Battlestar Galactica: "Saga of a Star World" (Glen A. Larson Productions, Universal Television, ABC-TV, aired September 17, 1978)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 8) my husband Charles and I watched “Saga of a Star World,” the first episode (of 24) in the short-lived ABC-TV series Battlestar Galactica, a really obvious knockoff of Star Wars produced by Universal Television. I got interested in this when Fanfare magazine sent me a boxed set of eight CD’s in a five-volume package containing Stu Phillips’s original scores for the Battlestar Galactica show. I’ll also never forget the hype that surrounded Battlestar Galactica when it was first aired, or the bad luck that beset ABC the night the show was scheduled to premiere. It was September 17, 1978, also the night then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter announced from Camp David near Washington, D.C. that he had successfully brokered a peace deal between Israel and Egypt. The opening of Battlestar Galactica was pre-empted so we could see the ceremony and hear a lot of promising talk from the principals – Carter, Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat – about what a great deal they’d made with each other and how peace would finally come to the Middle East at last. That was a really strange lead-in to a TV show whose whole plot is based around a peace treaty that goes horribly wrong and allows an attack that wipes out virtually all of the human race. Set many centuries in the future, Battlestar Galactica posited that Earth had colonized a string of nearby planets in other solar systems, only this had happened so long ago that the people living in these colonies had only dim and distant memories and legends about their true origins. The bad guys in Battlestar Galactica are the Cylons, who have been fighting a war with the colonists for 1,000 years and seek the utter annihilation of the human race (sort of like Hitler with the Jews).

The Cylons are actually robots; they were originally invented by a race of sentient reptiles but, like the robots in Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. (the pioneering 1920 science-fiction play that not only invented the concept of artificial humans but actually coined the term “robots” for them; Čapek took it from the Czech word Robotnik, meaning “worker”), they rebelled against their makers, killed them en masse, and took over. It’s as if George Lucas had decided to make everybody in the Star Wars Evil Empire look like Darth Vader, though I wondered if Battlestar Galactica creator Glen A. Larson had taken the concept from the Daleks of Doctor Who, also killer robots who wanted to annihilate the human race. (Charles cited another possible source for this plot element: Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker series, about a universe whose killer robots, which like the Cylons obliterated the race that created them, seek to eliminate not only human beings but all biological life forms, Saberhagen first introduced this universe in a 1963 magazine story, published his first book using it in 1967, and continued until 2005, two years before his death, so it was still running when Battlestar Galactica was made.) When the “Saga of a Star World” episode begins, the Cylons have sued for peace after 1,000 years of war against humanity, and President Adar (Lew Ayres), leader of the Council of Twelve that rules the various human colonies, has gladly accepted the peace offer. Only it’s a Cylon trap and, as the humans are resting and taking it easy thinking there will be peace at last, they will launch their genocidal attack and eliminate humanity once and for all. There seems to be something uncomfortably ironic about the casting of Ayres, real-life conscientious objector during World War II, as the President whose appeasement policy leads to humanity’s near-extermination, as if series creator Glen A. Larson and casting director Mark Malis were telling Ayres, “You were wrong then and you’re wrong now.”

The one member of the Council of Twelve who sees through the Cylons’ scheme is Adama (Lorne Greene, once again playing a single father with a number of adult kids as he did on his star-making role on the Western TV series Bonanza), who’s also the commander of Galactica, one of 12 “battlestar” spaceships that are the main defense force of the colonists. He sends his most trusted pilots, his son Captain Apollo (Richard Hatch, the only actor who appeared in both the original Battlestar Galactica and its 2004-2008 reboot) and Lieutenant Starbuck (Dirk Benedict), who’s dating Adama’s daughter Lt. Athena (Maren Jensen) but also has, you might say, a girl on every planet. Unfortunately, Starbuck bails at the last minute to give Apollo’s brother Zac (Rick Springfield, whom Charles immediately recognized even though at the time he’d only appeared as an actor on General Hospital; his brief but spectacular career as a singer would come later) a chance to fly his first patrol. The Cylons attack them and Apollo escapes but Zac is killed. The Cylons also destroy all the other 11 battlestars, including the Atlantia, which kills President Adar, as well as virtually all the colonized planets and their inhabitants. The federation organizes a Dunkirk-style evacuation of as many survivors as they can find and fit in on a ragtag batch of leftover freighters that made it through the Cylon attack. The rest of the show is a pretty dreary succession of battles and near-misses as the evacuees are understandably upset that they’re on spaceships without food or water. They call the fleet command and get only evasive answers that what’s left of the federation’s leadership is aware of the situation. The Galactica and the freighters make it past the Nova of Madagon, their only route to safety, by sending advance fighters out to detonate all the mines the Cylons have planted there.

Ultimately they land on a planet called Carillon, where there’s plenty of food and drink. There’s also a major casino whose players seemingly never lose, and a deposit of tylium, the fuel needed for the federation’s spaceships. Previously the federation had set up a tylium mining operation, but Count Baltar (John Colicos, an actor who’d worked with Igor Stravinsky; in 1962 in Canada he and Stravinsky had recorded the five-minute mini-cantata “Babel,” which Stravinsky had written for the multi-composer piece Genesis Suite in 1945), a traitor in league with the Cylons, had falsely reported that the mine didn’t contain enough tylium to be economically viable. Starbuck gets distracted by one of the evacuees, Cassiopeia (Laurette Spang), a “socialator” (a legal but not socially accepted prostitute), only their attempt at a tryst is caught by his girlfriend Athena, who fills the cabin they’re in with steam so he's badly burned when he makes the all-important trip to disarm the Cylon mines. There’s also a single woman and her son, an obnoxiously cute kid named Boxey (Noah Hathaway), whose dog was killed in the Cylon attack on their planet, though the federation scientists make him a robot replica (essentially Battlestar Galactica’s equivalent to R2-D2 on Star Wars) with which he falls in love. Eventually, and not surprisingly, the planet Carillon turns out to be yet another trap; its inhabitants, the Ovions, are in league with the Cylons and have set up that casino where nobody ever loses to lure the surviving humans to the planet so they can be either destroyed or turned into slave laborers to mine tylium for the Cylon war fleet. There’s also a three-being vocal group called the Tucanas, who look like normal Black women with sky-high Afros except that their facial organs are doubled: four eyes, two noses, and two mouths. Starbuck sees them perform in the film’s equivalent of the Star Wars cantina and immediately wants to sign them up and make money off them (though how he can do this in an era in which almost the entire human race has been destroyed, along with almost all of its infrastructure, is beyond me).

There’s also another traitor, Council of Twelve member Sire Uri (Ray Milland), who cuts a deal with the Cylons by which they will voluntarily disarm and prove to the Cylons that the human race (or what’s left of it) means them no harm by destroying the Galactica and all its weapons. The treaty is supposed to be announced at a ceremony in which Apollo and Starbuck are going to be given the highest human award. Once again most of the humans fall for it but Adama sees it as a trap; he realizes that the Cylons mean to get all the human warriors together so they can destroy them in one fell swoop. So he and his second-in-command, Col. Tigh (Terry Carter) concoct a plan to dress as many of the battlestar’s support staff as possible in battle uniforms to fool the Cylons into eliminating the wrong people. Starbuck catches on when he sees people he recognizes in uniforms they don’t normally wear. Ultimately the good guys win when they target a Cylon base star and send it crashing into Carillon, where it sets off a tylium explosion that literally blows up the planet. Then the fleet sets off on its long-delayed search for the legendary planet Earth, the only place in the universe where they can hope to be safe. Battlestar Galactica, seen at this remove, is alternately frustrating and campy. 20th Century-Fox, the production company that made Star Wars, sued Universal for plagiarism, noting 34 points of similarity between Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, though when Charles read that on the Battlestar Galactica Wikipedia page he thought it was rich of anyone connected with Star Wars to sue anyone else for plagiarism when Star Wars creator George Lucas himself ripped off so much of Star Wars from previous stories. Universal countersued and claimed that Lucas had ripped off the Buck Rogers serials from the 1940’s and their 1972 film Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull, who’d worked on the famous psychedelic ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the light show at the end of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Lucas also sued John Dykstra, who’d built the spaceship models for both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, for having left his company, Industrial Light and Magic, to work on Battlestar Galactica. (Dykstra was acknowledged with a producer credit on the show, and when the National Lampoon parodied Battlestar Galactica they called it Battlestar Dykstra.) Charles and I were watching “Saga of a Star World” on a DVD (not Blu-Ray) from Universal, part of a multi-disc box containing the full initial run of the show (24 episodes from September 17, 1978 to April 29, 1979). It presented the show in the original 4:3 TV aspect ratio (not the cropped 16:9 widescreen version that was briefly released as a theatrical movie), and it was a lousy transfer. Some scenes looked relatively clear but others were intensely grainy, and it also didn’t help that the soundtrack was mono (Battlestar Galactica was made at the dawn of the stereo TV era) and that Stu Phillips’s score was muddy and mixed far too softly. Phillips’s score, the main reason I was watching this (I had received a five-volume, eight-CD boxed set of the music from Intrada Records via Fanfare for review purposes), was about what you’d expect. In a project that from the get-go was intended as a knock-off of Star Wars, Phillips knew that he’d have to go after John Williams’s sound as much as possible. He responded with lots of loud brass fanfares accompanied by strings and plenty of pounding percussion, though occasionally the scripts offered him opportunities to write more quietly and lyrically. Battlestar Galactica was a flop on its initial TV run and ABC canceled it after just seven months on the air, largely because it cost so much to produce (Universal spent $8 million on the pilot alone), but it developed a cult following and Universal revived it for a new series that ran from 2004 to 2009 and produced 74 episodes, considerably more than the 24 of the original show.