Battlestar Galactica Movie Back On.

[The Old Mixer]

We can routinely accept spacefaring alien civilizations that look like us, talk like us, and share our cultural values...but if they dress like us, that's CROSSING THE LINE!!!!!!!

 

[Christopher]

That may be, but BSG was the wrong outlet for this. It totally works on "The Expanse", because that is actually our not-so-far future, but it's just ridiculous on a show about people to whom Earth is a myth.

I used to wish Moore had ditched the whole ancient-astronauts "Earth is a lost tribe of Kobol" angle -- one of the most embarrassing '70s relics of the original series -- and had the Twelve Colonies be actually settled from Earth, centuries in our future, and trying to get back there in hopes that some civilization survived. I would've found that more believable. Although in retrospect, I understand that Moore's BSG wasn't trying for realism in more than its superficial trappings, that it was actually a magic-realist space opera rooted in cycles of destiny and divine intervention.

Of course, I think like that while my two nephews (ten and eight years old) like Superman with the red trunks better than the current one.

Well, of course. That's just what Superman's costume looks like. It doesn't matter that there's no longer a cultural referent for circus strongmen wearing trunks over tights to protect their modesty; what matters is that we recognize it as Superman's iconic costume. The trunks are as much a part of it as the cape and the boots and the S shield. I don't think it looks silly, because it looks like Superman, and Superman stands for things that are noble and good and important and not at all silly. The problem with DC and Warner Bros. today is that they don't respect that legacy anymore and keep feeling that Superman is something they have to reinvent or work around. (Supergirl does the best job of respecting and embracing the essence of the character, yet still has to tiptoe around Superman himself.)

That sounds like just another excuse for not liking nuBSG. It was 26 years between the two series'. I saw TOS when it aired and loved it as an 11 year old. Then I loved the new series as a 37 year old.

For myself, I was never really that fond of the original. I liked it okay as a 10-year-old, but when I got older, I came to find it very silly and badly done. I recognize the reboot as far more sophisticated and intelligent. And yet I came to dislike the reboot after the first season or two, because it was too self-consciously dark for the sake of darkness, and because it became too obsessed with the "Who's the next secret Cylon?" games that I found the least interesting part of the premise, and because it got tedious that nobody ever listened to Helo and Sharon even though they were always, always right about the best course of action and people should've learned to trust their instincts eventually. And then I revisited the original, and I found that while it was still quite silly and dumb and much of it was awful, I actually found it a lot more fun than the reboot. (If nothing else, it had much better music. I like a lot of Bear McCreary's work on other shows, but I never liked the style he used on BSG.)

 

[Commander Richard]

- I remember fans always trying to shoehorn Earth history into the show but I never minded that the colonials came from Kobol.

Spoiler

And in the end, one could believe that they were plucked from Earth originally anyway.

- I'm not enough of a Superman purist to defend the red trunks.

- Bear McCreary's work on BSG was fantastic. It's another aspect of the show that was a step up from your usual sci fi fare. I'll take taiko drums and choir arrangements over stuff like Berman's wallpaper music any day.

 

[Skywalker]

The humans who settled on Earth being a lost tribe of a larger human community from the ancient past is more fun and interesting than the Colonials being descendants of humans from Earth, IMO. The latter is more plausible (as plausible as humanity developing FTL travel and establishing an interstellar civilization can be, at least), but the former has a more operatic feel to it.

As for Bear McCreary, I'd actually be super excited if he ends up composing the movie. It probably won't happen but I would really love that.

 

[Zaku]

That's the problem some people had with the new BSG. It wasn't what they were used to.

I still remember the reactions from the BSG TOS fans at the time:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/magazine/ron-moores-deep-space-journey.html?_r=0

But Moore understood fans from his "Star Trek" days. He had been a fan and had gone to conventions, and he remembered what it was like to feel that devotion to a fictional world, and what it could make you do. And so when he was invited to appear at Galacticon, the convention Hatch was helping to organize to mark the 25th anniversary of the original show, Moore said yes.

It was held in October 2003, two months before the miniseries was to go on the air, at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Universal City. Moore took video clips from the miniseries that no one had ever seen. "I really had this blind faith," he told me. "All the way through it, I always had this faith that they just have to see it, and then they'll see that it's actually pretty good."

The audience was tense and angry. Apparently a coordinated plan had been circulating to pelt Moore with popcorn. He took the stage and showed his clips. And the crowd booed. ("They booed," Moore recalled, with a kind of cool, blinking amazement. "And hissed.")

Or when Katee Sackhoff (the actress who played Starbuck) received a death threat before filming...

I got a death threat mailed to me. It made me terrified of science fiction fans, which was unfair because 98% of them are fantastic human beings. But there's 2% of them that scare the living shit out of ya.

 

[The Wormhole]

That may be, but BSG was the wrong outlet for this. It totally works on "The Expanse", because that is actually our not-so-far future, but it's just ridiculous on a show about people to whom Earth is a myth.

A shirt is a shirt and pants are pants. I personally prefer seeing something familiar than seeing something fictional and ugly, and normal clothes are likely more comfortable for the actors than spandex jumpsuits two sizes too small.

Besides, what is "plausible" in sci-fi shows stopped being a factor to me long time ago, since most of what we see in any sci-fi outlet, be it a TV show, movie, video game or even a book is often fantastical compared to how actual science works. I watch sci-fi to be entertained, not to see 100% plausibility.

Or to put it another way, there's this quote from Stargate SG-1's Wormhole X-Treme:
"What is this?"
"Fruit basket for scene 23."
"Scene 23 takes place on an alien planet. Do you seriously expect aliens to be eating apples?"
"Why not? They speak English."

 

[RandyS]

The humans who settled on Earth being a lost tribe of a larger human community from the ancient past is more fun and interesting than the Colonials being descendants of humans from Earth, IMO. The latter is more plausible (as plausible as humanity developing FTL travel and establishing an interstellar civilization can be, at least), but the former has a more operatic feel to it.

As for Bear McCreary, I'd actually be super excited if he ends up composing the movie. It probably won't happen but I would really love that.

I'd be fine with that as long as it wasn't those stupid voodoo drums that played in the background early on. Music such as appeared in season four, you know, actual music.

 

[Commander Richard]

Interesting article Zaku.

Moore said he would do it, but he wanted to make some changes. After numerous meetings and a full script treatment, he wrote a two-page memo that laid out the basic tenets of what the new "Battlestar Galactica" would eventually become. "We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera, with its stock characters, techno-double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics and empty heroics has run its course, and a new approach is required," it began. "Call it 'naturalistic science fiction."'

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The humans who settled on Earth being a lost tribe of a larger human community from the ancient past is more fun and interesting than the Colonials being descendants of humans from Earth, IMO.

What I'd like even more, is if BOTH of those were true. Just think about it for a minute...

 

[Romo Lampkin]

The complaint that "The stuff the kids like today is worse than the stuff I liked" has been a constant in every generation throughout human history. If it were remotely true, we would've long since degenerated to incoherent grunting. New things aren't worse, they just aren't what you're used to. Sooner or later, all of us have to realize that we aren't the primary target audience anymore. So we should face it with dignity and respect other people's right to like their own things, instead of stroking our own egos by pretending that our tastes are somehow fundamentally superior to theirs.

I find this argument gets parroted a lot on the internet and it's fairly asinine. Human culture isn't flat, there are peaks and troughs like everything in nature. Furthermore, when nuBSG came out I was 19/20 and I absolutely hated it, I never gave it a chance because I disliked the documentary camera style which I associated heavily with 24 (a series I have zero time for) and heard reports that all the characters were assholes (which I found out not to be true when I gave it a chance). The problem with your argument is that it assumes things remain stable and never change, that everything is all right Jack except given the flood of constant complaints about the shallowness and lack of originality in contemporary corporate owned culture, you couldn't be more wrong.

 

[Christopher]

I find this argument gets parroted a lot on the internet and it's fairly asinine. Human culture isn't flat, there are peaks and troughs like everything in nature. Furthermore, when nuBSG came out I was 19/20 and I absolutely hated it, I never gave it a chance because I disliked the documentary camera style which I associated heavily with 24 (a series I have zero time for) and heard reports that all the characters were assholes (which I found out not to be true when I gave it a chance). The problem with your argument is that it assumes things remain stable and never change, that everything is all right Jack except given the flood of constant complaints about the shallowness and lack of originality in contemporary corporate owned culture, you couldn't be more wrong.

Well, that's not even remotely what I said anyway, so I'm untroubled.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The "documentary" style is one of the things about nuBSG that I did like. I remember someone, might have been RDM himself, who said that they planned all the space shots with the specific knowledge of "who is filming this? Who is seeing this?" I do like that style.

And, yes, I do enjoy mostly the episodes which DID have a lot of space shots. Because pew-pew.

 

[The Wormhole]

I'd be fine with that as long as it wasn't those stupid voodoo drums that played in the background early on. Music such as appeared in season four, you know, actual music.

The "voodoo drums" as you put it were only used in the mini-series, which Bear McCreary did not do the music for. The music for the mini-series was done by Richard Gibbs.

 

[RandyS]

The "voodoo drums" as you put it were only used in the mini-series, which Bear McCreary did not do the music for. The music for the mini-series was done by Richard Gibbs.

I only call them "voodoo drums" because I'm unfamiliar with the actual name. Plus, that's what they remind me of for some odd reason. And I distinctly remember hearing them throughout the series, even if their use did ease off later on.

 

[Morpheus 02]

And then I revisited the original, and I found that while it was still quite silly and dumb and much of it was awful, I actually found it a lot more fun than the reboot. (If nothing else, it had much better music. I like a lot of Bear McCreary's work on other shows, but I never liked the style he used on BSG.)

As for Bear McCreary, I'd actually be super excited if he ends up composing the movie. It probably won't happen but I would really love that.

The theme of the original is grand, for sure, and other parts were great.

But Bear McCreary mad music that sounded "alien"...which for nuBSG, was probably wrong (as it was too modern American). But I would love to hear such music on the nu Trek show...

 

[Commander Richard]

I only call them "voodoo drums" because I'm unfamiliar with the actual name.

They're called taiko drums, which I mentioned a few posts up. And yeah, they were used during the series. They were used to great effect during the cylon attack in the 4th season premiere.

 

[JD]

One of the biggest problems with costumes on sci fi series is that they all too often represent the fashion sense of when they were made and then look dated only a few years later. It is rare that a costume designer does something truly unique that creates a "timeless" sense to the clothing and hair designs in the movie or series. Two of the best, in my opinion, exceptions to this come from Star Trek. The red and black movie uniforms still look good today, and the purple grey jackets over the colored shirts in the later seasons of DS9 and the later movies still look good. The BSG uniforms in the Moore series still look good as well. In part, this is because two of these choices are based on military styles that haven't changed much in the past half century or so.

I actually still think pretty much all of the Trek uniforms still look good, but the civilian clothes in early TNG and TOS on the other hand, could not possibly look more dated.
I guess the main reason I was never bothered by the whole modern/ancient society on BSG is because I'm pretty happy to just go with that kind of stuff if I enjoy the show. As long as it makes sense within the universe of the show, and isn't completely idiotic I'm content. I thought the way the whole thing was presented in BSG worked. To me it really wasn't that different from Star Trek's 22nd-24th centuries or Star Wars' galaxy far, far away. Their universe just happened to look like modern day Earth.

 

[Sgt. Sacrament]

The "voodoo drums" as you put it were only used in the mini-series, which Bear McCreary did not do the music for. The music for the mini-series was done by Richard Gibbs.

Yes, Gibbs wrote the music for the mini-series, and Bear was his assistant on it. (In fact, Bear got an "Additional music by" credit.) Gibb's liner note in the soundtrack CD says that they would work 8 to 12 hour shifts doing the music, and Bear usually got the night shift. Gibbs turned down the job of scoring the show when it went to series, and the job fell to Bear. And a legend was born.

 

[ancient]

I wouldn't mind another BSG. I started watching the original a while ago, and I have to say - I was expecting total cringe from it, but it's actually really good & interesting.

The scifi remake is frustrating, because it seems like a show I would really like, but I actually do get motion sickness from watching it, so i can only watch a little of it here & there. So it's hard to get invested.

For a movie I wouldn't mind a mixture of the old-school melodrama & new age grit.

 

[J.T.B.]

One of the biggest problems with costumes on sci fi series is that they all too often represent the fashion sense of when they were made and then look dated only a few years later. It is rare that a costume designer does something truly unique that creates a "timeless" sense to the clothing and hair designs in the movie or series. Two of the best, in my opinion, exceptions to this come from Star Trek. The red and black movie uniforms still look good today, and the purple grey jackets over the colored shirts in the later seasons of DS9 and the later movies still look good. The BSG uniforms in the Moore series still look good as well. In part, this is because two of these choices are based on military styles that haven't changed much in the past half century or so.

I agree with the premise but not the examples. The WOK uniforms also look totally dated. The dramatic colors and proliferation of pins, buckles, straps, stripes etc. screams '80s overstyling; the more formal look is like the future by way of Dynasty.

The more formal nuBSG stuff just looks made-up; I don't know what military style has a double-breasted shirt with a line of metal buttons up one side but it looks like it came from a high school marching band. The BDU style stuff is OK, but what's happened is field/combat clothing has advanced so much in the past decade that a lot of real stuff now looks more futuristic than the fictional.

The OS BSG uniforms were pretty good, I thought; kind of futuristic with the odd historical or Classical design touch. The civvies, OTOH, were High Seventies.

IMO the bar for sci-fi "timelessness" was set by John Mollo on Star Wars; with very few exceptions (Luke's yellow motorcycle jacket at the end maybe) the costume design doesn't take me back to the disco era. The haircuts, OTOH, not so timeless...