Today is my father\u2019s 75th birthday.<\/p>\n
He doesn\u2019t read this blog unless I tell him to, so I can let all of you in on a little secret. In the tradition of Ronald Reagan, he offers Jelly Bellies to the folks who happen to visit his office. So my wild-eyed sister got the idea that all of us siblings would chip in and have 75 pounds of Jelly Bellies delivered to his office.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a lot of carbs.<\/p>\n
On another anniversarial note, yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the premiere of Battlestar Galactica.<\/em> This is a big deal, if for no other reason than I own the world\u2019s stupidest Battlestar Galactica <\/em>bulletin board on the internet.<\/a> I can\u2019t let that occasion pass without some commentary, so I thought I\u2019d take a moment to commemorate the occasion.<\/p>\n People nowadays deride Battlestar Galactica <\/em>as nothing but a Star Wars<\/em> knock-off, ignoring the fact that, as a ten-year-old kid in 1978, that\u2019s exactly what I wanted. So imagine my surprise when I watched the lengthy three-hour premiere and found something quite different \u2013 and far more satisfying. Unlike Star Wars<\/em>, this was an elaborate creation myth \u2013 the untold history of humanity as seen from \u201csomewhere beyond the heavens.\u201d What\u2019s more, they were drawing from a creative wellspring hitherto untapped on network television \u2013 tenets of Mormon doctrine, put on display for the whole world to see.<\/p>\n This disturbed my mother somewhat, as she wasn\u2019t fond of seeing her church teachings dumbed down, science fictionized and broadcast to the masses. But I found it fascinating, if for no other reason than it validated the fact that there were others who believed what I believed, and it gave the proceedings more heft than they would have had otherwise.<\/p>\n Fans of the cheap bastardization of Galactica<\/em> that now airs on the SciFi Channel ritually denigrate the original series upon which it is based, yet all of GINO’s best moments have been lifted from its source material, which had a vast potential that remains forever unrealized. (GINO=Galactica In Name Only.) Sure, the hairstyles are disco and some of the dramatic conventions seem a little creaky with age, but the central premise remains as vibrant today as it was 30 years ago. My children have all watched the entire series, and the pilot episode, along with \u201cLost Planet of the Gods,\u201d \u201cLiving Legend,\u201d \u201cWar of the Gods\u201d and \u201cThe Hand of God\u201d hold up surprisingly well. (Stay away from \u201cGreetings from Earth,\u201d though. Hector and Vector make me itch.)<\/p>\n What\u2019s most interesting is how realistic the pre-CGI special effects are. They recycled the same shots over and over and over again through the course of the series, but they\u2019re actually pretty impressive shots. An undertaking of Galactica\u2019s<\/em> scope has not been seen on network television before or since.<\/p>\n All of my school friends watched the first few episodes of Galactica<\/em>, but they lost interest halfway through the season. My friend Philip, who I\u2019ve mentioned on this blog, convinced me that I was wasting my time and that I should be listening to Dr. Demento on the radio instead. So I checked out sometime after Hector and Vector, only to be disappointed by hearing \u201cFishheads\u201d every week instead of getting my Galactica<\/em> fix. So I returned to the Galactica<\/em> fold in time to see the glorious final episode, and then to be crushed by the news that the series, which had been once hailed as the sure-fire hit of the season, was being ignominiously cancelled.<\/p>\n The following year, my mom served as the Den Mother for my Cub Scout pack, and she arranged for a group visit to the Universal Studios special effects studio to see them doing work on Galactica<\/em> creator\/Languatron\u2019s bane Glen Larson\u2019s lesser follow-up project, Buck Rogers<\/em>. We watched disinterestedly as they took a series of photographs of a white sphere in front of a black background to be used in the show\u2019s lousy \u201cspace vampire\u201d episode. If you get a chance to watch that episode, don\u2019t. But if somehow you do, know that Stallion Cornell and his Cub Scout buddies were there at the creation thereof.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure how it happened, but I remember talking to the guy giving the tour about my love for Battlestar Galactica<\/em>. So, at some point in the evening, he took us into what I recall as an Indiana Jones-style warehouse, which undoubtedly housed lost television treasures of ages past. He took us to an unassuming wooden crate and then opened it, revealing not the Lost Ark of the Covenant, but the next best thing \u2013 the original working model of the Battlestar Galactica, live and in color.<\/p>\n That\u2019s right, sports fans. Stallion Cornell and the Battlestar Galactica have actually met in person.<\/p>\n I remember being impressed with how huge it was. It certainly couldn\u2019t have accommodated a crew of thousands, but it was probably four or five feet long, which was much bigger than the wussy space vampire ship I had seen a few minutes earlier. We didn\u2019t have long to look, and soon he was boxing the thing back up again, but it was a moment I will never forget.<\/p>\n It was on a summer trip to Utah that I caught the first promo for Galactica 1980<\/em> on television, complete with Lorne Greene in a goofy beard, and my heart skipped a beat. Galactica<\/em> was coming back!<\/p>\n Well, no. What came back was a watery retread of Galactica<\/em> that was almost too painful to watch. But watch it I did, religiously, trying not to make the \u201cdemented\u201d mistake I had made before, hoping that some semblance of the original series would shine through. It eventually did with the \u201cReturn of Starbuck\u201d episode, but everything else was dreck. I was left waiting for the promise of Galactica<\/em> to finally be fully realized sometime in the future.<\/p>\n Well, here we are, thirty years later.<\/p>\n I\u2019m still waiting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Todayis my father\u2019s 75th birthday. He doesn\u2019t read this blog unless I tell him to, so I can let all of you in on a little secret. In the tradition of Ronald Reagan, he offers Jelly Bellies to the folks who happen to visit his office. So my wild-eyed sister got the idea that all ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}