Many of you are looking at the original BSG with 2009 eyes not 1978 eyes.
For its day TOBSG was top of the line.
It was the most expensive pilot ever produced to that time. The series was the most expensive ever done to that time. (1 million + per espisode.
When it was cancelled it was still winning its Sunday night time slot. Supposedly it was cancelled to give Mork and Mindy its coveted time slot. M&M never got as good a ratings as TOBSG.
TOBSG really took nothing from Star Wars, more Star Trek. Glen Larson had been pitching the concept(originally called Adama’s Ark) since 1968.
Star Wars only helped finally get it on the air.
Much of the writing was excellent. The ‘Hand of God’ episode was great!
Does it look kind of hokey today? Certainly.
But so does the original Star Wars (Try to find a copy of the original release, not the ones after Lucas got to redo it twice. (Han shot first!)
Did they reuse a lot of shots over and over? Yes, due to cheapening budgets from the studio and network.
I certainly agree with another poster that if they wanted to do the new series the way they did, they should have kept the basic story and done it with a different name, characters, etc. and not tried to ride the coattails of the original, and then change everything.
It was cheesy in 1978. Partly in self defense. It had a really dark story but in 78 the Cyber Punk revolution hadn’t started yet, dark stories really weren’t big in SF or anything else, so there was a lot of fluff stuck in like Boxey to lighten it up. Actually my view of the original is better now than it was then, partly because of the new version, after the first season finished I Netflixed the original, one of the things I noticed was the seeds of the story Ron Moore has been telling. All the dark brooding stuff people complain about was in the original, they just couldn’t focus on that in a pre-Blade Runner/ Terminator world. You could kill off most of the human race back then, but you couldn’t dwell on it, you could mention that people’s living conditions in the fleet were basically sub-human, but you couldn’t show it every episode, you could hint at the fact that the commander of the Pegasus had crippling survivors guilt by having him plan suicide missions, but you couldn’t play with his insanity for half a season.
It didn’t get canceled to help M&M it got canceled because it was too expensive. In order to pay for itself it would have needed near Super Bowl numbers every week. 1 million 1978 dollars is very expensive, especially with the FCC regs that limited the number of commercials you could stick in an hour of TV, there was just no way to pay for the show. That was part of the point of Galactica 80, it was a very bad attempt to capture what they thought made Galactica popular for much less money, unfortunately they guessed wrong.