Haddow Press Experiment

Television Showdown - Episode #6

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This is Episode Six of my feature column, the Television Showdown on Haddow Drive where I pit two similar shows against each other on a variety of standard criteria. The criteria are always the same, and the winner of each criterion gets one point, for a maximum of five points. Winner takes all.

Episode #6
Battlestar Galactica (Remake) versus Battlestar Galactica (Original)

In this installment of the Television Showdown on Haddow Drive I ward off the cylon attacks between the old and new versions of Battlestar Galactica.

Criterion 1: Glad-I’m-Not-Them Factor
On one side of the coin we’ve got ourselves a good old fashioned disco party spaceship right of the nineteen-seventies. On the other side of the coin there is the apocalyptic human filth of the remade series. Perhaps I simply yearn for simpler times, with simpler, shinier enemies. Remake (+1)

Criterion 2: Use of Revenue Generating Product Placement
I fail to see how, say, Captain Odama drinking a Pepsi on the command deck would fit into the believability of the story. But then again, one of the main characters (in both series) is named ‘Starbuck.’ The difference, of course, is the latter is now somewhat (though completely unofficially) linked by sheer mechanics of word-DESIGN and the English language to a famous coffee company. Remake (+1)

Criterion 3: Inclusion of Primates in Cast
To the credit of the producers I have not seen a single monkey on board the remade Galactica. While I can’t say I’ve seen any on the original series, either, it’s exactly the type of (banana-flavored) cheese that would have scooped ratings in the 70s. And wasn’t Lorne Greene the host of that nature show? Original (+1)

Criterion 4: Clear and Present Reference to Adult Situations
Yes, the basis of all modern television is the logarithmic approach towards adult situations. As always, the newer the show the higher the bar. Back to the idea of a swingin’, sexy spaceship, the original could have been subtitled “pimp my viper” and had boom-chicka-boom playing in the background. Original (+1)

Criterion 5: Gratuitous Use of Four Letter Explicatives
Lacking any real gratuity on this front, we’re left to rule with the remake who has out and out contributed to geek vocabulary with their very own explicative: frak. It’s so frakking cool we gotta ignore the original in this case. Remake (+1)

OVERALL
Ignoring actual production quality, and looking solely to our own criteria, it seems it’s a narrow edge for the remade Battlestar scoring a close 3 to 2 over the original series.

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