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Olmos to 'Galactica' Purists: Don't Watch
(Wednesday, July 09 03:00 PM)
By Rick Porter
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - Edward James Olmos has a message for die-hard "Battlestar Galactica" fans who want to watch the Sci Fi Channel's remake of the 1970s series:
Don't.
"A person who really has a strict belief in the original, I would advise them not to watch this program," Olmos ("Miami Vice," "American Family") said Tuesday (July at the TV Critics Association press tour. "It'll hurt them. ...
"I know that Sci Fi Channel wants to say that everybody's going to enjoy it. They're not."
The point Olmos, who plays Commander Adama (Lorne Greene in the original) in the remake, was making is that those expecting to see a copy of the first "Galactica's" swashbuckling style won't see it when they tune into to the remake in December. The look of the four-hour miniseries and some of the characters are the same, but the tone is markedly different.
Writer Ron Moore says that in re-watching the series pilot, he was struck by its "extraordinarily dark" premise: Nearly all of humanity, save for the people on the Galactica and a handful of other ships, is wiped out at the beginning of the story.
"You wake up one morning and your world has changed forever, and what happens to you?" Moore says. "What do you do? How do you react to it?"
The original series, Moore says, eventually developed a more escapist tone -- which he believes it probably had to do in order to survive on network television at the time. The new "Galactica" will focus on the question of "What would really happen if your world was destroyed?"
Then there's the fact that Starbuck, first played by Dirk Benedict, is now a woman. Katee Sackhoff ("The Education of Max Bickford") is playing the part of the top fighter pilot and close friend of Apollo (Jamie Bamber, "Band of Brothers").
Moore ("Roswell," HBO's "Carnivale") says the rogue-pilot character Benedict was able to carry off is somewhat played out now, and he was intrigued by how the relationship between Apollo and Starbuck would change if Starbuck were a woman.
"I hadn't seen that relationship played on camera," Moore says. "The whole notion of women in the military, in the U.S. military, is a relatively new idea."
If "Battlestar Galactica" does well -- despite Olmos' warnings to purists -- it could become a weekly series. The principal cast is under contract to continue on a weekly show if the network decides to pick it up.
Sci Fi is clearly hoping people who do have fond memories of the original will watch the remake. The channel's president, Bonnie Hammer, made an appeal to reporters as the session was ending.
"We do hope you position your pieces so that you'll be writing in a way that everybody who does want to watch has to now watch," she said. "Correct?"
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Moore evidence of Hammer's Desperation
