49 Fun Facts About Battlestar Galactica

Who created the original 1978 Battlestar Galactica?

Glen A. Larson, a Latter-day Saint, wove Mormon ideas into the show, including a quorum-like ruling council, a lost thirteenth tribe and marriages 'sealed' for eternity.

Which Bonanza star led the cast of the 1978 series as Commander Adama?

Lorne Greene, Bonanza's Ben Cartwright, played Commander Adama opposite Dirk Benedict's Starbuck; the series premiered on ABC in September 1978.

In June 1978, which studio sued Universal claiming Battlestar Galactica had stolen 34 ideas from Star Wars?

20th Century Fox listed 34 alleged similarities; Universal countersued, claiming Star Wars had itself borrowed from its 1972 film Silent Running and the 1939 Buck Rogers serial.

After how many episodes was the original series cancelled due to high costs and falling ratings?

All 24 episodes aired on ABC in the 1978–79 season; the network tried a cheaper follow-up, Galactica 1980, which lasted ten episodes.

In the 1978 series, who created the Cylons?

An extinct reptilian species built the original Cylons as robot servants before dying out; the reimagined series flipped this, making the Cylons humanity's own creation, the whole point of the show.

Who developed the 2004 'reimagined' Battlestar Galactica?

Ronald D. Moore, a Star Trek veteran, ran the show with David Eick after the three-hour December 2003 miniseries and wrote its manifesto for 'naturalistic science fiction'.

The humans of the reimagined series live on a group of planets known as what?

The Twelve Colonies of Kobol were settled by tribes that left the ancestral homeworld Kobol; the fleet later finds Kobol itself on the way to Earth.

Roughly how many humans survive the Cylon attack on the Colonies?

About 50,000 people escaped in the ragtag fleet, a figure that shrank almost every episode; the running tally on Roslin's whiteboard became one of the show's grimmest recurring images.

Why did Galactica survive the attack when the rest of the fleet was crippled?

It was an old ship about to become a museum, so its outdated, un-networked computers were immune to the Cylon virus that disabled the newer battlestars.

Which actor plays Commander William Adama in the reimagined series?

Edward James Olmos, an Oscar nominee for Stand and Deliver, was Blade Runner's Gaff and Miami Vice's Lieutenant Castillo before taking the bridge.

What was Adama's callsign as a young Viper pilot?

Husker was the young Adama's callsign, used in the 2012 prequel Blood & Chrome, which follows him as a rookie Viper pilot during the First Cylon War.

Before the attack, President Laura Roslin held which cabinet post?

As Secretary of Education she was 43rd in the line of succession; her swearing-in aboard Colonial One deliberately echoed Lyndon Johnson's after the Kennedy assassination.

Mary McDonnell, who plays Roslin, was Oscar-nominated for playing Stands With A Fist in which film?

Dances with Wolves (1990) earned her a supporting-actress nomination; her second, for Passion Fish, came two years later, and she was the First Lady in Independence Day.

Which actress plays Kara 'Starbuck' Thrace?

Katee Sackhoff's casting as a female Starbuck drew a backlash, including a scathing essay from original Starbuck Dirk Benedict; she later played Deputy Vic Moretti in Longmire.

According to a prophecy, Starbuck is the 'Harbinger of Death' who will do what?

The Hybrid's prophecy is that she will lead humanity to its end; she dies, returns inexplicably and in the finale jumps the fleet to a new home before vanishing.

Which scientist unwittingly gives the Cylons access to the Colonial defence mainframe?

Gaius Baltar, played by James Callis, let his Cylon lover into the defence network; a Six later produces photos of him carrying a device into the mainframe.

Which actress plays Six, the blonde humanoid Cylon who seduces Baltar?

Tricia Helfer, a former model, plays the Six model; the copy who compromised the colonies is later treated as a hero by the other Cylons.

Grace Park plays the Eight model, whose copies include Boomer and which other Raptor pilot?

Athena is the callsign taken by the Eight who marries Helo; she flies Raptors for Galactica after defecting from the Cylons.

Which slur do some humans use for the Cylon Centurions?

'Toasters' mocks the chrome Centurions; 'skinjob', reserved for the humanoid models, is borrowed from Blade Runner's term for replicants.

Brother Cavil, the priest played by Dean Stockwell, is which numbered Cylon model?

Number One, the eldest model, was the first built by the Final Five; Cavil erased the other models' memories of them and hides their identities.

Which four of the Final Five are revealed in the season three finale 'Crossroads'?

Tigh, Tyrol, Tory Foster and Anders are drawn together by a song only they can hear; the fifth, Ellen Tigh, is revealed in season four and resurrected in 'No Exit'.

In the first regular episode, '33', how often must the fleet jump to stay ahead of the Cylons?

Every 33 minutes the Cylons reappear, so the crew goes five days without sleep and finally has to destroy one of its own ships; the episode won the 2005 Hugo Award.

Baltar wins the presidency from Roslin by promising to do what?

His pledge to settle the fleet on New Caprica proves a disaster: the Cylons arrive a year later and occupy the planet, forcing the fleet to flee and mount a rescue.

Which second surviving battlestar, commanded by Admiral Helena Cain, joins the fleet in season two?

Pegasus, a newer Mercury-class battlestar, had escaped the attack under Michelle Forbes's ruthless Cain and brought its own brutal history with it.

Which two-hour TV movie about Admiral Cain's battlestar took up the first two slots of the season four order?

Razor aired in November 2007 and got a limited cinema run; it flashes back to Cain's first days of the war and introduces Lieutenant Kendra Shaw.

Which composer scored more than 70 episodes of the reimagined series?

Bear McCreary took over from Richard Gibbs after the miniseries; his score used taiko drums, duduk, erhu and bansuri, and even spawned a ballet in Hagen, Germany.

Which Dylan song, in a Hendrix arrangement, plays over the closing montage of 'Daybreak'?

All Along the Watchtower's notes turn out to be the jump coordinates that Starbuck enters to take the fleet to Earth; the Hendrix arrangement closes the show.

In the finale, the fleet's survivors settle on a new planet and do what with their ships?

The plan is to fly them into the Sun, with the brain-dead Anders wired in as pilot; the surviving Centurions get the last Basestar, and the planet is our Earth 150,000 years ago.

The 'Daybreak' rescue mission is launched to retrieve which child from the Cylon colony?

Hera Agathon, the half-human, half-Cylon daughter of Helo and the Eight, is being studied for how Cylons might reproduce; the Colony sits beside a black hole.

Where are the angelic Baltar and Six walking in the very last scene?

In modern-day New York City they watch news of robots and gadgets and repeat the show's refrain: all of this has happened before, but does it have to happen again?

Which prequel spin-off, set 58 years before the main series, shows how humanity first built the Cylons?

Caprica follows the Adama and Graystone families as a dead teenager's avatar becomes the first Cylon; Syfy cancelled it after a single season in 2010.

Blood & Chrome, following the young Adama in the First Cylon War, was first released in 2012 as what?

It debuted as a ten-part web series of roughly ten-minute episodes on Machinima's YouTube channel in November 2012, before Syfy stitched them into a TV movie in February 2013.

Which prestigious broadcasting prize did the reimagined series win?

A Peabody honoured the show's politically charged storytelling; it also collected 19 Emmy nominations, winning three for visual effects and sound editing.

Which international body hosted a Battlestar Galactica retrospective in March 2009?

The United Nations hosted the panel, on terrorism, torture and human rights, at its headquarters on March 17, 2009; Olmos famously got the room to chant 'so say we all'.

Where was the reimagined series filmed?

Vancouver, British Columbia hosted the standing Galactica sets from the miniseries onward, with the city and its suburbs doubling for the colonies' surfaces.

The reimagined series has no humanoid aliens and its weapons fire what instead of lasers?

Bullets, rail guns and missiles were chosen for realism; the show also deliberately avoided technobabble, one of Moore's reactions to his years on Star Trek.

Which original-series actor returned in the reimagining as the political extremist Tom Zarek?

Richard Hatch had played Apollo in 1978 and spent years pitching a revival; his Zarek became vice-president under Baltar in the new show.

Which ex-ILM effects artist handled the original 1978 series' visual effects through his company Apogee?

John Dykstra, fresh from a visual-effects Oscar for Star Wars, formed Apogee with crew who stayed in Van Nuys rather than follow Lucas north to San Rafael; Universal hired them for Galactica.

Which Canadian actor plays Colonel Saul Tigh, Galactica's hard-drinking XO?

Michael Hogan, a veteran of Canadian film and TV, plays Tigh, who loses an eye during the Cylon occupation and turns out to be one of the Final Five, to his considerable disgust.

Starbuck's actress later played which Mandalorian character in The Mandalorian?

Bo-Katan Kryze had been voiced by Sackhoff in The Clone Wars and Rebels before she played the Mandalorian leader in live action from 2020.

Season four's 20 regular episodes were split into two halves because of what?

The 2007–08 writers' strike halted production after ten episodes; the gap was bridged by the webisodes The Face of the Enemy, and the finale aired on 20 March 2009.

Before Galactica, the reimagined series' developer was a producer on which Star Trek series?

He joined Deep Space Nine in its third season and rose to co-executive producer; he later developed Outlander and co-created For All Mankind.

Time magazine described the reimagined series as a gripping allegory of what?

Time's 2005 critic called it a sci-fi allegory of the war on terror, complete with sleeper cells, civil-liberties crackdowns and a prisoner-torture scandal; the later occupation arc read as Iraq.

Where do the first group of survivors settle in the finale's flash-forward?

Ancient Africa, 150,000 years ago, is where the survivors land among tribal humans; modern humans are shown to descend from the colonists, their Cylon allies and those natives.

What did Glen A. Larson originally call the premise that became Battlestar Galactica?

Adam's Ark was Larson's late-1960s pitch, a Biblical-flavoured space exodus that sat unmade for a decade until Star Wars made studios hungry for space opera.

The 1978 pilot's ABC premiere was interrupted by a special report on the signing of what?

The Camp David Accords were signed that night, September 17, 1978; two-thirds of the way through, viewers cut to Begin, Sadat and Carter at the White House, though West Coast viewers were spared the interruption.

In which sound format was the $8 million 1978 pilot released to cinemas?

Sensurround, Universal's low-frequency rumble system built for its 1970s disaster films, shook cinemas in Canada, Japan and parts of Europe from July 1978, months before the TV premiere, to help recoup the cost.

To save money, Galactica 1980 recycled a Cylon attack sequence from which 1974 disaster movie?

Earthquake's footage of collapsing Los Angeles stood in for a Cylon attack in the opener; the low-budget sequel, set mostly on contemporary Earth, aired Sundays against 60 Minutes and fans quickly abandoned it.

Which British broadcaster co-funded the reimagined series and premiered it in October 2004?

Sky co-funded the show and Sky One premiered it on 18 October 2004; North America waited until January 2005 on the Sci-Fi Channel, though NBC aired an edited miniseries five days before that premiere.