Before I proceed with my long-promised review of the new Battlestar Galactica<\/i> remake series, there’s something I want to get off my chest: I am really sick and tired of the way every article I read about the new show starts out by trashing the original series. What is it about American culture that we can’t complement one thing without denigrating something else? It’s almost like one of Newton’s laws — for every positive word spoken there must be an equal and opposite insult.
\nTV Guide<\/i> is especially guilty of this kind of needless hostility. For example, in next week’s issue, critic Matt Roush begins his comments about the new show’s season ender by saying, “If anyone had predicted a year ago that I’d be hooked on a new version of Battlestar Galactica<\/i> — that cheesily juvenile and insipid ‘Star Wars’ wannabe from the late ’70s — I’d have laughed.”<\/p>\n
That sort of remark is all too common in the press on Neo-G, and it really pisses me off.<\/p>\n
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For one thing, the original Battlestar<\/i> (Paleo-G?) was not<\/i> a Star Wars<\/i> rip-off, despite what most people seem to think. Yes, there are some superficial similarities between the two, but they really don’t mean much in my book. Consider two very important facts. First, Galactica<\/i> was in the development stage well before Star Wars<\/i> hit the movie theaters. It’s just a coincidence that two big space-opera projects were in the works at about the same time. (A new Star Trek<\/i> series was under development then as well, but nobody accuses that project — which eventually morphed into Star Trek: The Motion Picture<\/i> — of being a rip-off. For whatever reason, pop culture in the mid-70s was just naturally drifting toward adventures set in space.)<\/p>\n
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, George Lucas and 20th Century Fox lost a lawsuit against Glen Larson and Universal because they couldn’t legally prove their accusations of plagiarism. Fox’s attorneys had compiled a long list of plot and visual elements that were supposedly unique to Star Wars<\/i> and which Larson had supposedly copied from Galactica<\/i>‘s big-screen rival. The judge in the case was unimpressed, rightfully noting that most of the cited elements did not correspond as closely as the attorneys claimed they did. If the court determined that Paleo-G was not a rip-off of SW, then that’s good enough for me.<\/p>\n
(Incidentally, there’s an amusing footnote to that story: Universal, which produced Galactica<\/i>, countersued Fox, claiming that Lucas had stolen his cute little Star Wars<\/i> robot, R2-D2, from the cute little robots in Universal’s Silent Running<\/i>. That was an even more ridiculous notion than Fox’s claims — SR’s Huey, Dewey and Louie look nothing like Artoo, for one thing — and I’m not sure the suit even made it into court. However, in an interesting coincidence, it turns out that Galactica<\/i>‘s special-effects wizard, John Dykstra<\/a>, did reuse footage he’d shot for Silent Running<\/i> on Paleo-G, specifically the domed “agro-ships” that are seen in several episodes. And if that isn’t incestuous enough for you, it also turns out that Dykstra worked on Star Wars<\/i>, which to my mind is all the explanation you need for the visual similarities between the two. I don’t think it was a case of copying his earlier work so much as just building on prior experience.)<\/p>\n In any event, it’s not as if Star Wars<\/i> is such an original piece of work either. The plot is basically lifted from Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress<\/i><\/a> with a few Western motifs and some World War II aerial dogfighting thrown in, while the film’s most memorable location — the desert planet Tatooine — bears a striking resemblance to Frank Herbert’s Arrakis, a.k.a. Dune<\/i><\/a>. That’s why I tend to dismiss accusations of artists ripping off one another. Everything is synthesized from something else, so there’s little point to these pissing contests over who borrowed what from whom. Especially in this case when it should be obvious to anyone who’s ever watched the damn show that it isn’t<\/i> about the same things that Star Wars<\/i> is about, once you get past the spaceships and things that go “boom.”<\/p>\n