NOTE: Battlestar Galactica returned to television in 2005 as a miniseries and then a TV series! Check out our Battlestar Galactica (2005) page!

Series Description

Galactica 1980 was a 60 minute sci-fi series on ABC and a "spin-off" of the 1978 version of the Battlestar Galactica TV Show. The wandering collection of ships lead by the Battlestar Galactica finally reaches Earth!

Galactica 1980 Cast

Lorne Greene .... Commander Adama
Barry Van Dyke .... Lieutenant Dillon
Kent McCord .... Captain Troy
Herbert Jefferson, Jr. .... Colonel Boomer
Robyn Douglass .... Jaime Hamilton
James Patrick Stuart .... Dr. Zee
Fred Holliday .... Mr. Brooks
Tracy Justrich .... Starla
Eric Larson .... Moonstone

Super Scouts:

Mike Brick
Lindsay Kennedy
D.G. Larson
Ronnie Densford
Mark Everett
Georgi Irene
Michelle Larson

Galactica 1980 Trivia:

The only cast member from the original series to be re-cast in this one was Lorne Greene however Herbert Jefferson, Jr. returned in the second episode and for four others as Colonel Boomer and Dirk Benedict returned in the final episode in a failed attempt to increase ratings and save the show from cancellation!

The main reason for only bringing back a couple of the members of the original cast was to reduce production costs. The show's first episode took place five years after the final episode of the first series so that actors who would most likely demand big salaries could be eliminated. Their disappearance could be explained away by saying that they had died in the past five years, been transferred off Galactica to another ship or by simply not mentioning them.

In a successful attempt to make Galactica 1980 appear to be a big budget show while actually spending very little, the producers used a sequence from the 1974 movie, "Earthquake" to make a scene where Cylon fighters were attacking Earth. They simply took the movie footage of mass destruction taking place during an Earthquake and super-imposed Cylon fighters on top!

In a response to the fact that a certain percentage of the public seems to believe that anything they see on television has some basis in fact, several of the Galactica 1980 episodes ended with a notice stating, "The United States Air Force stopped investigating UFOs in 1969. After 22 years they found no evidence of extra-terrestrial visits and no threat to national security."

While only three actors appeared from the original series, a fourth character was cast with a different actor. Boxey who was Apollo's adopted son on the first series had grown up and become a twenty-year-older Captain Troy on Galactica 1980.

Write-in campaigns by fans to save a series from cancellation are very common today but almost never work. Producers know that a series with ratings below a certain percentage are highly unlikely to recover despite how many diehard fans complain. In 1979 when the original Battlestar Galactica was canceled, however, the producers were shocked by the fans' response to the show's cancellation! They thought that perhaps by making some minor changes and reducing production costs they might be able to revive the show as a profitable series. It failed miserably and future complaining fans would have their complaints about their show being canceled fall on mostly dead ears!

An eleventh episode was being developed when the series got canceled. It would have been a sequel to the tenth episode and its title would have been, "The Day They Kidnapped Cleopatra".