Saga Of Annihilation!

 

Forty-three years ago almost to the month, I and several other college students in a media-related course were invited to our professor's home for an informal gathering with his family to watch the premiere of the new "Battlestar Galactica" television series on ABC. With the amount of press the show was receiving, coasting as it did on the reception of the wildly successful "Star Wars" film a year and a half earlier, there was a good deal of curiosity as to the show's concept as well as the quality of its production values considering its multi-million-dollar price tag--and our professor, who enjoyed cataloguing such media events and related trivia, had his VCR all set up to record the three-hour special. (There's no telling what he eventually did with all those videocassette tapes he must have amassed by the time VCRs finally bit the dust, but he no doubt enjoyed the run while it lasted.)

Things didn't end well for Galactica as a weekly series (at least where ABC was concerned)--yet Marvel was still able to reap some benefits from the show, the first being an adaptation of part of its premiere, "Saga of a Star World," for magazine publication in its Marvel Super Special publication, which hit the stands a month later.

Like its handling of the Star Wars adaptation in 1977, Marvel was contracted to bring Galactica to comic form before the film's actual release--which meant writer Roger McKenzie and artist Ernie Colón were obliged to take their cues from the production's script in order to craft their story. This time around, however, readers would notice a greater amount of discrepancies between what they were reading and what they'd previously viewed on their television sets, which McKenzie would detail in a letters page column after the subsequent Battlestar Galactica comic book was underway:

Circumstances which practically left the Super Special hanging out to dry. Yet the essence of the show is more or less intact in the work that McKenzie and Colón provide, with McKenzie even making some noted improvements here and there. For instance, what a difference an exclamation point makes in a key scene where Capt. Apollo loses his brother to the enemy, as a Cylon warrior's voice--which would ordinarily sound perfectly modulated at all times--is instead able to ramp the scene's tension level and provide these metal warriors with an air of ruthlessness, the better to convey the Cylons' urgency to prevent the two-man Galactica patrol from reaching their fleet with the discovery that the peace treaty is a sham.

The aftermath of the final attack is fairly accurate, though the order to evacuate the colonies comes from Apollo and not his father, while the setting is different as to Adama's information regarding the mysterious 13th tribe of humans.

Meanwhile, Baltar, the Council member who sold out his fellow humans in a one-sided bargain to set himself up as their ruler, suffered a grisly fate for his betrayal.

As I recall from the premiere (and which my professor could likely attest to), this scene played out just as pictured here--though when the show was picked up for a series where the character of Baltar would continue, the scene was edited for later releases of this episode so that, just as the Cylon guard's knife was drawn, the Imperious Leader halted the strike and instead had Baltar removed for later public execution, only to relent in a later scene and direct Baltar to lure the humans into a well-laid trap.

Five months later, Battlestar Galactica #1 is launched--though with its first issue lifting much of its content from the earlier Super Special (including, to my own disappointment, the issue's splash page), the new material which McKenzie mentions would come in the form of the issue's cover by artist Dave Cockrum, with McKenzie and Colón supplementing previous scenes with revisions to correct the discrepancies mentioned earlier. And so by issue #5, the groundwork has been laid for the book to chart its own course*, albeit with the same destination.

*Marvel's contract with Universal Studios reportedly prohibited any further adaptations of the TV series beyond the three-hour premiere (which comprised the first three episodes).

In contrast with the Star Wars comic, which ran for nine years and 107 issues, Battlestar Galactica fell well short of that mark at just under a two-year run, though churning out a respectable 23 issues at monthly distribution. Compare that to a few other comics of the day which had their own problems sustaining readership:

• The Champions (17 issues)
  
• Doctor Strange Vol. 1 (15 issues)
• Luke Cage, Hero For Hire (16 issues)
• Black Panther (15 issues)
• The Eternals Vol. 1 (19 issues)
• The Eternals Vol. 2 (12 issues)
• The Inhumans (12 issues)
• Silver Surfer Vol. 1 (18 issues)
• Super-Villain Team-Up (17 issues)
• Omega The Unknown (10 issues)

And while McKenzie and artist/writer Walt Simonson took care of the bulk of the book's plotting, there were a few other notables pitching in their talents:

Writers:
Roger McKenzie, Bill Mantlo, Tom DeFalco, Walt Simonson, Steven Grant

Artists:
Walt Simonson, Carmine Infantino, Ernie Colón, Rich Buckler, Sal Buscema, Klaus Janson, Pat Broderick, Jim Mooney, Brent Anderson

So where did the comic leave things? Well, other than an arc involving piracy which was wrapped up, the Galactica and its fleet of survivors are able to plot a direct course to Earth, thanks in part to an offhand observation by a certain warrior whose talent for lucky breaks manages to come through when it's needed.

BONUS! (clockwise) Actors Maren Jensen, Dirk Benedict, Richard Hatch, and Lorne Greene
(Check out that state-of-the-art computer!)