when i was just a wee lad growing up in the boondocks of rural wisconsin, they would air battlestar galactica right about the time i got home from school. trouble was, my parents wouldn’t let me watch TV that wasn’t PBS (i blame this for my apparent english accent).
presuming that the bus didn’t slip off the icey road on the way back from school (which happened weekly) i had maybe 45minutes of BSG time between my father going off to eke out a living as a late-night banjo teacher and my mother coming back from a hard day of construction-site management. i would huddle in the basement, right up next to the TV, the sound turned down as low as possible, my hand on the off-knob, ready to turn off the TV and pretend i was reading the moment i heard the front door swing open.
those tiny morsels of space opera were like crack. my heart would beat harder just hearing the opening trumpets of the BSG theme.
then my mother would come home, stalk down to the basement and put her hand on the TV to see if it was still warm from the bootlegged boobtoobing. (note to biographer: this is pretty much my only claim to being an abused child)
now i’m an adult, i live four states away from my closest parent (BIG states even), and i can rent as many goddamn BSG DVDs as i want.
which i did last night. it’s been, oh, 17 years or so since i’ve seen the vintage BSG series. and man does it suck now.
remember when you could have a crewmember with a mullet on the bridge of a starship? remember when ‘turbo’ was a part of the english language? and it seemed to actually mean something? remember when dirk "face" benedict seemed really, REALLY cool?
i don’t understand how something with so many spacebattles can be so dull and silly. but i’m going to watch the entire thing.
just to spite my mother.
