Subsequently, when the ILM team was relocated to San Francisco to begin working on Empire, Dykstra was not invited to join them.

That's indeed why they made it very apparent they were robots, so parents wouldn't feel it's overly violent. Buck Rogers was another show that had excellent effects (in season one), and unlike Galactica, they often featured new ships and effects for almost every episode. The theatrical cut ran on HBO for awhile back in '79, presumably because of the Star Wars– Star Trek mania of the time, and is the best of Galactica, if there is such a thing.

But Universal wasn’t interested in such high-concept science fiction until the success of Star Wars made them reconsider.

Titles are original from what I can tell (thankfully not all studios are obsessed with re-doing main titles like Paramount is). Probably tens of thousands of TV episodes of people under the covers supposedly nude and "getting busy" but airing in Primetime. An ensemble cast was recruited with both familiar faces, including Greene ( Bonanza), Richard Hatch ( The Streets of San Francisco), and Jane Seymour ( Live and Let Die), as well as relative newcomers like Dirk Benedict (who would later star in The A-Team) and Rick Springfield (years before General Hospital, Hard to Hold, and his career as an MTV pop rock star with hits like Jessie’s Girl). Star Wars knock off though it might be, Battlestar Galactica was a major television event in 1978, and one that many young members of Generation X will never forget—especially those that, having been wowed by George Lucas’ space adventure, craved more experiences like it. Star Wars used similar methods of mounting the ships on rods but they used mattes and bluescreen of course, which sometimes resulted in obvious matte boxes around objects in some shots.

And we’d like to dedicate the piece to the memory of director Richard Donner, without whom the film would not be possible. Yet with the help of a human named Baltar (John Colicos), the Cylons have approached humanity with an offer of peace. But nudity was absolutely off-limits for the networks, with maybe some extremely rare exceptions where somebody tried to push the envelope.

For its theatrical release, the 148-minute pilot film (which aired on ABC TV on September 17, 1978) was edited down to 125 minutes.That made sense since the original plan was to just film several feature-length made-for-TV movies, but then decided on a full series after some back-and-forth. And for those of you who may be wondering what I’m up to review-wise, I’m currently working on film reviews for the first four Star Trek features, as well as David Lynch’s Dune, and Ridley Scott’s Legend, in anticipation of receiving the newly-remastered 4K (and/or Blu-ray) editions of each from Paramount and Arrow Video respectively in the next week or two.