Colonial Fleets - Galactica History Book

Well, I should report that there is an oral history book out about the entire production history saga of Galactica.

https://www.amazon.com/Say-All-Uncen...=UTF8&qid=&sr=

The catch is that this book is about everything and that means alas more than 60% of it is about the other entity I refuse to acknowledge the existence of. I would have frankly preferred that this project had been in two volumes so that both eras could be cleanly separated but things being what they are I got the Kindle version and finished the 37% that covers BSG and G80. For that part, it is worth picking up.

The oral history approach clearly utilized at time some archival comments from old interviews which accounts for why there is an occasional quote from the likes of Lorne Greene and Maren Jensen. By and large it appears that the bulk are from fairly recent interviews including Larson and Hatch before their deaths. It looks as if other recent (as opposed to archival interviews) were done with Anne, Laurette, Dirk and Herb. Terry and Sarah Rush are also in there too. But for the most part, it's a lot more production/technical people than cast so if you want everything on the hardware production side, it's there. The story/casting side info is good though nowhere near as complete.

I saw a lot of points I've made over the years validated. Namely that the show's cancellation was entirely the fault of ABC and the fact that ABC was the #1 network at the time and raised the standards for success to an impossibly high level. While someone identified as a Galactica archivist noted the Season 2 Larson memo that infamously called for Sheba to be killed, this point isn't elaborated on in any of the other interviews unfortunately. I think what they don't touch on is that if that memo is really an indication of what Larson might have done, then a S2 of Galactica on those terms would not have been as satisfying as we would have liked. If anything it would have more resembled the second season of "Space 1999" that was so drastically different from the first season.

A LOT of venom is leveled at standards and practices people at ABC at the time in terms of limiting what they could do, and apparently with G80 it really got over the top in terms of contributing to the dumbing down of the scripts. But even so, it's still acknowledged that without Standards and Practices you were still left with a bad idea. Robyn Douglass has some unflattering remarks about Kent McCord.

Carlson and McDonnell interestingly mention that they had done the initial version of the idea of what became Living Legend, only their "Patton in space" was named Jedediah. Then, Larson tossed out their effort and went ahead with his own in which the character was named Cain.

Others I'm sure will for their own reasons want to read the other part of the book dealing with that other program. But those who are like me should still read it for the details and knowledge we'll pick up about our show.