11 Facts You Might Not Know about Battlestar Galactica

In 1978, Glen A. Larson launched his ambitious space saga Battlestar Galactica. It was a grand story of a clash of civilizations and battle for survival. But its ratings could not justify its enormous production expense, and the show folded. A brief return in 1980 offered hope, but that came to nothing. For a generation, Battlestar Galactica fans lobbied for a revival and their efforts finally came to fruition in a re-imagined version of the show in a 2003 miniseries, followed by four seasons of storytelling. Here are eleven facts that you might not know about that latter series.

 

1. Laura Roslin’s swearing-in ceremony as the President of the Twelve Colonies was modeled after that of Lyndon Johnson onboard Air Force One after the assassination of President Kennedy.

2. Grace Park initially auditioned for role of Dualla. She was turned down, but told by directors to audition for the role of Starbuck. She did so, but was instead offered the role of Boomer.

3. At 22, Katee Sackoff was much younger than what the directors had in mind for Starbuck, but she aced the audition and was given the role. The decision to make Starbuck a woman although the original Starbuck had been a man was deeply controversial among BSG fans. Dirk Benedict, the actor who played Starbuck in the 1978 series, strongly and repeatedly objected to this change. But eventually he and Sackoff came to an understanding that allowed them to work together.

4. Sackoff has a tattoo of the Latin words bona fiscalia, which means "public property." It’s a reminder to her that she is a role model to people and that this entails a high responsibility.

5. Producers wanted Lucy Lawless to audition for the role of Colonel Tigh's adulterous wife. She turned them down, but was interested in the role of the Cylon agent D'Anna Biers.

6. Paul Campbell, who played Billy, was killed off in the episode “Sacrifice.” Producers wanted Campbell to take a 5-year contract, but he wouldn’t. Since they couldn’t be sure that his character would be in the story in the long run, they decided to kill him off so that they didn’t have to worry about Campbell leaving the show and disrupting the story arc.







(Video Link)

7. Chief Tyrol’s pro-union speech in “Lay Down Your Burdens” is a partial paraphrase of Mario Savio’s 1964 speech at the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

8. At the end of “Maelstrom,” Admiral Adama wrecks a model ship in a fit of rage. This was one of the most expensive scenes in the show because that action was ad libbed. The model ship was a high-quality one borrowed from a museum. Olmos didn’t know this and treated it like a cheap prop -- a decision that had expensive consequences.

9. Bill Adama’s office features a painting of a battle scene. It depicts the First Cylon War and was composed by Ken Rabehl.

10. The deadly accident scene in the Galactica hangar that takes place in the episode “Act of Contrition” was inspired by the terrible fire that almost sank the USS Forrestal in 1967.

11. One minor detail that sets BSG apart from other shows is that the main characters dress like ordinary people in the Western world of the 21st Century. Deborah Everton, the costume designer, made this decision to help viewers relate to the characters easier.

Sources: Bassom, David. Battlestar Galactica: The Official Companion. London: Titan Books, 2005. Print. Storm, Jo. Frak You!: The Ultimate Unauthorized Guide to Battlestar Galactica. Chicago: ECW, 2007. Print. Images: Cecil Stoughton, British Sky Broadcasting, NBC Universal, Propworx, US Navy.


Comments (12)

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Only reason I watched this show was Edward James Olmos and his character, commander Adama. All the other characters were dumb, childish drama queens that would never act responsibly or believably if the survival of the human race was at stake.

I loved the universe and all its possibilities, but the writers tried to be too clever with the cylon plot, and ruined everything IMO.
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According to the propmaster for the show, the story about the model ship is not true; it was just a cheap model that they in fact had several of (and indeed, they sold them at the auctions a couple of years ago). It's a great story but, alas, false.
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@Savya -- no, I haven't read the comics.

I enjoyed the spectacle of it all, even though the plot stopped making sense to me in the final season. But the ending was simply preposterous. It is unfathomable that tens of thousands of otherwise reasonable people would choose to live at a stone age level of technology.
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Yeah... number 11... that was the One thing I really didn't like about the show.. that and that they were so damn American, in the original they made an effort to create a unique culture.
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To all those people who think that they didn't think the show through..esp in the case of starbuck..i guess u have never read the comics about the final five...if u would have read them then u would know how the entire show was brilliantly planned ...n wot is starbucks real deal ...bout pythia.....n wot actually happened 4000 yrs ago in kobol ..n how it all happens over n over again..n esp wot every character was in their previous lives n how it was all meant to be....
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They will all fall prey to the disease. All cavendish bananas are genetically identical--like clones, so there is no genetic diversity, and thus possibility for immunity in some small area, so there is no way to repopulate with resistant bananas. This is the same thing that happened back in the 60's, as mentioned in the article. Banana growers have known that this would be a problem since then, but they did nothing to prevent it. We'll just all have to switch to a new, likely less tasty variety.
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there is no genetic diversity, and thus possibility for immunity in some small area

Hmm. Exactly the thing my genetics prof tried drilling into us when he'd rip into the big corporate farms with patents on genotypes.
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When I was in Bali I got to have little bananas for breakfast every day. They were so much better than our US imports! I'm guessing the cavendish wasn't chosen because of flavor or texture, but some trait that allows it to travel and store well.
The part of this that scares me is that African staple foods are at risk.
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Ah, the joys of a monoculture.

@Homer
A lot of the people who go around saying "Well, look at bananas (or housecats, or corn, or whatever)! Obviously they were created by an intelligent being!" fail to take into account that almost all of the plants and animals humans surround themselves with have been heavily altered by humans. Corn was bred from a type of grass; wild bananas from thousands of years ago were doubtless just as different. We manipulate evolution to benefit ourselves, and this (the banana blight) is the consequence of breeding for ease of use without regard to the dangers of a monoculture.
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Would there be any way to take the wild bananas that the ones we eat evolved from and once again manipulate them to evolve into edible bananas? Or are the wild bananas also affected by Panama disease?
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DOJ: Commercialized bananas are sterilized to reproduce asexually, thus they have no seeds. They were all identical copies with hardly any genetic variations, and were multiplied by artificial planting methods.

(Some wild bananas do have seeds, like how watermelons are used to be.)
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I think I must clear something up with the anti-creationism crowd here. Creationists/Intelligent Design scientists AGREE that the kind of "evolution" talked about here happens (i.e. variations of bananas).

The difference is whether the fruits we have today merely evolved from other fruits from a long time ago, or whether they evolved from primordial soup or aliens or whatever.

By the way: Intelligent Christians don't get their science from Kirk Cameron or whoever that other guy is in the video. I like Kirk, but he doesn't represent the Christians well is the science department.
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Gibson8or has good commentary.

As a practical matter, generally diseases like that affect an entire species pretty uniformly. So while relying on a single cultivar like 'Cavendish' doesn't help, in truth, probably the whole species will be affected. What sometimes happens though, is that a rare individual plants *within* a species exhibit some degree of atypical resistance. When that happens, the resistant plant can be cloned (usually through age-old vegetative means such as cuttings) and then crossed with existing cultivars such as 'Cavendish' in the hope that a variety can be produced that has the good features of 'Cavendish' without the disease susceptibility.

This is a great plan, but it can take decades and decades... such has been the case with producing a American Chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight -- that was introduced in 1904 and has completely decimated the U.S. Chestnut forests.

While there have been some individual trees within the native chestnut species that exhibited some resistance, most of the effort on finding a blight-proof solution has been doing crosses with other species that are more resistant (but otherwise lamer trees). So they start off by crossing a blight-sensitive American Chestnust with a blight-resistant Chinese Chestnut ( a different species) and select the most resistant "children" (seedlings) and then backcross these with American chestnuts. The idea is that in the end you have a tree that is almost indistinguishable from an American Chestnut, but is blight-resistant. This can take 8 or more backcrosses & since chestnuts takes years to fruit (and have seeds) it can take a long long time.

It sounds like something must be needed for bananas. They'll need to cross seeded cultivars with other species that are more resistant, come up with something resistant and then get to work at developing a seedless cultivar thereafter. It will be a ot of work, but the banana market is huge, so they'll have the bucks to do it. Time is time, however...
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