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.
Still have to disagree on the cheesy part.
TOBSG’s effects were done by John Dkystra, Richard Edlund(who both worked on Star Wars) and John Goss(who later worked on V). They won a Emmy for the effects.
The effects compared very well on a shot for shot basis.(what there were of them, but that was just a budget problem)
I think the real reason people think the effects of TOBSG weren’t as good as SW is that they saw them on different size screens. Seeing SW on a 50ft screen and then seeing TOBSG on a 25” screen makes all the difference in the world.
I saw TOBSG on TV and then later went to the theatre to see the theatrical release. TOBSG did not hold up very well on the big screen. Even my wife noticed the difference, and she wasn’t in the business.
Then a few weeks later I got a hold of a pristine copy of Star Wars on 3 3/4” UMatic cassettes.
Strange as it may seem, SW did not look as good on the small screen as TOBSG. I think it is because they were each composited for different mediums.
RE: M&M replacing TOBSG. All I can say is that Wikipedia mentions it(Yeah, I know), Glen Larson said the same thing in a film interview, and it was mentioned in an anniversary article in Starlog magazine a while back. Argue with them, not me.
And M&M DID move into TOBSG’S time slot.