So Say We All

by Mark A. Altman

  ROBYN DOUGLASS

  To this day, I don’t understand why Kent went to such lengths being a professional that was on Adam-12. It’s no different than what was going on with The A-Team. They went through a lot of girls on that. They really wanted me to do that show, because they couldn’t hold on to the girls, and they thought I was tough. I heard George Peppard and Mr. T didn’t want a girl on the show either, but you need balance. You’ve got to have the broad on the show so that both audiences, male and female, can identify with a character.

  After the three-part premiere, the much-loathed superpowered Galactican kids are introduced in “The Super Scouts.” With Earth’s gravity being weaker than on board the Galactica and the fleet, the Super Scouts, stranded on Earth after the school barge is attacked, are endowed with super strength, allowing them to win at baseball in “Spaceball” (against a team that featured “Little Frankie Lupo and little Jeffrey Freilich”) and help a band of financially strapped farmers in “Space Croppers” who are being put out of business by a racist landowner among others in some truly dreadful hours of dramatic television.

  JEFF FREILICH

  In targeting it for a younger audience and a family audience, it was Glen Larson who decided to introduce the Super Scouts and to give them basically two counselors to go with them and to bring them to Earth because you can do more with kids on Earth than you can in a spaceship. There are just many more stories to tell. In fact, his whole concept of the show was to see the world through the eyes of children who’ve never seen it before.

  In “Spaceball,” the kids demonstrate how a television camera works. The purpose of the scene was to show the Galactican kids’ advanced technological capabilities and their knowledge and their understanding. But to Glen, it was a comedy scene because he had a bunch of kids, and he always loved the capricious nature of children. Because the show was geared for a younger audience, he thought it might be fun to show kids basically misbehaving in an incredibly intellectual way and getting away with it.

  However, Galactica 1980 did make one significant contribution the Galactica mythology when it introduced humanoid Cylons long before 2004’s reinvention, in “The Night the Cylons Landed,” in which the Cylons crash-land on Earth on Halloween and look for a radio station to transmit Earth’s location back to the Alliance. It further cemented the series’ schizophrenic reputation: Was this a show about superpowered children, was it about the search for a rogue Colonial Warrior intent on changing Earth’s history, or was it about preventing the Cylons from finding the location of Earth?

  JEFF FREILICH

  The first experience I had with Glen as a writer was when he saw [producer] Frank Lupo and me one Friday night, and he said, “I want you guys to come out to the house for the weekend, because this script we’re going to shoot on Monday is terrible and the three of us are going to rewrite it.” Mind you, this was an entire television script written over a weekend.

  ALLAN COLE

  The Suits were all over Larson. Out of desperation he pitched them a story about the evil Cylons finding the school ship. After a furious fight, they blow the ship up. But our heroes rush in and get the kids off just in time.

  JEFF FREILICH

  Glen had three IBM Selectrics and several really excellent bottles of red wine, and a couple of guitars. He had the guitars because he was a member of the Four Preps and the coauthor of “26 Miles,” the song about Catalina that was a big pop hit in the fifties or the early sixties. What he didn’t know was that I both played guitar and I used it as a method of procrastinating when I write, and that I also did a really spot-on Bob Dylan impression. So we’re sitting there and we’re each at a typewriter. Glen sat down at the typewriter on his deck looking out at the ocean. He was outside with a long extension cord. Frank and I were in the living room. He asked us to come out on the deck because it was so pretty out and the sun was going down. I was in awe of the fact that when Glen wrote, he never looked at the page. He looked straight out at the ocean with this idyllic expression and he typed without stopping, page after page. He knew when he would get to the bottom of the page and he would just pull it out of the typewriter and put a new one in and keep going. Glen managed to write two complete acts of a television show overnight. It was I’d say twenty, at least twenty, twenty-eight pages maybe, while Frank wrote an act, which was probably twelve or thirteen pages, and I was stuck in the middle of mine.

  Glen looked and he said, “Look, don’t struggle. Let’s have a glass of wine.” I picked up a guitar and I started doing Bob Dylan impressions and that’s all he wanted me to do. He was laughing, he was singing along. Then he picked up the guitar and we sang “26 Miles,” and he found a use for me that I actually wasn’t hired for. It loosened me up enough for me to be able to continue to write, and although I never really got a handle on the show, I could certainly tell the stories. The dialogue for that show was very difficult for me on a variety of levels, because I didn’t really know the character of either the Cylons or the Galacticans as well as Lupo did, and certainly as well as Glen did, but I knew the stories that we should be telling. I had a lot to do with arcing all the stories and all the permutations of the plot throughout that first season.

  “The Super Scouts, Part One” was directed by actor turned director Vince Edwards, who had done such a magnificent job with “The Living Legend” on the original series. This time, however, the highly touted episode, in which the Galactican kids are stranded on Earth and find themselves poisoned from the runoff of a local manufacturing plant into a nearby lake, would be a misfire of dramatic proportions, filled with a heavy-handed, eco-friendly message, slapstick humor (Dillon accidently robs a bank in a scene that no one would confuse with Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run), and the introduction of Allan Miller’s Colonel Sydell, who begins his relentless (and buffoonish) pursuit of the marooned Galactica children.

  ALLAN COLE

  It was a complicated episode that needed a director experienced in handling lots of action, stunts, explosives, fire—all that scary, expensive stuff. And so they hired Vince Edwards, former brooding Marlon Brando wannabe, who starred in Ben Casey years before.

  BARRY VAN DYKE

  I almost got arrested on that episode. We were shooting at a bank on Sherman Way [in the San Fernando Valley] and Vince Edwards was across the street from the bank with the crew where the camera was set up. He said, “Can you run out of the bank and run through traffic? I’m not going to stop traffic.” I said, “Yeah, if you’re willing to wait to make sure there’s no cars coming or anything.” He said, “Just take your time and run straight to the camera.” So I said, “Fine.” Then they rolled and I had a bag of money in each hand and I ran out. As I got to the curb, I saw a cop car coming. I thought, “Oh man, should I do this or not?” They were rolling so I just ran through traffic. They slammed on their brakes. Both guys jumped out of the car with their guns drawn and started yelling, “Freeze.” I’m trying to point at the crew so they’d see we were filming. I said, “We’re filming a TV show.” The headline in the next day’s paper was “Cops Steal Scene as Van Dyke’s Son Robs a Bank”: “Crack team of L.A. cops swooped down on the twenty-eight-year-old son of actor Dick Van Dyke yesterday while the fledgling actor was filming a bank robbery scene for his upcoming TV series Galactica 80. They mistook him for a real-life bank robber and it took some fast, glib talk to keep him out of the slammer.”

  ALLAN COLE

  The true disaster unfolded one day at dailies. There were Suits in attendance from every Universal Studios department, ABC Television, and advertisers who were chained by contracts for the run of the show. And then there were the hordes of producers from Galactica 1980, including Glen, who sat at the command station in the center of the screening room. Directly in front of the command group was Vince Edwards, the director of the episode. He didn’t look well. But maybe it was the lighting. Chris [Bunch] and I found a place out of the line of fire where we could see both the screen and the Suits. The foota
ge rolled. It was herky-jerky at first but soon settled down. The next bits were supposed to portray the aftermath of the Cylon attack on the school ship. The corridors were filled with smoke and flames. Alarms were blaring. Meanwhile, in a series of shots, our heroes are shown walking casually through the chaos as if they were on a Sunday-school outing. Later footage showed them leading the kids to safety with equally slow calm. If this was an emergency, you sure couldn’t tell it from our actors. Plus, if any of them started to quicken his or her steps, you could hear Edwards’s offscreen voice commanding, “Slow down.” We heard Larson’s booming voice: “What the fuck is this? Who directed this turd? Who? Who?” We heard someone whisper something to Larson. “I don’t care if he is here. He’s ruining my show.”

  Not unlike the original series, Galactica 1980 was rushed into production, which led to a chaotic shooting schedule, with multiple episodes being written and shot at the same time, which created immense problems for both cast and crew.

  ROBYN DOUGLASS

  This whole adventure of Galactica 1980 was really a baptism by fire for me. They started early on in this series shooting two shows simultaneously. I thought it was going to be temporary that I’m being handed rewrites for two different scripts, and things are changing every day. You think you’re going to shoot one scene and it’s changed at the last minute.

  BARRY VAN DYKE

  Before we even aired the TV movie, they picked up the initial order, so we never got a day off, not even weekends. We were just punchy half the time, because we didn’t know what the scripts meant. We were shooting scenes from two different segments at the same time and running from one set to another, all in different episodes. So half the time we didn’t even know what was going on. But the fun was since we were supposed to be on Earth and our characters were the fish out of water, everything worked. We had to play dumb since we didn’t know what was going on either in real life or on the show.

  ROBYN DOUGLASS

  At first, I thought, “Oooh, this is great,” since they were paying me so much overtime. I then realized I’m not getting any sleep. I called the union, and I said, “How can they possibly work me eighteen straight hours?” And they said, “They can. They pay you overtime.” I said, “Yeah, but they’re setting my hair and doing my makeup while I’m sleeping.” They’d do my face from one side. Do one side, and turn my face to the other, and I’m still sleeping. I would ask other people, “Is this normal?” And they’d go, “No. This is not normal.” And I would say, “Oh my God. I don’t think the money is worth this.”

  BARRY VAN DYKE

  A lot of the space stuff where we sat in the Vipers, they would just put you in the cockpit and light the whole thing and you’d shoot all your scenes from different episodes. Our pages were taped on the dash, so we were just reading some of this stuff and had no idea what we were talking about. But it was so much fun; I don’t know if I’ve ever had so much fun on a show.

  ROBYN DOUGLASS

  You can’t get out of a contract like this, so I had to figure out how to pace myself for something that’s two shows simultaneously, two different scripts, two different rewrites coming at me each day, and sometimes locations would change at the last minute. Sometimes I would confide with fellow actors and say, “Oh my God, this is really stressing me out,” but I felt very isolated, because it seemed like everybody I ever talked to was either drinking alcohol or on drugs or seeing a therapist, and I was the only one that was kind of normal.

  DAVID LARSON

  My father stuffed me in there [as a Super Scout] for whatever reason and I was really shy. I have outtakes from B.J. and the Bear of me where I’m supposed to order a cheeseburger and hid under the table for like fifteen takes. “Can’t you just order a cheeseburger?” I don’t think I ever really grew out of that shyness. It was good, though, because it paid for some of my schooling. I couldn’t touch the money until I was eighteen years old, so it paid for some of my college. That money just sort of accrued over the years. All I remember is unlike Battlestar Galactica we shot outdoors a lot … and the flying motorcycles.

  BARRY VAN DYKE

  I’m a motorcycle nut. I was into desert racing and dirt bikes and everything before that. The turbo cycles were Yamahas—MX 175s, which is kind of a small dirt bike—and they built the retractable wings and everything around them. They were the most awkward things in the world to ride to even go ten feet on them.

  JACK GILL

  (stunt double, Galactica 1980)

  I remember they were always trying to make it look cooler since they didn’t have the effects the original show had. One thing I was involved with, since I have a motorcycle background, were the flying motorcycles. They built these motorcycles with a button on them, so the wings dropped out at the front and back of the motorcycle.

  BARRY VAN DYKE

  In the pilot, we were on the motorcycles going down the freeway. It was way out at the end of the Valley and they closed the whole freeway for this. A gang of bikers start chasing us and say, “Let’s see those bikes,” and start yelling at us. Kent’s going, “We can’t get caught, we can’t be seen on these bikes.” And we fly off, up into the air. Our stunt coordinator actually took one of the bikes and strapped it to the skids of a helicopter and shot out where you could just see the bike and the road, and then put a guy on it and took off with the bikes on the skid of the helicopter. There’s no way on Earth they would let you do that now. It’s totally illegal.

  JACK GILL

  The helicopter first flew close to the ground and then took off. They’d film me sitting on the motorcycle, so it looked like I was taking off on the motorcycle. Since the camera was inside the helicopter looking over me, it looked like I was flying. It was a little scary at first since we weren’t sure if the motorcycle would stay on the skid. It was rigged on the side. It worked really well, so we used that a lot.

  BARRY VAN DYKE

  I remember I got in the van that morning to drive out to set that day and Bud Ekins, who was Steve McQueen’s friend, and actually did the motorcycle jump in The Great Escape, got onto the van. He’s famous in Southern California for desert and TT racing, he’s one of the top racers. All the stunt guys were getting in, and he got in the van and I sat next to him. He was my hero, and I was so intimidated. I never said a word. I could not get a word out. It drives me nuts now, because my God the things I could’ve asked him.

  New Colonial helmets were also created for Galactica 1980 owing to safety concerns regarding the actors and stuntmen riding the turbocycles.

  ROB KLEIN

  (Battlestar Galactica archivist)

  The Daggit Squadron pilot helmets exist due the fact the stunt drivers refused to ride the turbobikes using the prop Colonial Viper helmets, which were made of thin fiberglass and were not made for safety. New helmets were made using a real motorcycle safety helmet, adding the familiar Egyptian/Colonial styling. The round shape of the motorcycle helmet caused the helmets to look ugly, and not as elegant as the popular Colonial Viper helmets were.

  JACK GILL

  We also did this episode where we were leaping through a cornfield [“Space Croppers”]. They had this real six-feet-high cornfield and they wanted to make it look like we were weightless and we were leaping, making big jumps through the field. They put us up on this thing called the Russian Swing and we would hit airbags in the middle of the field. This swing would throw you thirty feet high in the air to this airbag. I was doing this with this other guy and while jumping I looked over to the left and saw he was missing his airbag. He broke his shoulder and punctured a lung. He was pretty messed up.

  We did some wire jumping into thirty-feet-high trees in white tuxedos [“The Night the Cylons Landed”]. They also wanted us to jump from the top of this tree onto this building. They had us on piano wires—a really thin wire that was attached to each hip, going up to a crane. They’d lift you up out of the tree, you’d throw your arms up and act like you’re jumping from the tree to the top of this r
oof. They were taking us from a thirty-foot tree to an eighty-foot building. I doubled for Barry Van Dyke, and this other guy doubled for Kent McCord. While we were doing this jump one of his wires broke and he was going sideways. I thought for sure he would fall sixty feet and get killed, but he made it fine. The only bad thing about that was that we then had to do it again. Back in the eighties you had to have these really thin cables [because you couldn’t erase them digitally] and they were very dangerous, most of the times.

  While the original series had largely eschewed laser beams as a result of the agreement they had made early on with Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox to minimize comparisons to Star Wars, Galactica 1980 reintroduced traditional animated laser effects to the proceedings, utilizing a smaller and less production-challenging prop.

  ROB KLEIN

  The original effects of the Colonial laser and Cylon rifles were achieved by adding a “star filter” on the motion picture cameras used during filming of Battlestar Galactica, and Apogee built the laser guns and Cylon rifles with camera strobes inside that would fire off in sequence when the triggers were activated. The strobes required a 510-volt battery to power them. These batteries were large. The cumbersome batteries would fit inside the stock of the Cylon rifles, but were obviously too large for the Colonial pistols. The Colonial actors had to wear a fanny pack around their waist with a wire running up their sleeves into the handles of the pistols. If you look for these fanny packs, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of them onscreen. Due to the expensive and fragile nature of the pistols, a safety strap was used to go around the actor’s wrist in case an actor dropped the pistol to avoid it being dropped and damaged. One of the only two known surviving hero strobe Colonial lasers was dropped on set late in the series’ production, and was never put back into working service on the show.

  For Galactica 1980, the strobe effect was dropped as well as both of the Colonial laser pistols, and new, smaller “laser derringers” were designed for Galactica 1980, rigged with one simple incandescent lightbulb powered only by a nine-volt battery. The nonworking dummy Colonial laser prop pistols left over from Battlestar Galactica were cut in half and altered by adding a single incandescent lightbulb to become “working” Galactica 1980 prop pistols, as the strobe laser effects were found to be too complicated for Galactica 1980’s modest production.