Everybody has this story, that particular piece of popular culture which drew you into Science Fiction and was the gateway drug which led further down the road and ended you up wherever you turned out to be as a fan. For the Tour that was Star Trek, stripped daily on afternoon TV on a distant station which could barely be brought in using a rabbit-eared antenna.
But Star Trek at the time in the mid-70’s, while appreciated, was not ‘mine’ insofar as it was well of its original run when it came into my orbit. People forget that the 70’s, up until Star Wars blew everything up in May 1977, was a fairly barren time for SF and SFTV in particular. But in the wake of Star Wars came an explosion of projects of various degrees of quality, and this included TV.
There’s no question that Battlestar Galactica would not have existed without the kickstart that Star Wars provided, don’t let any revisionist history tell you otherwise.
But you know what? Despite all factors that could have sank it, it wasn’t half-bad much of the time–and even excellent a little bit of the time. And if you were the right age for it, and the Tour was, it was ‘yours’ in a way that any program that had had it’s day long ago could never be.
Galactica premiered 40 years ago today (as of this writing), September 17, 1978. It lasted in it’s original run for just one complete season but was canceled after being deemed too expensive for the ratings it was drawing.
The germ of an idea which Galactica was was good enough to be picked up and tried again in 2003 and was received much better the second time around. Kinda sorta like another series which restarted in 2005 and has been running ever since.
