So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  BARRY VAN DYKE

  Universal, when they did the first season of Galactica, thought it was kind of dark and heavy, which appealed to a lot of people in the long run, but at the time they were thinking, “It’s too much, and we have a young audience.” So they decided, “We’re gonna lighten this up and put a little comedy in it and appeal to kids more than anything,” which appealed to me, because I was doing some comedy at the time but I loved to do action stuff. These guys are thrown into a world they know nothing about and they’ve got to walk around and pretend like they fit in.

  We had a wristband where we could punch stuff in and if an Earthling were talking, we could look it up. It was so funny it got to the point where we started to laugh every time we did it. We were working so many hours, twelve, fourteen hours, seven days a week, every single day for weeks, and you get a little punchy.

  So we were on the mock-up 747 for “The Night the Cylons Landed” and a guy jumps up to hijack the jet. He says, “Everyone stay in your seats, I’m taking this plane to Cuba.” But he was Hispanic and correctly pronounced it “Ku-ba.” So I have to repeat the way he said it back to Kent when I punch it in, and I look at Kent and I can see his eyes starting to go and I said, “Ku-ba?” And we both just went to pieces. We started laughing and laughing. It’s late, the crew is tired, everyone just wants to go home, but we couldn’t get through it. Every single time I had to look him in the face and say “Cuba,” we went to pieces. The director finally yelled at us and told us to get off the plane and said, “You guys go get it together. I expect you to act like professionals.” It was so unlike Kent. He just lost it. We just couldn’t stop laughing. It must have taken ten takes before he said, “Just don’t look at me.” And I said, “I’m not looking at you.” And then trying to say “Cuba” and we finally got through that one.

  However, the biggest problem for Galactica 1980 remained ABC’s Standards and Practices department under the aegis of Susan Futterman, the head censor, who some felt took great pleasure in tormenting the series writers in order to maintain the sanctity of the 7 P.M. hour, which was mandated by the government as an educational hour for television at the time.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  ABC made it impossible, since one of their prerequisites for going on the air was going on at seven o’clock, which was an educational, not an entertainment, slot, so the odds were enormous. If we had walked away from it, we probably could have continued to do two-hour movies. The mistake was in not turning down the series order, because if we couldn’t do it the way we wanted to then we shouldn’t have done it all. But there is a certain arrogance in power, and you feel that you’re going to get your way. It turned out that Standards and Practices at ABC was more effective than we were. I guess we just desperately wanted that chance.

  JEFF FREILICH

  We were on against The Wide World of Disney and 60 Minutes, two of the biggest shows on television, and it was the “family hour,” so there were rules that governed content. Galactica 1980 was a spin-off and a continuation of Battlestar Galactica, which was always intended to be more of an adult show.

  ALLAN COLE

  Because it was a seven o’clock show it had to either educate kiddies, or be of value to the general public, like a news program. In episodic TV, you had to have “educational beats” in every episode for the kiddies. So, for example, in the middle of car chase, you’d have to stop and explain the mysteries of the internal combustion engine.

  BARRY VAN DYKE

  It always stuck out like a sore thumb because they had to work it in somehow. In the pilot, Kent starts asking how does the car run and Robert Reed describes in detail how the internal combustion engine works out of nowhere. We used to laugh because every episode had to have a message that was educational for the younger audience. We would take bets who was going to have to give the speech. With the kids who could jump high into the air, we had to describe what gravity was.

  ALLAN COLE

  It was an action-adventure shoot-’em-up, but we were only allowed so many “violence beats” per episode. Susan’s definition of violence included cutting down a tree to save a school bus from crashing. Making a tree a victim was considered a violence beat in her book.

  BARRY VAN DYKE

  The violence was very limited. You could kill a Cylon, I think.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  They were ripping and tearing at every script that didn’t come down to a certain level. They stripped everything out of that show. It was virtually a replacement for The Hardy Boys.

  JEFF FREILICH

  It became a lot more about the Galacticans as the Fugitive: the air force was Lieutenant Gerard and the Cylons were the One-Armed Man. It was all ripped off from the TV series The Greatest Show on Earth, where somebody in hiding would still go out of their way and risk their own freedom and safety to help people in need. The Galactican kids and their adult counterparts would get involved in situations where they could. It was just like The Incredible Hulk, where David Banner—whose name they changed from the comic book because the network thought Bruce sounded too gay—would risk his own safety to help somebody in need using his expertise in those situations to do the greatest good.

  That was certainly true for the Hulk and it certainly was true on Galactica 1980. The Galactican kids can do everything from hit a ball that goes for miles and leap high fences to make amazing catches to help save the community. The way we made the show into a family-oriented, child-friendly show was to show the Galactican children as good samaritans who bring goodness with them to the Earth. But along with it came the baggage from Battlestar Galactica, which is the violence, and the constant ongoing war with the Cylons, who were robotic and not human beings. We got into constant battles with ABC Standards and Practices over the number of violent moments in the show. We were limited to ten. If we shot a tree with a laser gun, that was one. If we shot a Cylon out of the sky, that was one.

  ROBYN DOUGLASS

  Every time somebody would come down to my trailer, I would always think I was in trouble. For some reason, I always feared when a writer or a director or somebody would come knock on my door. One day somebody came down and said, “We need to talk to you about something personal,” and I’m like, “Oh, crap.” And they said, “When you’re in the Galactica uniform, you’re too sexy. You’re too curvy. So, we’re going to change some of your wardrobe.” It was not a question of dieting. I was curvy with a small waist. So, they started dressing me a little more schoolmarmish because of the children’s hour. It fell to me to be the cool teacher.

  JEFF FREILICH

  There is one time I remember vividly where the Standards and Practices person, who was over-the-top in her diligence, would not allow an episode to air. The champion who helped us get the show made is now president of Warner Bros. Television, Peter Roth. He was the vice president of ABC for current television at the time and oversaw Battlestar Galactica. He was a huge fan of the show. He got the show better than I did, certainly, and he would intercede for us when Standards and Practices would come in. He interceded and was correctly claiming that the additional Cylon that got shot out of the sky was just a piece of metal and nobody got injured and kids knew this and she should know that and we saved that episode. There was no thinking in a lot of these decisions. The other thing that kind of frustrated everybody who was working on that show was that it was a capricious approach to determining morality, both for adults and children.

  STU PHILLIPS

  (composer, Galactica 1980)

  They were evidently unhappy with the sampling of viewers they had. They kept leaning toward the fact that they wanted to pick kids up and when they did Galactica 1980 they wanted young stars and a lot of children in every episode. They wanted to see the children of Galactica. It got sterile, it had no heart, it had no balls. It was typical network interference. If they were so smart, when they put on eighteen new shows every season they wouldn’t have sixteen of them flop.

  Standards and Practices’
heavy-handedness was typical of that era of television and not exclusive to Galactica. It was often the result of powerful stars pushing the boundaries of their clout and was often a way to tweak the network suits as well.

  JEFF FREILICH

  There wasn’t a lot of questioning things on most shows in those days, except on Quincy, where Jack Klugman pretty much refused to read any line of dialogue without taking complete credit for it. For whatever reason, Jack thought it was important to say that he rewrote everything, which drove me a little bit crazy. Robert Blake was like that, too. The day after I wrote my first script for Baretta, I got a call the next day from Robert Blake directly, saying, “Kid, I want you to come and work for me.” As I was driving in the Universal gate, driving out was the executive producer, who had hired me to write the script. He yelled back, “Good luck.” And left. I got to the building and Blake took me down the hall and showed me all the empty offices and said, “I got rid of Donald Duck, I got rid of Goofy, I got rid of Mickey, it’s just you and me.”

  I had to write all of the scripts or rewrite the ones that had already been started. Blake would change dialogue on the set and insist on changing it in a way that Standards and Practices rated it as unusable. He delighted in doing combat with [ABC network president] Fred Silverman and Al Snyder, who was the head of ABC’s Standards and Practices. He was renowned for doing things that perpetuated his bad-boy reputation. I was always kind of on his side, because I thought it took a tremendous amount of chutzpah to do what he was doing. No two people share the same sense of values, and I never believed, nor did he, that anybody should dictate any of that stuff.

  In one episode, two jewel thieves were driving around in a fur-lined van, which was very popular in the seventies. It’s a little pimped out. Baretta pulls them over and opens up the back of the van and proceeded to say, “Where did you get the muff-mobile?” ABC hit the roof. Called me to the dailies screening to look at it. They asked me if there was any coverage of the scene and there wasn’t. I told them, “I didn’t write that line, Bob made it up.” And they went crazy. Blake shut down the show by saying, “If you don’t leave that line as is, find a new Baretta.” Which is something he did several times. We would end up in a closed conference room with Fred Silverman. At the time, shows were sent by satellite to air on the West and East Coast separately, so we dubbed it for the East Coast feed so that Fred Silverman could say he got the better of Robert Blake. On the West Coast, it stayed in so Blake could say he got the better of Fred.

  ALLAN COLE

  Glen’s scripts started drifting down to our level, where we’d plug in educational stuff to make the censor happy. Then it became a big part of our job, because we were the guys Futterman went after first. We’d have to defend the undefendable. She’d piss and moan, until finally we’d tell her—“Susan, you’re asking to change things that our boss already told you he wasn’t going to change.”

  JEFF FREILICH

  There was a Halloween episode we were writing where the Cylons get picked up in a car by this couple who bring them to a party where they’re serving Swedish meatballs or something [“The Night the Cylons Landed”]. They thought the Cylons were going to a costume party. So they give them a ride to this costume party, and they get there and the host opens the door and they say, “I see you made your famous meatballs.”

  ALLAN COLE

  Futterman refused to believe that Glen was not up to something filthy. She insisted there was some hidden meaning. Although she couldn’t explain what nastiness she thought Larson was trying to slip past her. Eventually, she made Larson so mad that he took the script back and inserted meatball references willy-nilly everywhere.

  JEFF FREILICH

  Standards and Practices called us up and said that it had sexual connotations. Frank and I looked at each other like, “Are they on another planet? What are they thinking about?” So Frank said, “Well, what if we say wieners?” They said that would be fine.

  For Larson and many of those involved, there was one episode, however, that made Galactica 1980 worthwhile. “The Return of Starbuck” reunited viewers with the spirit of the original series and answered a few questions as to the fate of the character. The episode chronicled the experiences of Starbuck after he crash-lands on a barren world. For companionship, he repairs a damaged Cylon that pursued him down to the planet, and together they face being marooned there. With a nod to the mysticism of the original series and episodes like “War of the Gods” and “Experiment in Terra,” the episode reveals that Starbuck is actually the father of Dr. Zee.

  GLEN A. LARSON

  It was something from my heart. I wrote the simplest little story, and to me it had all the dynamics of some of our biggest pictures. Maybe it sounds egotistical to talk about an episode like it’s something great, but it’s great in my heart. They even wanted to make that a play in England. They wanted to do virtually a two-man show with Starbuck and the Cylon.

  DIRK BENEDICT

  It was a wonderful script that Glen wrote. It was basically me and a girl on a planet with a Cylon. It was only a year after Battlestar had been canceled, so the wonderful thing for me was that all those episodes seemed like years of being chased by Cylons. Here I was having this wonderful show where I built a Cylon to have company; taught him how to gamble, taught him how to cheat, and he ends up saving my life. It was great fun.

  TERRENCE MCDONNELL

  (story editor, Battlestar Galactica)

  My heart goes out to the guys who were on that show. The writers in particular. But, it certainly wasn’t what I would have done. They toned it down and made it G-rated. The only episode worth a damn was “The Return of Starbuck.” And that was the last episode.

  DAVID LARSON

  That was the best Galactica 1980 episode. It was a bottle show, basically.

  MARC GUGGENHEIM

  It was just this constant slow level of disappointment. I wish I could say that I stopped watching, but I didn’t. Quite frankly, I’m glad I didn’t. For one thing, “The Return of Starbuck” is a really great hour of television. The rest of it is like Wolfman Jack and Mike Brady and Cousin Oliver.

  SCOTT MANTZ

  Glen Larson wrote that for the fans, and basically, it was an episode of Battlestar Galactica, just framed with this dream that Dr. Zee had. The beginning of that episode is pretty chilling, when Zee tells Adama about his dream about a great warrior, “Starbuck.” Adama is horrified. He’s just like, “Tell me your dream.” “There was a great battle,” and it’s basically lifted from stock footage and Boomer has to abandon Starbuck and he says, “Starbuck, take care of yourself,” and he speeds off and Boomer goes, “My friend, my dear, dear friend, if I could trade places with you, I would.”

  The next scene is lifted from the original show with the Cylons attacking the Galactica and a scene on the bridge, which isn’t really the bridge because that set was destroyed, where Boomer tells Adama they can’t just leave Starbuck behind.

  Lorne Greene has one of the best scenes that he had to act in. “You think I want to leave him behind,” Adama says. “Someone I love like a son? Our enemy pushes us on and on. It can never turn away or look back.” Boomer just turns his back and walks away and says, “Thank you, sir, I appreciate your honesty.”

  Then, they just put Starbuck on the planet, and he’s so desperate for companionship that he builds a Cylon. It was Enemy Mine, before Enemy Mine was out as a movie. They’re teaching each other. Cy calls him out on cheating at pyramid. Then, this girl, who is she? Is she from the Ship of Lights? Probably. Angela … Angel. She’s caught, and Angela is calling Starbuck out. “Haven’t you just worried about yourself all this time?” Basically, she makes him look inward at himself, to be a better man, to be a better person, to be selfless instead of selfish.

  DIRK BENEDICT

  That was my second-most-favorite experience playing that character [after “The Man with Nine Lives”]. It was a wonderful script that Glen wrote. It was Robinson Crusoe.

/>   ROB KLEIN

  The detonator built for Baltar in “Baltar’s Escape” was later reused in the episode “Return of Starbuck” as the control that turns Cy on and off, and again was put into use in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and can be seen on Frank Gorshin’s belt in “The Plot to Kill a City.”

  ALLAN COLE

  Chris [Bunch] and I thought that Larson finally had just had it and threw up his hands and wrote what he fucking felt like writing. It turned out to be not only the best but the only good episode in the series. It was basically a two-person radio episode. We thought it was Larson’s Galactica 1980 swan song. He knew he was going to get canceled. So there was no reason not to just do what he pleased. It scared the hell out of some of the young regulars. But they were all still fooling themselves.

  Galactica 1980 was canceled after airing only ten episodes. Another time-travel episode was already in production and several days into filming when ABC pulled the proverbial plug on the series. Called “The Day They Kidnapped Cleopatra,” the episode marked the return of the nefarious rogue Council of Twelve member Xaviar, who travels back in time to 48 BC proclaiming he is a god only to return to present-day Earth with Cleopatra as his prisoner after being poisoned in search of an antidote. Although the role was played by Richard Lynch in the pilot, when Xaviar returned he was now portrayed by My Fair Lady and Sherlock Holmes actor Jeremy Brett. The episode was mercifully never completed, and footage from the episode has never materialized on DVD or the internet.

  JEFF FREILICH

  I left Galactica 1980, not at the end, but maybe a few weeks in advance of it. Glen had hired me to work on a show called Battles, starring William Conrad as a campus security chief at the University of Hawaii. He said, “You’re really good at plotting mysterious stories, and maybe Galactica is not exactly right for you, but I think this is. With your medical background and your police-procedural background, you’re going to like this. And you’ll get to go to Hawaii.” He got me all excited about it. At that point, I only witnessed the cancellation of Galactica secondhand, because I got it from Glen and from [producer] Frank [Lupo], who came into my office and said, “Well, that’s that. You got out while the getting was good.”