KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (11)

By: Mark Kingwell
May 5, 2022

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite TV shows of the Seventies (1974–1983).

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA | 1978–1979 and GALACTICA | 1980

If you didn’t live through it when this weekly series debuted in September 1978, the first thing you need to know is that OG Battlestar Galactica resembles the later uncanny political, space-drama iteration (started in 2004) about as much as Christian Bale’s Dark Knight is the same character as the campy Adam West Batman.

The 1970s version sported unexplained Egyptian styling, courtesy the popular boobs-and-muscles kitsch SF/F painter Frank Frazetta (the only time the artist’s work appeared in TV Guide), little shrug capes for the blow-dried fighter pilots, and hulking, humming, shiny evil enemies, the Cylons. No uncanny-valley issues there.

In fact, there ought to be a label for cultural production that is not quite campy, because unselfconscious and played straight, but goofy, even ridiculous, when consumed. George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, released in 1978, is a good example of the un-campy, on the model of zombies as the undead. It has your basic brain-craving revenant apocalypse, some funny lines about its shopping-mall setting, but it doesn’t celebrate its endgame oddness like, say, Army of Darkness (1993) or Shaun of the Dead (2004). John Carpenter’s unsettling They Live, released in 1988, walks the same fine line between dramatic and dumb.

The essential element of the un-campy is a suspension of disbelief on the part of the actors, not the audience. They must play it straight. And nobody alive in 1978 had a straighter face than wise-man specialist Lorne Greene, the Canadian actor who plays Commander Adama. Handsome Richard Hatch is Captain Apollo, while the original Lieutenant Starbuck role went to Dirk Benedict, an actor whose altered name (born Dirk Niewoehner) is itself un-campy.

The original series was popular, thought to rival Star Wars (1977-forever). I bought and assembled plastic models of both the Galactica Viper fighters and the Cylons’ fat-frisbee-style dogfight jets. But the show’s cancellation during the 1980 regroup proved a blessing in disguise for the original premise, namely that the space-born vestige of the human population would battle conscious, organized and deadly AIs. By the time the haunting post-millennial reboot premiered, the scriptwriters were boldly offering a female Starbuck, gripping political drama, and the possibility of Cylons who looked and behaved exactly like humans.

In fact, they might be Cylons without even knowing it, as with likeable Boomer aboard the Galactica, a sleeper agent with false memories. This move was surely enabled by the Nexus 6 replicant Rachel in Blade Runner (1982). “How can it not know what it is?” demands Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford). But how does anyone know who they are? How does anyone know how long they’ll live?

Fun un-campy, uncanny fact: Edward James Olmos plays a creepy blade runner, Gaff, in Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece. Later Olmos would radiate ruthless gravitas as the 2.0 William Adama, master of the Galactica.

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KOJAK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (11)

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