> I miss Apollo, Starbuck, Boomer, Bojay...oh, and the
Not sure. :) Richard ought to have fun when he reads
The reply is from Michael Faries, of the BattlestarGalactica.com and BattlestarPegasus.com websites...two of the best sites I've run across dedicated to that sci-fi television classic.
In answer, I retorted that I'd just have to send him the URL for this area of my site when I've got it up and running, just so he could see how weird we could be back then. Perhaps it was something in the incense they used at Mass that addled our young brains...Perhaps my brain is still addled a bit for putting this story on the 'Net.
So here we go...confessions from Rosary Catholic School in Oklahoma City:
this.
instead.
The Year: 1980
I had just started seventh grade. The first few days, I saw a girl from my class off by herself on the parking lot we used as a playground. Being weird and curious, as usual, I wandered over to check her out.
This was Justine (name changed to protect the not-so-innocent), and in only a few moments, I discovered she'd moved from Kansas recently, and she was into the group Supertramp and loved the show "Battlestar Galactica". Oooh...her mom let her watch that? How neat! Of course she could watch it; why wasn't I allowed?
I finally asked my mom a few nights ago for the answer. She told me that she didn't think the costumes and the storylines were suitable for young girls my sister's and my ages.
Wait a minute...what was wrong with the costumes? Sure, the guys' pants were kind of tight sometimes...
Mom thought the skirts were way too revealing, and the storylines got too violent sometimes.
*Pause* Mom, I think you confused it with "Star Trek".
I received an apology from my mother on that one...
At any rate, Justine gleefully caught me up on all I needed to know about "Battlestar Galactica" those next few days on the blacktop. Sitting on the steps of St. Francis of Assisi Church in our uniforms and knee-hi socks, she told me the story of how the Twelve Colonies were anihillated by the Cylons, about the traitorous Baltar, about the paternal Commander Adama, the heroic Captain Apollo, the incorrigible Lieutenant Starbuck, the tragedy of Serina, how beautiful both Athena and Cassiopeia were...
I was hooked. Even more than before, when I would sneak up to the television while my parents were out of the room and change the channel ever-so-slowly, making sure the channel knob didn't click too loudly. My little sister sat quietly, wanting to see the show as much as I did, but not wanting to get in trouble for turning off "The Wonderful World of Disney", or whatever it was that was showing against it. Sometimes we would manage to see nearly twenty minutes before we heard Mom's footsteps in the entryway, and hear her asking why the channel was changed. "Ummm, it was a commercial, so we wanted to see what else was on."
Really lame excuse, since I was known for having the entire "TV Guide" memorized during those years. And, no---Mom never did buy into it, either.
Along came "Galactica: 1980" (You purists can stop groaning now...it happened, it aired, and I watched it. *wink*) Somehow, this series escaped my parents' scrutiny. In fact, they'd sit there and watch it with us every week. Granted, only Adama seemed to be left on this battlestar full of strangers, not including an all-grown-up Boxey/Troy. But it fed my imagination full of images of the fleet, Colonial life, and a million "What ifs..." Justine and I actually kept an eye out for any handsome men behaving in a strange manner at that time. Hey, one never knew when one might happen to run into a real alien like that!
One of the UHF stations began airing the two-hour episodes from the original series on Saturday afternoons soon after this. (I think it was KOKH-TV, Channel 25 for you Oklahoma City people...) By this time, Mom and Dad had seen enough of "Galactica: 1980" to know that "Battlestar Galactica" wasn't the morally undermining show they thought it had been, and I was finally allowed to watch it. I made videotapes when I could---remember those huge VCRs back then? The ones that were nearly as big as the television set itself? The tapes were slid into a carriage on the top, and then pushed down? And the "remote" was connected to the VCR by a cord, and it only had two settings: PLAY/REC and PAUSE. Major hi-tech.
But that was off-topic.
The paper covers for my school books began to be decorated with my drawings of Colonial Vipers, Cylon Raiders, warrior helmets...anything I could try. Justine and I used Colonial time measurements in abundance. We used words like frack and felgercarb instead of the plethora of cuss words our classmates were beginning to pick up. We would look up at the night sky, hoping for some anomaly that might signal the approach of the Colonial Fleet.
Seriously, we took all this to heart. Maybe we just needed something to believe in: Justine's parents just having been divorced, and my parents constantly worrying about finances. (The pressure on me to win an academic scholarship to college had begun a few years before in fifth grade.) The idea of Apollo and Starbuck, or even Troy and Dillon, coming to our rescue was enticing. We could threaten to reveal their identities to the world; therefore, they would HAVE to take us to the Galactica and let us live there, go to instructional period with Boxey (no matter he was several yahren younger than we were), and our lives would become one big Utopia.
Trust me, this story CONTINUES.