The Flophouse Roundtable, Inaugural Congress

The chairman brings this inaugural congress of the Flophouse Roundtable to order.

First agendum: Battlestar Galactica.

Chairman's report:

I'm finding it difficult to begin a conversation regarding the current Battlestar Galactica series without going back to the original. And the circumstances of the original seem to require me to go even further back ... all the way to 1966 ... years before my birth.

Sci fi fans know that 1966 was the year that Star Trek began. When I was a kid in the early 1970s, Star Trek was a huge part of the culture of young nerds. We lived and breathed Star Trek. There was a problem, though. It was no longer being made. And, it had already gone through its initial run of syndication, so it was actually difficult to catch on television. Our city didn't have an "independent" television station, so we had to try to tune in a distant one in a bigger city. Mostly we had to make do with things like Space: 1999 and The Six-Million Dollar Man, which somehow failed to grasp the operatic potential of science fiction fantasy.

So, we were hungry for sci fi. Then, in the summer of 1977, we left for a two-month long sojourn in India. And when I returned ... The world had changed.

I was greeted with "How many times have you seen Star Wars?"

First of all, I had no idea what Star Wars was. Second, How many times? I had never conceived of, having once seen a movie in a theatre, going to see it again. Surely it's something my parents would consider wasteful. But every day on the playground, there were new reports of someone having seen this movie 10 times, 15 times, 30 times!

Star Wars triggered a new age of science fiction, and one of the followers in that wave was Battlestar Galactica. Actually, as I remember it, Galactica appeared first as a new series of toys in the Sears Roebuck catalogue. I recall thinking that the spaceships were better looking than the ones in Star Wars. After many weeks and months of expectation, Galactica premiered ...

Almost.

The three-hour pilot was interrupted by President Carter's "malaise" speech. Not an auspicious beginning.

Galactica proved to be one of the most expensive television shows to prove up to that point, but it appealed largely to children, and thus didn't last more than a season. For years after its cancellation, it was my favorite show ever.

A brief sequel, Galactica 1980, was so horrible, that it made more keen the pain of the absence of the original.

Over the years, there was occasional talk of a revival, but nothing ever came of it, so its actual revival in 2003 was very unexpected. The quality of the show was even more unexpected.

I suppose that's a good place to begin the meeting.

The chair recognizes the comptroller, Mr. Reginald Santo Domingo.