Live from 1978

When it was announced that Battlestar Galactica was coming back to the screen, fans of the original 1970's show were up in arms about the new version robbing them of their childhood memories of lunchboxes and playsets and the show's lovable robot dogs.

All that evaporated pretty quickly, and the show went on to spawn two mostly fruitless attempts to put a new spin on old saws The Bionic Woman and Knight Rider. BW was canceled after eight episodes, I think, and New-KITT has gone gently in to that good Knight. (If you think that's bad, take a look at the episode titles for that show). Now, I myself was irked because it seemed like my favorite show at the time, Farscape, was being canceled to make way for BSG, but, like the fans of Galactica Original Recipe, my ire died pretty quickly upon seeing the finished product.

I was actually surprised to find out later that many of my friends had never even seen the original show (its heyday was a couple years before any of us were born), and some of them even came to the new show years after the original fan anger died down. For them, I dedicate the following run through Youtube:

The original series' theme, as narrated by The Avengers Patrick McNee:



And the only clip I could seem to find of Dirk Benedict's 'Starbuck.' Both Benedict and Original Apollo Richard Hatch came out against the show at first and while Hatch turned around and wound up cast as Tom Zarek, Hatch rebuffed Moore's attempts to get him on the show and wrote a pretty sexist article for I think Dark Horizons or something about the gender-switching on Starbuck and Boomer.



Sadly, Youtube seems to be sparse on fans of the original (either that or there was another TV industry-mandated culling of TV show clips). I found a bunch of clips, though these have been fan-edited to spruce up the special effects slightly. Still: fun stuff.



And one more, the 70's origin of the Cylons as narrated by Lorne Greene's Commander Adama:



Full episodes of the show's first season (it had two, and an ill-fated spinoff, Galactica 1980) are available on hulu. I might actually watch the whole series one day.