By Matthew Wharmby mwharmby@amdragon.com
It wasn't THAT bad, for Sagan's sake. Rationales in 'YES', 'NO' and 'INDIFFERENT'
categories as follows.
YES:
1. Any Galactica is good Galactica. Although, if Todd Moyer's really going to foist
on us walking vipers, I might have to reconsider.
2. The Cylon A-B craft was the baddest-ass warship I have ever seen. So it can be
brought down with a simple prang to the undercarriage, but it's the 600 SEL to the
viper's 300 E.
3. The unnamed anti-gravity ship was pretty smart as well. Much of the budget will
have gone on fitting it out, although rather than 'retaking the planets' as Adama
believed, it ended up basically a crop duster. Did like the shameless bite of 'Close
Encounters', that was a nice touch. Though it could have done with the alien jam
session that made that movie so special, perhaps with Adama on low notes and Dr Zee
as soprano.
4. They still had Stu Phillips on music duties, I think - the music was well up to
standard, and still over and above the non-orchestral drear of today's episodics.
The 'Goodbye, Starbuck...I love you... we all love you' theme of 'Return of Starbuck'
really tugs at the old heartstrings. (Although it lacks when used again as the
backdrop for a crappy Ford Econoline van inching slowly up the mountains with nasty
ol' Mr Stockton on board, who has to be thankfully silenced with the familiar stun
burst).
5. Mean old industrialist Stockton as good as soiling his drawers upon visiting same
ship. '...Not my boy... not Jimmy!'
6. Dillon's lines 'The glory of the universe is intelligence' lines are hysterical.
Barry van Dyke was camping them up too, you could see the roll in his eyes.
7. Some personal parallels with my own life; having emigrated to the offending region
myself (though from London, not Caprica), I was eventually as disappointed with
Southern California as the Galacticans were with Earth as a whole. The locals were
nice and meant well, but it just seemed too, well, primitive. I got to go home
though. (Thanks to Eric Paddon's fantastic stories, Our Fallen Heroes can, and have!)
8. Dr Zee is English. (Nuff said!) A decade and a half later I became a big All My
Children junkie, on which Patrick Stuart played a large part round about the turn of
the decade. The lovely posh choirboy accent had completely gone (and it was starting
to slip in 1980, there was a lot of mid-Atlantic in there!). I was starting to sound
the same at one point. A point to note; if the series had been picked up, what would
they have done when Dr Zee's voice broke?
9. The bikes were cool. Even when they flew. I've often thought of customising my
bike with a few chunks of fibreglass. Would help if I had a bike, of course.
10. Ditto the wrist computrons, even though they were big enough to break a skull if
swung in anger. (Wonder if Dr Zee was actually an alter ego for Bill Gates, another
brainbox nerd that everybody hates? This would account for Microsoft CE)
11. Dr Zee's conference chamber was very swish. Think about it - all those TVs? A
teenage boy's dream. I want my bedroom to be like that (although obviously with a bed
somewhere amid all those tellies).
12. I adored Angela. I always get the 'likeable, but a little on the loony side' ones
as it is. Best of all, all the cachet of having knocked someone up but without the
paternity suit! (Or child support, it appears. It's all Starbuck's fault that Dr Zee
is so well ... odd).
13. Two words. Gloria Alonso. (I think I'd be a little more grateful than a kiss on
the cheek if someone got me a racehorse for a present! After all, you've all heard
the one about the farmer's daughter!) Ana Alicia is STILL fine.
14. Xaviar was no Baltar, but he would have to do. I liked the way that circumstances
forced him to be played by two actors; Richard Lynch's psychopathic nastiness and
dreadful skin versus Jeremy Brett's effete slyness).
NO:
1. Conquest of the Earth. This was the first time I ever saw G:80; it reached the UK
on April 7th, 1984, after which the series followed. I thought it was pretty good
(going on the 'Any Galactica is Good Galactica' premise - there was so little of it
after all!), but obviously not a patch on the real thing. The use of Baltar footage
was well out of order (unless you account for extra Lucifer voice-overs; he was
sorely missed after 'War of the Gods').
2. Some absolutely god-bloody-awful continuity which makes you pale with shame. For
instance, why has Adama only got his left silver collar tab when conversing with
Doctor Zee? Why does Cy's scanner eye not function for half of 'Return of Starbuck'?
And why do they even repeat Dr Zee dialogue (the infamous 'Since the time of our
defeat, the Cylons have not been idle').
3. Why did Dr Zee's monitors only feature ABC programming? :) And likewise, the same
footage on the Cylon A-B craft (featuring the notorious 'gorilla with deep-sea diving
helmet' B-movie of the '50s).
4. The Valley Cylons in 'Space Croppers'.
'GAG-ME-WITH-A-SPOON-ATTACK-SQUADRON-PROGRAMMED-FOR-LIKE-AGRICULTURAL- SHIP-DESTRUCTIO
N'
5. Cy's human voice was disconcerting. (But couldn't do without it for those snappy
comebacks such as 'I'm going...I'm going...' when ordered by Starbuck to fetch water
etc).
6. Why did they delete the three rifle cartridges from colonial warriors' belts?
Probably somebody whining that kids would want to collect them. (When I was a kid
around that time, we used to collect spent shotgun shells from the woods near school,
when pheasants were in season).
7. The appalling line 'Then they are hardly so advanced that we cannot win' uttered by
Adama of all people, who ought to have been ashamed of himself. Oh, sure you could
win, with thirty yahrens' worth of tinheads stacked up behind you and a planet of the
apes of no help in front.
8. The time travel gimmick. It's a personal thing, but I don't rate time-travel in
sci-fi much; it tends to be used as a bit of a cop-out. Glad they resisted the
temptation after Galactica Discovers Earth.
9. To which end - have you ever seen a German soldier with hair like Troy and
Dillon's? (Maybe in the hippy Bundeswehr). In the real Nazi Germany, that general
whom Xaviar was sucking up to would have spent so much time bastinadoing Our Heroes
(and Jamie, who incidentally doesn't look at all bad under a coal-scuttle helmet)
that there wouldn't have been enough time to launch a V2. (Editor's note: To bastinado means to whip the soles of the feet!)
10. The invisibility schtick was lame - also a corny sci-fi fallback. Not even going
to expand on it, there are too many instances with which to find fault.
11. That scarecrow had more clout than Troy and Dillon squared. (I love the dialogue
in this one, they were really enjoying themselves here - 'That's not a life form!
...'Some type of dried grass.. stuffed in an Earthling's clothing. Why?' and then
Dillon signing off with 'Nice night!')
12. Devoting a whole episode to baseball. Curse if you will my foreign attitude to
this foreign sport, but it bored me stiff. I did think, however, that Starla throwing
a baseball clear over the horizon was quite sweet.
13. Driving along in a rusty flatbed with a cigar butt burning your groceries does
NOT in ANY way compare to multiple squadrons of Raiders and Vipers having it out.
They had no right to use the same music in that scene!
14. The awful, hideous covers of the awful, hideous music playing over the
reel-to-reels at Wolfman Jack's obviously AOR radio station. (If I was Imperious
Leader, I wouldn't have been tuned in that Hallowe'en night - sorry to disappoint
you, Andromus). Come on, guys - even though this was 1980, there was some quite
decent stuff out there. Late P-Funk, the whole Two-Tone ska scene, Prince's second
album and loads of early New York hip-hop!
15. What WAS that blackshirt smoking? The Delphi's being blown to bits by Cylon
fighters (including the A-B craft awkwardly matted into existing footage), supply
teachers Troy and Dillon are hustling more kids onto buses than Scorpio from 'Dirty
Harry' and this Council security guard is grinning like he won the lottery! Did he
even make it off the old tub?
INDIFFERENT:
1. The Super Scouts don't repulse me THAT much. Don't be mean! Glen Larson's kids
needed jobs after all. They played a blinder in 'Greetings from Earth', so why
shouldn't they be cheaply re-used for some greetings FROM Earth?
2. How cruel to lampoon the US military (stifled chuckle!). It wasn't very
imaginative to go straight from poor dimwitted Sydell and Briggs on G:80 to the
A-Team's Lynch and Decker. (and the shortlived third one, who might also have been
called Briggs?)
3. The lads' weapons - lady derringers maybe, but can your .22 fell an oak tree at
fifty metrons?
4. On that note, how did Xaviar get hold of one? He wasn't an Earth plant, he
wouldn't have been issued with one.
5. So did Buck Rogers loan Troy and Dillon some of his spare shootin' irons to plough
Hector Alonso's fields with?
6. And why was Jamie not considered good enough to carry a weapon when she went to
Nazi Germany?
7. There WERE daggits in G:80, to riposte Mark Weller - briefly, when Dillon is
strolling through the Gemini (after thirty yahrens, STILL looking like the South
Bronx), pressing the flesh and going 'We made it' none too convincingly. There are
two of them, to which Dillon chides the kids baiting them 'Easy kids! You'll singe
their circuits!' while wishing he had some firecrackers to put under them like he
used to do back on Caprica with REAL cats.
8. Maybe the real reason G:80 was cancelled even quicker than its superior
predecessor was not that it was sh*t, but that certain matters didn't quite fit into
its new family-friendly time slot of 7 pm on a Sunday evening (still a TV death zone
in my American heyday twenty years on). For example, the strange things that
transpire when two men find themselves alone in a confined space ('The air's foul in
here....')
9. At least some contemporary villains get theirs one way or another - the
military-industrial complex, thick sheriffs, polluting capitalist pigs, durbrained
genocidal robots, rednecks, bullying kids, patronising bank tellers, undertrained
nurses, Nazis, anyone who plays 'Daydream Believer' on a juke box (nice shooting,
guys, even if it was only on stun!), horse abusers, unionised labour, ethnically
stereotyped muggers, people who actually eat meatballs, bad DJs, bikers, Cuban
commies in drag, etc, etc.
To read Matthew's hilarious episode Galactica 1980 episode reviews, click here.