Wasn't hard to miss, even if you had a tv and cable; Warner did Drakh-all to promote the show.  It was put out through Warner's syndication network (which was just a syndication package), with little fanfare.  They didn't merchandise the show at all (well, hardly) and JMS basically went to DC Comics, himself, to cut a deal for a comic tie-in.  They got more love when they went to TNT, where they did the tie-in movies and re-ran the series, for people to catch up.  For the first three seasons, it was far more popular in the UK than the US.  I worked for Barnes & Noble and we got UK sci0fi entertainment magazines 9SFX and Starburst), which had great coverage and SFX even put out an episode guide.  They did release some of Christopher Franke's soundtracks, on CD.  Loved his heroic season 5 title theme.

The Season 5 intro is a nice trailer for the previous 4 seasons and gives you a great visual feel for the series, plus snippets of key dialogue.




My favorite "F@#$ Yeah!!!!" moment from the series....




And my favorite quiet, yet powerful statement about the diversity of the human race...

Ask and ye shall receive!

I was already thinking about it and decided to go ahead, after your post.

Do you mean the pilot, where they time travel to WW2, or the start of the series proper?  The pilot is mostly good, with a few quibbles.  Richard Lynch helps it greatly by adding a new villain.  Unfortunately, he doesn't return.  At the time, I thought the show was okay; but, way below the standard of the original (well, of the early episodes).  I tried watching some of it again and my opinion was much worse.

To me, the budget restrictions kind of put a tether on the imagination of the writers and they were stuck with a lot of very generic plots, with a few tech gimmicks.  That's a problem of a lot of sci-fi of the era.  Doing sci-fi on the cheap, without really good scripts , just doesn't work.  If you have really great characters and charismatic leads, you might get by, also; but, that doesn't describe Kent McCord and Barry Van Dyke.  i liked McCord in Adam-12; but, that wasn't a show that challenged him as an actor.  Galactica seemed way out of his comfort zone, though he was good in Farscape.  Van Dyke isn't his father and was supposed to kind of take over the Starbuck role; but, didn't have Dirk Benedict's charm or that roguish twinkle in his eye that helped forgive some hokey dialogue or not so great props.

I like some of the Galactica 1980 episodes; but, it's hit-to-miss ratio is a lot worse than the original.  It felt a lot more like other short-lived sci-fi tv series of the era, like Logan's Run and The Phoenix, rather than the epic saga that the original did (to a point, which lessened over time).

I still think the original BSG would have worked better as a series of movies and specials, with a definite end in mind, with each one progressing the story to a conclusion.  the best episodes are the ones that do that.

That's the pilot three-parter.  We meet the adult Boxey, aka Troy (McCord) and Dillon (Van Dyke).  Boomer is now a colonel and runs the Galactica bridge, while Adama still commands.  James Patrick Stuart is the child genius Dr Zee, whose advances have allowed the galactica to finally reach earth, and who finds the secret to time travel and creates the hover bikes.  However, the Earth's primitive state (relative to the Galactica) prevents it from being a help to the fleet and makes it something they must protect.  They send Troy and Dillon down to Earth to make contact and introduce technology to help nudge Earth along.  A rogue warrior/scientist named Commander Xavier (Richard Lynch) decides that going into Earth's past would advance the planet more quickly and takes a viper back to WW2, where he is aiding the Nazis with the V-2.  Robert Reed was the scientist who Troy and Dillon contact, but who is also contacted by Xavier, who finds his book about nazi Germany and decides that's the place to start.  Dillon, Troy and a reporter, Jamie Hamilton, go back and stop him from changing history.

That three-parter was intriguing, as was a two-part episode where a Cylon ship crashes on earth, destroying all but one Centurian.  he tries to get to a radio station to broadcast a report to his base star, about the presence of humans.  Then, there is the last episode, The return of Starbuck, where we learned what happened to him, as he is marooned on a derelict planet, with a crashed Cylon ship.  he repairs a Centurian and tries to reprogram it, for companionship (in a twist on Hell in the Pacific and Enemy Mine).  They work to build a ship out of the remains of their two destroyed vessels, until they meet a strange human woman, who is pregnant.  The baby is born and Starbuck launches him into space on an improvised ship, after the Cylon sacrifices himself to stop three other Centurians from killing Starbuck and the woman & child.  The child's ship finds the fleet and we learn he is Dr Zee.

Apart from those, the rest were pretty bland, with Colonial children on Earth (where they are stronger and more agile, due to weaker gravity) and attempts to improve agriculture, via special seeds.

Yup; "The Night the Cylons Landed."






James Patrick Stuart as Dr Zee



Flying motorcycles, escaping rear screen-projected bikers.


The awesomely evil Richard Lynch (never saw him play a good guy).

You know, I don't recall Wilma in a green disco uniform.  I recall a red, a blue one (think that was Marla Landers, though) and Purple; but, not that color.

I went for Wilma.  She was leggier and a bit more mischievous, which was sexier (to me).  Sheba was a little too goody goody.  I like Ann Lockhart, but, I would have prefered Jane Seymour to have survived. 

When I watched the original Battlestar Galactica pilot a couple of years ago, I was struck by the stew that Larson concocted:

1) Star Wars was obviously a big component; the population was hungry for more space opera while awaiting The Empire Strikes Back. Also, the lived-in aesthetic rather than gleaming white Buck Rogers corridors.

2) Ancient Astronauts (e.g. "Chariots of the Gods") were big in the 70s, and the opening credit monologue plays up that angle strongly. Some elements come from Greek mythology, and some from Mormonism.

3) It's been noted in this thread that many episodes played out like Westerns, which had been the go-to action setting for TV shows in the 50s. The casting of Lorne Green played into this as well. Star Trek, on the other hand, had been more likely to employ sci-fi writers (instead of writers from the westerns) and thus to explore sci-fi scenarios.

4) The plot of the pilot was, "After centuries of conflict, the two sides are about to sign a peace treaty. But is it just a ruse preceding a sneak attack?" (Spoilers: Yes, it was.) This element seems ripped from the headlines. Lowering of Israel-Arabic tensions were a major focus of United States diplomatic effort in the mid 1970s in the wake of the military actions of the Six Day War (1967) and the Yom Kippur War (1973). It's quite easy to read the pilot episode as a commentary on the Middle Eastern conflict of the day, with the Twelve Colonies of Mankind standing in for Israel. This thread wasn't really followed in the series as a whole. But the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series made religious conflict a key feature of its story line.