YMMV / Battlestar Galactica (1978)

• Angst? What Angst?: A general point of complaint, which tends to get especially pronounced in the 21st century: for a people whose entire civilization was nearly destroyed, whose population was drastically reduced, who've been forced out of their solar system and their very way of life, and virtually all of whom have lost their homes and many loved ones, and who are still hunted by a race of killer robots who want to make them extinct, the Colonials seem pretty upbeat (and it can come across as "they're upbeat because the actors are upbeat and not really threatened with extinction") and after "Saga of a Star World", those lost in the original attack are rarely really mourned or mentioned. A good deal of this comes down to the general culture of 1978, along with the fact that it was a show made for terrestrial broadcast; the cable revolution was only just getting underway, and network guidelines still tended to be very stringent and angled for an all-audiences approach. Something more in line with the tone of the later version was never going to air in '78 in any event, even if Glen Larson had been interested in doing so.
• Awesome Music: Stu Phillips' theme for the series, complete with prelude in the pilot episode.
• Common Knowledge: It's harder to people who've heard of the show who don't think that daggits are funny robotic creatures like Muffit. "Daggit" is just the Colonial word for "dog", and Muffit was created to be Boxey's substitute for a real one.
• Complete Monster: "Saga of a Star World": The first Imperious Leader is the ruler of the Cylon Empire. Ostensibly drawing up a truce with the Twelve Colonies of Man with the help of Count Baltar, the Imperious Leader instead masterminds an attack on the Colonies, destroying their military and civilian populations, leaving billions dead across 12 planets. In an unpleasant touch, Imperious Leader has the jamming lifted just in time so the crew of the battlestar Galactica is Forced to Watch their civilization be destroyed. Learning of the escape of many survivors, the Imperious Leader orders the extermination of whoever was unlucky enough to be left behind. When the refugees protected by the Galactica land on the planet Carillon, the Imperious Leader draws up a plan to destroy the warship and leave the rest of the humans to be fed on by his allies the Ovions before he's destroyed.
• Evil Is Cool: The Cylons. Cheesy maybe, but there's just something really badass about their designs and voices.
• Fair for Its Day:
  • People complained that the series was a TV rip-off of Star Wars (specifically A New Hope, by its then-lonesome), but it had a number of things over that film. For instance, while A New Hope had a markedly all-white cast with all-male combat personnel, Battlestar had several black characters: Viper pilot Boomer and Colonel Tigh, a senior commanding officer no less. In addition, the series had various female pilots (Caucasian and African-American) recruited for the Viper wings, and Lt. Sheba joins the Galactica's crew when the Battlestar Pegasus is found and then lost. Those characters may seem fairly token-ish from a 21st-century perspective, but it was an advance for TV for its time.
  • Granted, there's little question that BSG was greenlit because of the huge success of Star Wars; the Cylons look quite a bit like stormtroopers, Space Fighter dogfights are common, and all the larger ships are covered with greebles. Plot-wise, though, they are fairly dissimilar. And, of course, George Lucas hardly invented space opera.
• First Installment Wins:
  • The Cylons are sci fi icons on the same level as Klingons and Stormtroopers. However, they're only the villains for the first half of the series. In the second half, they are replaced by the far less memorable Eastern Alliance, though they do come Back for the Finale.
  • Some fans prefer this show to Battlestar Galactica (2003) due to its lighter tone and less convoluted storytelling. And even fans who prefer the newer version usually have no trouble admitting this show is still way, way better than Galactica 1980.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Eastern Alliance soldiers strongly resemble Spaceballs.
  • In "Greetings from Earth (Part 2)", Starbuck is mistaken for a woman. The character would be Gender Flipped in the 2003 reboot.
• Memetic Mutation: "By your command."
• Nightmare Fuel
  • There is a reason why no one has heard of the planet Carrilon. The screaming doesn't help.
  • During the episode "The Long Patrol", no female guards are ever seen in Proteus prison. Though we see a few female prisoners. Which can lead to the rather uncomfortable question of how the guards were able to have children who would grow up to take their place as the next generation of guards...
• Older Than They Think: The show is frequently mocked as a Star Wars ripoff even on this page, but the original script was written almost a decade before George Lucas began developing his famous franchise.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: For a while, Dirk Benedict's comments about his character getting a Gender Swap in the reboot series was criticized as sexist and has hung a shadow over this series.
• Popularity Polynomial: For 25 years or so after it first aired, it was regarded as being a pretty solid show considering the time period when it was produced. Then, following the launch of the reimagined series in 2003, people tended to dismiss the original series as being just silly, campy fluff that wasted the potential of its concept. A few years after the base breaking finale of the reimagined series, however, people started to warm up to the original again for at least being fun to watch and not having a storyline that fell victim to The Chris Carter Effect (it helps that it's much easier to ignore Galactica 1980 than it is to ignore the latter few reimagined seasons). That said, by the time it turned 40, the original series began to fade from the public consciousness completely (as the original fans began to die off in significant numbers, along with a significant chunk of the cast by that point), ending up largely overshadowed by the reimagining.
• Sci Fi Ghetto: The series was largely written off at the time of its release as a hokey attempt to cash in on the popularity of Star Wars.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Isaac Asimov wrote this series off as a rip-off of Star Wars. As did Lucasfilm and Fox. Didn't exactly help that they were kind of right.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Anton, a rare reasonable Council of Twelve member, made a positive enough impression that some fans mourn how he's Dropped After the Pilot.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The first episode hints at cultural differences and prejudices between the former inhabitants of the twelve colonies (specifically, Geminon having its own language aside from "Colonial standard" is a brief plot point, and Cassiopeia faces a lot of hate aboard the Gemini freighter because of her "sanctioned prostitute" profession/status, which some Geminons apparently find abhorrent). Aside from a few throwaway references and the Borellian Nomen later in the series, this is never really expanded upon. It's as if Earthlings from America, China, Kenya, France, Iraq, and so on were suddenly forced to live and work in the same community, but had almost no cultural barriers or difficulties resulting from this.
  • The Terrans were a spacefaring civilization technologically behind the Cylons and Colonials, but with perfectly habitable planets. Instead of leaving them behind, the colonials could have settled there, and tried to uplift the Terrans to their tech level before the Cylons found them. Of course, at this point, the Colonials still assumed Earth would be technologically advanced enough to actually help them against the Cylons, so they were reasonably holding out for it. Oh, little did they know...
• Uncertain Audience: Not quite to the same extent as Galactica 1980, but still. At its core, it's a very serious and quite dark story, with heavy themes such as war, genocide, and religion (never mind Cassiopeia's status as, essentially, a legal, sanctioned prostitute). Despite this, much of it, especially after "Saga of a Star World", plays as a lightweight action-adventure series, with kid-appeal elements such as Muffit the robotic daggit, Boxy's presence period, and plots recycled from classic westerns. Even big fans of the series generally agree that these elements don't exactly mesh well and serve to bring down the overall quality of the series, which is one reason for the re-imagined series fully embracing the darker aspects of the premise, making it more tonally consistent.
• Visual Effects of Awesome:
  • The space battle scenes are praised as being as good as the ones in Star Wars, something that even modern science fiction shows can struggle to achieve. It really is not an exaggeration to say that nothing like the level of special effects seen on the show had been attempted for broadcast TV to that point.
  • The robotic Cylon costumes have also aged pretty well and helped make them into iconic villains.
  • The singers from Saga of a Star World are astoundingly-realized full-prosthetic masks that hold up well even today, even if the four-eye, two mouth effect goes straight into the Uncanny Valley. And of course, that is partly the point.
• Wangst: Some think Sheba's got way too much angst for one character.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: Apparently we will all wear togas and discowear in space.

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