discover a lead box with a miraculously intact VHS tape, which they manage to play back and discover a "message in a bottle" from one of Buck's best friends in the military, who recorded the message in the midst of the global nuclear holocaust that occurred months after Buck's "Ranger 3" spacecraft was lost during its mission... In his message, recorded after the first strike had damaged the bunker and the second salvo was inbound to finish the job, he implicates Buck as the man most responsible for the nuclear holocaust that destroyed the late 20th century world-- he had uncovered evidence that Buck had conspired with a cabal of rebel generals to steal the US launch codes so they could launch a preemptive strike on the Soviets. The Earth Directorate dispatches a war crimes investigator to arrest Buck, who denies the charges, but can provide no evidence to back up his assertions. Dr. Goodfellow comes to the rescue with an "optical engram reader" which can read Buck's subconscious and retrieve memories and play the out on screen for the court members sent to decide his fate to see, but the first two sessions seem only to corroborate the evidence on the tape presented against him. Buck is troubled by inexplicable flashbacks of disjointed images, but cannot explain it, and is deeply troubled that his best friend died moments after recording the tape and securing it inside the box, thinking he was a traitor. Finally, Wilma and Hawk stage a jailbreak for Buck and Wilma accompanies him to Mount Rushmore on Earth, source of the flashbacks he's been having. Once there, they encounter a park ranger who asks if they've come to see the "presidential bunker", and directs them to it. It triggers Buck's memory of a time in the 20th century, months before his ill-fated NASA flight when he was still in the Air Force, when he visited the bunker and conversed with the President, who recruited him for a top-secret mission to expose the cabal of rebel generals attempting to steal the launch codes, which he agrees to undertake, but to be successful, he will have to be hypnotized and brainwashed into actually BELIEVING that he is joining the conspiracy, in order to be absolutely convincing, which of course explains Buck's memory problems and apparent corroboration of his involvement with the conspiracy. Buck returns to the courtroom to "testify" using the projector device to show he was in fact trying to help expose the conspiracy under orders, not participate in it, and is exonerated... Of course apparently the conspiracy was not ENTIRELY exposed or rooted out by Buck's efforts, since about a year later, after Buck's transfer to NASA, the launch of his ill-fated Ranger 3 mission and loss, the very nuclear war he tried to avert occurred anyway...

The last episode wasn't bad, either... a young woman seeks asylum on Searcher amid a group of evacuees and a powerful warship seizes the Searcher and demands her return, alternately freezing and frying the ship to force their capitulation and return of the woman. As it turns out, she's a member of a genetically identical species where all the women look just like her, and all the men look just like the captain of the warship, and the entire species wears individualized masks under penalty of law to conceal this fact and individualize themselves from one another...

Other than that, the second season of Buck Rogers was a COMPLETE failure... Gone were the babe of the week space shoot-em-ups of the first season, replaced with watered down "canned episodes" on the ship with a lot of bad writing and unlikable characters... No wonder it only lasted one more season. With better writing and better characters, the "Buck on the Enterprise" theme COULD have been pretty good... instead we got more Fred Freiberger drivel, like the third season of Star Trek...

As for "Battlestar Galactica", the original only made one season. Like Buck Rogers, it suffered from bad writing more than anything, though there were some pretty original stories and a lot of wheat among the chaff... the casting and acting was pretty much top-notch, and the visuals were stunning, especially for the time, but again, due the expense of special FX, after a few episodes the vast majority of the effects shots of ships and space battles were "stock shots" reused to the point of absolute predictability. Cost cutting efforts seems to have been the ultimate undoing of both Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers, in the end...

Later! OL J R :)

[tbzep]

I just had trouble with the Barclay character because I enjoyed Schultz so much as Captain H. M. "Howling Mad" Murdock. :cool:

[ghrocketman]

Lt. Barclay on ST:TNG was FAR worse than Wesley Crusher and even Deanna Troi.
TOTAL irritant to the extreme.

[astronwolf]

Lt. Barclay on ST:TNG was FAR worse than Wesley Crusher and even Deanna Troi.
TOTAL irritant to the extreme.
The real Lt. Barclay was a TOTAL irritant to an extreme for many crew members. I'd say Dwight Schultz did an excellent job with making that role believable.
-W

[tbzep]

The real Lt. Barclay was a TOTAL irritant to an extreme for many crew members. I'd say Dwight Schultz did an excellent job with making that role believable.
-W
Schultz is a great character actor. "Trash bags! I want some trash bags! Trash Bags! I need some trash bags! I'd like a trashbag please, if you have one. I really could use a trashbag."

.

[Randy]

I have no problem with the actor, he was great on A Team. Barclay could have his moments but they were too far between for me. I thought of him as Gilligan does Star Trek. If I'm in space with him he goes out an airlock.



Randy
http://www.vernarockets.com
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HHJHOK6
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O14ET8K
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CX1UPCG

[ghrocketman]

TRASH BAGS !!!!!!

[mycrofte]

Whoo-hoo! MeTV just started playing the original Battlestar Galactica!
________________________________________________________

[chrism]

The two reasons to watch are: Jane Seymour and Maren Jensen!!

[tbzep]

I only get MeTV from 3:00-5:00 pm central so I won't be able to watch it. The rest of the time the channel shows CBS. I already have 2 CBS channels. Not happy.

[Randy]

The two reasons to watch are: Jane Seymour and Maren Jensen!!

Here's 2 more, Sarah Rush and Anne Lockhart. Cpr.l Rigel and Lt. Sheba


Randy
http://www.vernarockets.com
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HHJHOK6
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O14ET8K
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CX1UPCG

[luke strawwalker]

The two reasons to watch are: Jane Seymour and Maren Jensen!!

A big thumbs up on that one! (and that's not all... LOL:)

OL J R :)

[Rob Campbell]

Here's 2 more, Sarah Rush and Anne Lockhart. Cpr.l Rigel and Lt. Sheba


Randy
http://www.vernarockets.com
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HHJHOK6
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O14ET8K
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CX1UPCG

IIRC, Anne Lockhart is making a guest appearance in an upcoming episode of Star Trek Continues.