Happy Thanksgiving! So Say We ALL!
http://www.americangreetings.com/ecards/thanksgiving/bird-with-no-tomorrow/pn/3126715
All Posts (11)
Sort by
This is for all of you wonderful Fan Club members...yeah you!
If any of you wonderful folks are interested in attending (and you should be!) Geekmonicon in Biloxi, Misssissippi, Dec 12th-14th...I actually have a special deal for you.
You...and only you can get special 1/2 price deal, but only I know the magic password...so send me a message at Shawn O'Donnell directly and I will tell you.
This fine show features Richard Hatch, Jack Stauffer & from Farscape Gigi Edgley...and promises to be a great show.Come visit the Battlestar Galactica Fan Club table while your there!
So Say We All!
Shawn O'Donnell
President
Battlestar Galactica Fan Club
Hello Colonials,
Passing along a few thoughts about Glen Larson that Jack Stauffer wanted to share with all of you:
Wasn't it only yesterday that as youthful vibrant athletic actors, we climbed into the cockpit of our vipers and sped out to do battle with the cylons? What great fun we had. I will always be grateful to and keep a special place in my memories for Glen because he not only cast me as Bojay in the original Battlestar Galactica" he also hired me for other shows he produced including "Six Million Dollar Man" and "Fall Guy".
Moving on is the natural order of things and for those of us who are now in our late 60's, many of the producers and directors who helped steer our careers are leaving us for new adventures in other places. So - I choose not to mourn the loss of Glen as a friend and mentor. I wish him bon voyage as he embarks on another life journey full of surprises and amazing new experiences. Have a great time Glen and if on your new mission on deep space patrol you come across Commanders Cain and Adama raise a glass of ambrosia and say hi from all of us who will never forget.
Glen A. Larson, Creator of TV’s 'Quincy M.E.,' 'Magnum, P.I.' and 'Battlestar Galactica,' Dies at 77
The writer-producer also was behind 'Knight Rider,' 'Fall Guy' and 'Six Million Dollar Man'
Glen A. Larson, the wildly successful television writer-producer whose enviable track record includes Quincy M.E., Magnum, P.I., Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider and The Fall Guy, has died. He was 77.
Larson, a singer in the 1950s clean-cut pop group The Four Preps who went on to compose many of the theme songs for his TV shows, died Friday night of esophageal cancer at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica, his son, James, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Larson also wrote and produced for such noteworthy series as ABC’s It Takes a Thief, starring his fellow Hollywood High School alum Robert Wagner as a burglar now stealing for the U.S. government, and NBC’s McCloud, with Dennis Weaver as a sheriff from Taos, N.M., who moves to Manhattan to help the big-city cops there.
After ABC spurned the original pilot for The Six Million Dollar Man (based on the 1972 novel Cyborg), Larson rewrote it, then penned a pair of 90-minute telefilms that convinced then-network executive Barry Diller to greenlight the action series, which starred Lee Majors as a former astronaut supercharged with bionic implants.
Other shows Larson created included Alias Smith & Jones, B.J. and The Bear, Switch (another series with Wagner), Manimal and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. He spent his early career at Universal Studios, inventing new shows and reworking others, before moving to 20th Century Fox in 1980 with a multiseries, multimillion-dollar deal.
With Lou Shaw, Larson conceived Quincy M.E., which starred Jack Klugman — coming off his stint on The Odd Couple — as a murder-solving Los Angeles medical examiner. A forerunner to such “forensic” dramas as CSI, the series ran for 148 episodes over eight seasons on NBC from 1976-83.
CBS’ Magnum, P.I., toplined by Tom Selleck as a charismatic Ferrari-driving private instigator based in Oahu, Hawaii, also aired eight seasons, running from 1980-88 with 162 installments. Larson created the ratings hit with Donald Bellisario, with whom he had worked on Quincy and Battlestar.
NBC’s Knight Rider, starring David Hasselhoff as a crime fighter aided by a Pontiac Trans-Am with artificial intelligence (K.I.T.T., drolly voiced by William Daniels), lasted four seasons and 90 episodes from 1982-86. And ABC’s Fall Guy, with Majors as a stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter, prevailed for five seasons and 113 episodes spanning 1981-86.
If you’re counting, Quincy, Magnum, Knight Rider and Fall Guy accounted for 513 hours of television and 21 combined seasons from 1976-88.
During a 2009 interview with the Archive of American Television, Larson was asked how he could possibly keep up with such a workload.
“I tried to stay with things until I thought they were on their feet and they learned to walk and talk,” he said.
“If you believe if something, you must will it through, because everything gets in the way. Everyone tries to steer the ship off course.”
Battlestar Galactica lasted just one season on ABC from 1978-79, yet the show had an astronomical impact. Starring Lorne Greene and Richard Hatch as leaders of a homeless fleet wandering through space, featuring special effects supervised by Star Wars’ John Dykstra and influenced by Larson’s Mormon beliefs, Battlestar premiered as a top 10 show and finished the year in the top 25. But it was axed after 24 episodes because, Larson said, each episode cost “well over” $1 million.
“I was vested emotionally in Battlestar, I really loved the thematic things. I don’t feel it really got its shot, and I can’t blame anyone else, I was at the center of that,” said Larson, who years early had written a sci-fi script, Adam’s Ark, with a theme similar to Battlestar’s and had been mentored by Star Trek's Gene Coon. “But circumstances weren’t in our favor to be able to make it cheaper or to insist we make two of three two-hour movies [instead of a weekly one-hour series] to get our sea legs.”
Much like Star Trek before it, Battlestar became much more beloved after it was canceled. Universal packaged episodes into two-hour telefilms and added a “Battle of Galactica” attraction to its studio tour that proved hugely popular. A new version debuted in 2004 on the Sci-Fi Channel, followed by a spinoff, Caprica.
Yet for all his success, Larson had his share of critics.
Writer Harlan Ellison, in a 1996 book about his Star Trek teleplay for the famous episode “City on the Edge of Forever,” infamously called him “Glen Larceny,” accusing him of using movie concepts for his TV shows.
It often has been noted that Battlestar premiered soon after Star Wars, that Alias Smith & Jones arrived shortly after Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and that the setups for McCloud and B.J. and The Bear bore similarities to the Clint Eastwood films Coogan’s Bluff and Every Which Way But Loose, respectively.
“Larson is undeniably a controversial figure in TV history because of his reputation for producing video facsimiles of popular films, but scholars, fans and critics should also consider that ‘similarity’ is the name of the game in the fast world of TV productions,” John Kenneth Muir wrote in his 2005 book, An Analytical Guide to Television’s Battlestar Galactica. “Shows are frequently purchased, produced and promoted by networks not for their differences from popular productions, but because of their similarities.”
Fox in 1978 sued Battlestar studio Universal for infringing on Star Wars copyrights but lost the suit years later, vindicating Larson, who described his TV show as “Wagon Train heading toward Earth.”
He also said that Alias Smith & Jones was “certainly in the genre of Butch Cassidy, a New Wave western” and compared B.J. and the Bear to something along the lines of the 1977 film Smokey & the Bandit.
He was not apologizing for any of this.
“Television networks are a lot like automobile manufacturers, or anyone else who’s in commerce. If something out there catches on with the public … I guess you can call it ‘market research,’ ” he said in the TV Archive interview. “You can go in and pitch one idea at a network and they’ll say, ‘You know, we’d really like it if you had something a little more like this.’ ”
And the trend goes on: new versions of Battlestar, Knight Rider, Manimal, Six Million Dollar Man and The Fall Guy have been floated about for the big screen in recent years.
Glen Albert Larson was born an only child on Jan. 3, 1937, in Long Beach, Calif. He and his parents moved to Los Angeles when he was young, and he became enthralled with the art of storytelling while listening to hour after hour of radio shows.
He met Wagner while hitchhiking to Hollywood High and landed a job as a page at NBC, then home to such live anthologies as Lux Video Theatre and Matinee Theatre.
Music took over when Capitol Records A&R exec Nik Venet signed The Four Preps to a long-term contract in 1956, and the wholesome youngsters recorded such hits as “Twenty Six Miles (Santa Catalina),” “Big Man," “Dreamy Eyes” and "Down by the Station."
“Ultimately, The Four Preps’ biggest influence can be heard via their impact on Brian Wilson, whose harmony-driven production for The Beach Boys was a direct antecedent of The Four Preps’ sound,” or so says a biography of the group on AllMusic.com.
The Preps appeared on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand, played college campuses around the country and toured the world. But with a new wife and child, Larson wanted to get off the road, so he pursued a career in television and sold a story idea for a 1966 episode of The Fugitive.
Larson then wrote an episode of It Takes a Thief, and within the short span of a season he went from story editor to producing the series.
He created his first show, the ABC Western Alias Smith and Jones, which starred Peter Duel and Ben Murphy as outlaw cousins trying to go straight. He exited the series soon after Duel died of a self-inflicted gunshot on New Year’s Eve in 1971.
He did not get along with Klugman on Quincy and eventually left the show in the hands of Bellisario.
Selleck, who was under contract at Universal and had done a couple of pilots that had not made it to series, was obligated to do Magnum, whose pilot was written by Bellisario.
“We got the star, it was a perfect fit,” said Larson, who was a fan of the 1960s CBS series Hawaiian Eye, which centered on a detective agency. “I had a house over there [in Hawaii] and a guy [like Selleck’s character] who lived in a guest house and took care of it.”
Larson based the unseen novelist character Robin Masters, the owner of the home, on author Harold Robbins.
After years at Universal — where he also did The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries for ABC and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century for NBC — Larson left for Fox. But to get out of his Universal deal, he had to give the studio one more show, and that would be Knight Rider.
“Michael Knight [Hasselhoff’s character] in a way is a prototyped by the Lone Ranger,” Larson said. “If you think about him riding across the plains and going from one town to another to help law and order, then K.I.T.T. becomes Tonto.”
At Fox in the spring of 1983, he sold four new series: Manimal to ABC and Trauma Center, Automan and Masquerade to ABC, but all were quickly canceled.
Larson’s next show, CBS’ Cover Up — about a photographer (Jennifer O’Neill) who replaces her late husband as an undercover CIA agent — lasted one season. During production, actor Jon-Erik Hexum died as a result of an accidental self-inflicted blank-cartridge gunshot wound on the set.
In July 2011, Larson sued Universal, alleging a decades-long fraud perpetrated by a studio that he said never once sent him profit participation statements despite his shows earning hundreds of millions of dollars.
More recently, Larson reteamed up with The Four Preps, reuniting in 2004 for a PBS reunion show, Magic Moments, with best friends and fellow group members David Somerville and Bruce Belland.
Survivors include his wife Jeannie, brother Kenneth and nine children (including his son James) from former wives Carol Gourley and Janet Curtis: Kimberly, Christopher, Glen, Michelle, David, Caroline, Danielle and Nicole.
A memorial for his service will be held in the near future, his son said.
Despite his remarkable career churning out hits, Larson earned but three Emmy nominations, two for producing McCloud and one (for outstanding drama) for Quincy. He never won.
His shows, Larson said in the TV Archive interview, “were enjoyable, they had a pretty decent dose of humor. All struck a chord in the mainstream. What we weren’t going to do was win a shelf full of Emmys. We got plenty of nominations for things, but ours were not the kind of shows that were doing anything more than reaching a core audience. I would like to think we brought a lot of entertainment into the living room.
8:22 AM PST 11/15/2014 by Mike Barnes at The Hollywood Reporter
Colonials and to all Members of Battlestar Raven and Raven Friends and Family Circle,
I just wanted to quickly take my time to welcome all our news members here at Battlestar Galactica Fan Club!
Second, I know we have a lot of Battlestar Galactica Fans especially Battlestar Raven members out there, that are either a veteran of the military or still currently serving. My husband and I just wanted to take our time to wish each and everyone of you, HAPPY VETERANS DAY! THANK YOU for serving and or having served! But Veterans Day is also a time to remember those who lost their lives serving this country. So to those who courageously gave their lives.....THANK YOU! You maybe gone, but you will NEVER be forgotten! A lot of us wear different uniforms representing our respective branch of the military. But in the end, regardless of the difference in the unifrom we all wear, we are all brothers and sisters at arms doing the same job....and that is PROTECTING the very foundation of which this country was founded on and the freedom we all so much enjoy!
So when you are walking around wherever you maybe going, if and when you see a veteran, THANK THEM for their service! Those words may mean little to some people but for those veterans, they mean EVERYTHING to them!!!!
HOOAH!!!!!
In Service,
Raven Actual- USAF ( still currently serving )
Here's another case where real life and science fiction reflect each other. This is a recent account of a Russian fighter testing out the equivalent of the Cylon weapon used to dud the Colonial defenses in the Re-imagined version of Battlestar Galactica. By the way, their war game test was on a US warship and it was left helpless, just like the Colonial fleet. Maybe it's a controlled EMP, or maybe it's some sort of virus that they can transmit. What ever the case, their target is easily duded and left completely helpless, basically dead in the water.
Leah Cairns: Interstellar: (Mystery/Sci-Fi ) 11-7-2014
Earth is at the brink of extinction due to extreme climate changes. A mysterious rip in the space-time continuum is discovered. It may be the last chance to save the human race. The crew of the Endurance uses the newly discovered wormhole on an interstellar voyage in a last ditch attempt to locate a habitable planet for a new beginning. No one knows if they will ever see their families again and what the future holds for them.
I found information about the now playing movie “Interstellar” earlier this year. Leah “Racetrack” Cairns plays the part of Lois in the film; although I’m not sure how big of a part her character has. Leah is my favorite Raptor pilot from the Re-imagined BSG series and I would see the film just because she’s in it.
On Thanksgiving week Battlestar Galactica star Jamie Bamber will assume the roll of Bishop's husband. See the web site attached:
http://tvline.com/2014/10/14/ncis-season-12-jamie-bamber-bishops-husband/
"NARCOPOLIS"
Jamie “Baltar” Callis stars as Todd Ambro in “Narcopolis.” In 2024 all drugs are legal. Ambro is largest Pharmicutal producer of recreational narcotic drugs. Ambro drugs are Legal, Affordable and Safe, but are they? Elliot Cowan is the hard hitting drug Cop Frank Grieves investigating drug related deaths. Soon Frank has his superiors and Ambro henchman gunning for him in this Mystery / Sci-Fi / Thriller to be released sometime in 2015.
Everyone,
If you have not seen these special awards given by BFC President O'Donnell, it is located at the following link on the Raven main website and also on the Raven Facebook page dated July 21, 2014:
http://www.battlestarraven-bfc-002.com/#!battlestar-galactica-fan-club--awards/c1p49
The way the certificate is displayed on the Raven website is it is from the highest and on down.
Raven Marines,
I just wanted to quickly post this to let everyone know, the RAVEN COLONIAL MARINE PATCHES are in! Like I said when I agree to take on this position and learn more about how you do things in the science ficition world as I am new to this, I told myself that if I am going to do something like this, I vowed to make the Raven Marines unique and different. And this is JUST one of the ways I will do it. Uniformity WILL BE maintained within the Raven Colonial Marine Ranks but at the same time, we are different amongst the other Colonial Marines Detachment out there amongts the other Battlestar Chapters. That is why WE ARE THE RAVEN COLONIAL MARINES! WE think outside the box! Unless the Commander tells me otherwise ( ONLY SHE CAN DO IT ), I will continue to make us unique towards becoming the best one out there! I mean after all, I was told that this is all for fun. And fun it will be!
There will be more new things to come for the Raven Colonial Marines including the long awaited Raven Marine Tactical Manual! As stated before, that manual will ONLY be exclusive to actual deserving Raven Colonial Marine Members and select individuals within the Raven. Why I chose to do this in this manner, it is because a lot of hard work was put into this manual by both me and the Commander so we want to make sure that deserving individuals ( active members ) who contributed a lot to the Raven, gets it as a reward. And I believe that is a fair thing to do. So far, real life responsibilities has been getting on the way but we are still moving along with many new things being put into play.
Have a great weekend and SEMPER FI!
In Service,
-Raven Marine OIC
