When Starbuck Had A Penis by Paul Waldowski
There are three good things that came out of the 70s: Me, Star Wars, and cheesy TV science fiction. This was a time before Richard Hatch was a fat, naked man on an island. This was a time before everyone was moody and depressed about every damned thing. This was a time when Starbuck had a penis.
Galactica '78 was almost operatic in scope and tone. From Lorne Greene's basso voice intoning deep respect for the Lords of Kobol, to his rock-solid faith in finding Earth, you knew that everything was going to be okay. You see, Galactica gets a lot of crap about their almost immediate partying after humanity was wiped out. I'm sorry, but if I knew Lorne Greene was in charge, I'd cut a little rug myself. It was the 70s. You didn't dwell on the negative vibes; you picked yourself up, dusted yourself off, and went about your way to a bright, new future. There's an inherent optimism in Galactica that doesn't exist in sci-fi today. These days, everything has to be dark and moody, plus all the characters have to be morally ambiguous people with deep, personal conflicts. That's fine for what it is, but we get enough of that stuff in the real world. Sometimes it's nice to escape to a place where the men are men, the woman wear low-cut dresses and lip gloss, people fly cool spaceships, and Jane Seymour dies. The one weird thing about Galactica, other than the feathered hair, was the fact that they kept bumping into humans. The Cylons were supposed to have wiped out humanity, The TV kin to Battlestar Galactica was Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. There are really only two things you need to know about Buck Rogers, and they were both nestled in the tight confines of Erin Gray's spandex outfit. Oh my god. That woman was so hot that the portion of outer space she occupied at any given moment was always above absolute zero. In fact, if you look at the cosmic background radiation, you can just make out the shapely form of Erin Gray heating up her surrounding space. Millions of years from now, that space will become the hottest galaxy in the universe. Universal expansion will cease and contraction will begin as all the other galaxies begin racing toward the beckoning Erin Gray galaxy.
Buck also got a kick out of spouting his cool 20th Century Earth catch-phrases and watching the resulting confusion wash over the faces of people who were genetically superior to himself. I guess you could say he was like John Crichton's dorky older brother, who was always trying to look hip, but just ended up being so pathetic that you were embarrassed for him. Now that I think of it, Farscape was pretty much Buck Rogers done right. Shit, I never really thought of it that way before. Thanks, FTTW! I recently tried watching both shows to see if they held up to my childhood memories of them. Galactica held up fairly well. Sure, the hairstyles and outfits are goofy, but the Vipers still looked cool and the stories were fun, lighthearted romps as the the old battlewagon tripped the light fantastic across the stars. Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict still made for a good heroic duo and their acting chops weren't bad at all, considering what they had to work with. The old Cylons were still menacing, even if they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn and moved at a glacial pace. Still, I prefer them over the newer cylons, who are really just mute, mindless robots.
The scripts for Buck Rogers also sucked more than an old-ass space vampire in a lame-ass casino. You can say what you want about Battlestar Galactica, but it was the Sopranos compared to Buck Rogers. I don't know who they got to write the scripts for Buck Rogers, but the episodes played more like a bad episode of Vega$ than anything approaching a serviceable story. The fact that they were in space and in the future always seemed incidental to the plot. The series became more sci-fi oriented in its following seasons, when they finally hopped aboard a spaceship and Buck befriended Hawkman, an honorable warrior whose wife was killed by some bad people. He was like a proto-Dargo. Again, not as cool as Old Squidbeard, but a rough sketch of things to come. I sometimes wonder if the writers for these seasons of Buck Rogers went on to create Spencer: For Hire, as the plots are often eerily similar. Buck, looking quite a bit like Spencer, would say something like, "Hawkman, there's danger ahead. Why don't you go check it out while I sneak around back?" And then Buck would get the girl in the end while the cool guy who did all the work sat there stewing in his sexually frustrated juices. At least Hawk went on to command a space station, surrounded by hotties and considered a prophet by the natives. Hawkman may have been The Fonz's stuntman once or twice.
Paul really does leave his basement. For Cheetos. |
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