Battlestar Galactica is back! Again? Seriously?

[NeophobiA 1,503]

Universal has announced that it’s moving ahead with a new movie version of Battlestar Galactica


The original 1970s TV show followed the adventures of a fleet of spaceships searching
for a mysterious planet called ‘Earth’ after their home planets got all bombed to bits
by space-robots called Cylons.

Notable mainly for being a knock-off of Star Wars (there was an unsuccessful lawsuit
over it) combined with the some of the odder aspects of Mormon mythology (courtesy of
producer Glen Larson), it lasted a year before being cancelled due to the expense of
the production.

Oh yeah, and they had a robot dog, played by a chimp



It was followed up by the not-at-all-rubbish Galactica 1980, in which our heroes
flew around on space motorbikes and fought THE NAZIS

Not to mention that time they killed a Cylon with a microwave.


This is more something we’d expect to see in Doctor Who.

This, not hugely surprisingly, was cancelled even quicker. But the series has oddly
refused to ever die completely.

One of the original stars, Richard Hatch, so passionately believed in the show that
in the 1990s he wrote spin-off books, and even made his own pilot for a revival: The
Second Coming


This probably slightly over-estimated fans’ fondness for the original show, and failed
to get beyond a few screenings of the trailer at sci-fi conventions.

Then, in 2003, a completely ‘re-imagined’ version was made by the Sci-Fi channel,
and surprised everyone by being (mostly) quite good

It took a more thoughtful approach to the material, with fewer space adventures and
more looking at how people might actually behave after seeing their entire
civilization destroyed.

Not everyone was overjoyed



Dirk Benedict, off of the A-Team, who played Starbuck in the original, was so upset
about his part being recast as a lady that he wrote a weird blog post about how he’d
been ‘castrated’

        Women are from Venus. Men are from Mars. Hamlet does not scan as Hamletta. Nor
    does Han Solo as Han Sally. Faceman is not the same as Facewoman. Nor does a
    Stardoe a Starbuck make. Men hand out cigars. Women “hand out” babies. And
    thus the world for thousands of years has gone’ round.

Which is nice. He should have kept quiet; former co-star Richard Hatch managed to land
a pretty good recurring role on the new show.

And now, just 5 years later, the series is about to reinvented. Again. As a movie

Director Bryan Singer was linked to the project - he’d been involved with *another*
mooted TV version in the early 2000s that got as far as some fancy concept art:



But he’ll probably be tied up with X-Men films for the foreseeable future. However, Jack
Paglen, writer of Transcendence, that new film about Johnny Depp turning into the
internet (or something), has just been hired to script it.

Will he opt for the revival’s style: dark stories of the hidden costs of human survival?
Or are we in for rollocking adventures with time-travelling Mormon space dogs.

One thing’s for sure: all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
And again. And again