Looking at the new Battlestar Galactica trailers, it’s interesting how times change.
In the late 70s, when the original series aired, it was still the Cold War. The idea of the Bad Guys betraying our peaceful overtures and nuking us while our pants were down was, at least in the popular culture, completely believable.
The new BG, instead, has the “enemy is us” about it. The Cylons are no longer “walking toasters” and aliens, but synthetic creatures, created by humanity — and, now, capable of resembling humanity. A parable for the dangers of modern science? An allusion to humanity creating its own internal enemies in an era of terrorism and WMDs? Take your headline-of-the-week pick.
All that’s certain is that there’s going to be Human/Cylon nookie. Guaranteed.
The Enemy Among us is not, though, a new theme. And while the Borg might have made the Evil Robot Invader meme theirs for decades to come, I’m going to miss those Walking Toasters.
We’ll see.
(via GoaF)
By Your Command.
Darn, I love the old toasters.
Me, too. And Jonathan Harris doing voices. And Patrick MacNee. And John Colicos as Baltar. And …
Okay, I’m not expecting it to be All the Same. And, in fact, the Cylons were pretty inept robots. But I’m concerned that the new series is replacing goofy cliches with trite ones of its own.
Frack. I suspect it’s going to be a load of felgercarb.
The flip side is that a walking toaster just doesn’t have the legs for that red dress…
I always thought of the first BSG, especially the pilot as being about the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was especially made weird when the pilot movie? or one of the first episodes? was interupted by a press conference about the first breakthrough (Camp David, Carter and the Egypt-Israel agreement).
Or so the fuzzy memory reminds me…
Hmmm. Never thought of it in those terms.
The timing is about right on your recollection. I believe the series was ’78-79; Carter was president ’77-80.
Anything they do, anything at all, can only be an improvement on the old series.
Except for young Jane Seymour in the pilot.
I saw the first episode last night. Interestingly enough they decided to go retro on a number of things such as paper printouts and old-style telephone handsets. I would disagree with you in that BG has more to do with Mormon mythology (e.g., the Kobol/Kolob anagram) than the Cold War. In general, I liked it. The Sci-Fi channel has done a good job with their mini-series lately.