Apparently I should be getting TV Guide again, because I’ve seen no less than 3-4 cool stories come from their latest issue, “The Sci-Fi Preview.”
Thanks to Aint it Cool News, I found this juicy little nugget that I’ll be watching and keeping you all updated on if things progress.
According to SciFi VP Mark Stern, with the strike looking like it will never end and the lack of scripted shows set to hurt studios in the coming year, the channel is looking into the production of a full-scripted Battlestar Galactica prequel.
“I just got a call from NBC-Universal,â€? SciFi VP Mark Stern tells the magazine. “They want us to take another look at the project.â€?
It’s called Caprica and it’s supposed to be set 50 years previous to the Cylons attack on the colonies that we’ve already seen. It will deal with William Adama’s father and the human inventor of the Cylons.
Here is the official plot from Wikipedia and some other tidbits (if you consider that official):
It is described as “television’s first science fiction family saga.” The show will be set on the fictional planet Caprica, approximately fifty to seventy years before the events depicted in the re-imagined series. It will tell the story of the Twelve Colonies at peace and living in a society not unlike our own. But high technology and a startling breakthrough in robotics brings to life the age-old dream of marrying artificial intelligence with mechanical bodies to create the first living robots â€â€Â? the Cylons. They are researched and built, ultimately leading to the First Cylon War.
The series will revolve around two families: the Adamas and the Graystones. Joseph Adama, father of future Battlestar commander William Adama, is a renowned civil liberties lawyer who becomes an opponent of the artificial intelligence/Cylon experiments wrought by the Graystones, owners of a large computer corporation that builds the first Cylons. According to Mark Stern, Sci-Fi Channel’s Executive Vice President of Original Programming, the script for the two-hour pilot episode concluded with an explanation for how the name “Cylon” was coined. On September 20, 2007, Battlestar Galactica writer and producer Bradley Thompson revealed that Ron D. Moore’s script for Caprica has a character coin the term, saying, “A cybernetic life-form node, a Cylon.”
Sounds awesome. I don’t know how amazing it will be to get a single episode of a new series, but I’ll take it.
It seems all suscessful movies always go the prequel route… how about going forward and outlying what happens next?!? This is why STNG was a hit (besides the time gap between the original ST series and any movies or new TV series), it was a step forward (75 years) and not a prequel (yeah great thanks George Lucas we really needed to meet Jar-Jar). Prequels can be interesting in setting a story we already know, but mostly they arent (Phantom Menance, Temple of Doom to name a few). Lets go forward with with successful series… but at the same time lets avoid BattleStar Galactica 1980…
Temple of Doom was a prequel?
It was. It took place before Raiders….
I don’t know about this. It had better be really good or it’ll be the end of the BSG franchise.
Temple of Doom did well because no one knew (no one I knew knew or something like that) it was a prequel until after it came out.
The SW prequels were crap in my book.
I agree, but not on the Temple of Doom bit. It was a decent movie in it’s own right, and the fact that it was a prequel didn’t really change things one way or another. It didn’t create a bogus or contradictory backstory or anything like that. It was just an Indy adventure, timeline didn’t affect things.
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I think a BSG prequel would be good if it in some way explained the role of the final 5 cylons who, reportedly, have some link to the first cylon war.
Maybe we would see Tigh, Anders, etc undercover as observers of humanity?
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[...] in mid-January, we reported via AICN, that NBC/Universal was interested in moving forward on the Battlestar Galactica spinoff [...]