Trivia / Battlestar Galactica (1978)

• Acting for Two: Patrick Mac Nee voices the Imperious Leader and portrays Count Iblis. Baltar points out the similarity. He also voices the narrator heard at the beginning of several episodes.
• California Doubling: The portion of the Capital city of Caprica where the Cylons attack in the opening of the pilot, was filmed at the (then brand new) City Hall and Public Library complex in downtown Long Beach, California.
• Completely Different Title: In Spanish-speaking countries, the series is known as Galactica: astronave de combate ("Galactica: Combat Spaceship"). In Germany, it is called "Kampfstern Galactica" (which arguably cleaves a little closer to "Warstar Galactica" than "Battlestar", though it's a bit semantic).
• Contractual Immortality. For example, in battle Cylon raiders will be exploding left right and centre, but we can be pretty sure all the familiar Viper pilots are coming home safe.
• Defictionalization: Sort of. The real world F-16 jet fighter was being issued into squadron service in 1979. It got the nickname Viper after the fighter in this show.
• Development Hell: The Richard Hatch or the Bryan Singer sequel series; we eventually got the reboot series instead. Many of Hatch's ideas for a sequel series did get adapted into the 1997-2004 novel series, however.
• Executive Meddling:
  • The series was originally envisioned as a series of "special event" TV movies rather than a regular weekly series. The earliest episodes reflect this, since they are two-parters made from scripts originally intended to be TV movies. When the pilot was such a hit and the series was changed to a weekly series instead its production values began to suffer. Stock footage of the expensive starship special effects was overused and episode scripts became more conventional, sometimes obvious re-workings of westerns.
  • Part of the reason why Galactica 1980 was such a disaster. The show was originally supposed to be based around Time Travel stories, as seen in the three-part pilot. The network on the other hand thought that science fiction should appeal primarily to kids, and so forced the producers drop the time travel aspect, have children making up over half the main cast (resulting in the Super Scouts), and give the series a primarily educational focus. The requirement for an educational focus was partially due to the decision to air the show in a time slot that basically required it. Now, if they hadn't decided it was a kids' show, things might have been different...
• He Also Did: A couple of decades before creating the show, Glen Larson was a member of the Four Preps, a vocal quartet which enjoyed some success with hits such as "26 Miles (Santa Catalina)", "Big Man" and "Down by the Station", all of which he co-wrote.
• Screwed by the Network: In its original Sunday night broadcast run, the series got very positive reviews and grew a fan following comparable to Star Trek, leading some to pin it as the next big science fiction universe in a field that was already crowded with the likes of Star Trek and the newly-released Star Wars...and yet ABC chose to cancel the series after its one and only season. Not only did the series, which as mentioned above was forced by the network to be a weekly series instead of the original idea of TV movies where the budgetary demands could have been manageable, get hammered by All in the Family on rival CBS, who moved that series on Galactica's slot with the intention to turn up the heat on ABC, but the network was beginning to lose money because of the show's high budget. However, creator-producer Glen A. Larson claimed ABC deliberately screwed over the series in an attempt to give their then-number-one program, Mork & Mindy, a more favorable time-slot. Regardless, fans were not too pleased with ABC's behavior, and a year later the network tried to redeem itself by green lighting Galactica 1980, but that series ended up being poorly received and canned after just ten episodes, putting the kibosh on the original franchise.
• So My Kids Can Watch: Fred Astaire approached the producers to see if he could appear in a small cameo role on the series so he could please his grandchildren, who were big Battlestar Galactica fans. The producers were so delighted at this veteran star's interest that they wrote a whole episode featuring his character.
• Unfinished Episode: Had Galactica 1980 not been cancelled, they were planning a sequel to "The Return of Starbuck", showing him having a somewhat happier fate. Additionally, both Apollo and the Ship of Lights was to have played an important role in the rest of the series.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Mark Hamill was considered for a part (most likely either Apollo or Starbuck).
  • Don Johnson was up for the role of Lieutenant Starbuck, but he lost out to Dirk Benedict because of his Southern accent.
  • David Hasselhoff and Tom Selleck were considered for Apollo.
  • Mattel Electronics was originally intending to develop an Intellivision game based on the property, but the parent company Mattel couldn't secure the rights, so it simply became Space Battle.
  • During early development of the pilot miniseries, Terry Carter was slated to play the role of Lieutenant Boomer, but broke his ankle while rollerskating with his daughter in Venice Beach. Fortunately, the part of Colonel Tigh had not been secured yet while being slated for a white man. Terry was fortunate to get recast into the part of Tigh while Herbert Jefferson Jr. eventually secured the role of Boomer, helping to add diversity in two black men in science fiction television of The '70s, not to mention having a black man playing a respected military officer of high authority.
• You Look Familiar: The Imperious Leader voice actor is the same actor that plays Count Iblis: Patrick Macnee. This is lampshaded when Baltar realizes Iblis speaks with Imperious Leader's voice and gets seriously creeped out by it, because the voice of the Imperious Leader had been transcribed over a thousand years earlier, implying that Iblis was at least that old.

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