I’ve thought a lot over the past few weeks about remakes, or “reimaginings,” as TV and movie producers have pretentiously taken to calling them. They’re nothing new, of course — updating older entertainment properties for a new generation has been a common industry practice since at least the early sound era, when a number of prominent silent films were redone as talkies. These days, however, there seem to be a lot more of them being made than there used to be. A recent TV Guide article listed about a dozen old TV shows that are currently being transformed into feature films. I imagine most of these will probably be of the smug, let’s-make-fun-of-the-entertainment-of-our-youth variety that’s been so popular recently. I hate those treatments, myself. I don’t see any reason to mock things simply because they’re a couple decades removed from the cutting edge. The thought of Jim Carrey as The Six Million Dollar Man, or greasy, potty-mouthed Colin Farrell filling Sonny Crockett’s shoes in a new Miami Vice makes me want to hurt someone. Badly. (By the way, I didn’t make up those projects or attach those names to them. They’re both for real, at least according to the aforementioned article.)

As much as I despise those disrespectful parodies, though, they’re generally easy to dismiss. They tend to have short lives at the box office and are quickly forgotten, while the original properties live on in the memories of those who love them. Sometimes the remakes even help the originals because a DVD release of the old frequently goes along with the marketing of the new. But what happens when the remake is no parody? What if the new version is a serious attempt to update and improve upon a property that was badly flawed, despite its charms? What’s the loyal fanboy to do when it turns out the remake actually is better than the original in many respects, and even seems poised to eclipse the memory of the original in the minds of the general public?

That’s the quandry I’ve been struggling with ever since the premiere of the SciFi Channel‘s new version of Battlestar Galactica.

The original Battlestar Galactica, in case you don’t remember it, ran for a single season in 1978-79. Widely dismissed at the time as a rip-off of Star Wars, Battlestar was in fact a curious melding of space opera, Western motif, the faddish notion that all the mysteries of human history had extraterrestrial explanations, and the religious beliefs of the show’s Mormon creator, Glen Larson. The premise of the series was relatively complex (and, I might add, quite unlike that of Star Wars once you got past the visual similarities between the two). Here’s the set-up: Long ago, tribes of ancient, space-travelling humans settled on twelve planets, known as the Colonies. For the past thousand years, the Colonies had been at war with a race of alien robots known as Cylons; the humans’ primary weapon in this war was a fleet of battlestars, immense aircraft carriers in space that could launch waves of small but powerful Viper fighters. As the series begins, the Cylons finally manage to gain the upper hand, thanks to a human traitor called Baltar, and in the holocaust that follows, the Colonies are obliterated and all the battlestars destroyed save one, the Galactica. The survivors of the Colonies take to the stars in whatever broken-down ships they can find and, under the protection of the last battlestar, they set out on an impossible quest to find the legendary Thirteenth Colony, a planet somewhere out there in the endless sea of space known as Earth. No one knows if Earth even exists, or if the humans living there will be advanced enough to offer assistance or if they will be much more primitive than the Colonials. Meanwhile, the ruthless Cylons are in pursuit, determined to exterminate every last human in existence…

All of that probably sounds pretty silly to the uninitiated, but remember, this was the 1970s. Von Daniken was big, Star Wars was huge, and yours truly was only eight or nine years old when the show premiered. It was a perfect combination of concept and timing, and although I never developed the same affection for Galactica that I feel for the original Star Wars movies, it remains one of my all-time favorite TV series.

Loving Galactica isn’t easy, though. The show has never received much respect from mainstream critics or hardcore science-fiction fans, not even when it was new, and I can’t deny that there are good reasons for this. There isn’t a single episode of the original series that doesn’t suffer from a major lapse of logic, or some shoddy editing, or a passage of really painful dialogue, and it’s obvious that no one on the writing staff had a grasp on the conventions of science fiction, or even real science. (Common exasperating error: the terms “solar system,” “galaxy,” and “universe” were often used interchangeably, despite the very distinct and immense differences in scale between them.)

Despite its flaws, however, the show managed to sink a hook deep into my youthful imagination. I loved the idea that my planet Earth might be someone else’s legend, and that the mythological characters I was learning about in school may have been based on actual living beings. (For the record, I have never believed for a moment that aliens built the pyramids, but I liked that idea for storytelling purposes. One of my favorite Star Trek episodes, “Who Mourns for Adonis?”, is based around a similar concept, only using Greek gods instead of Egyptian.) I loved the characters, too: wise and noble Commander Adama; his son, the too-serious-for-his-own-good Apollo; Apollo’s wisecracking wingman and best friend, Starbuck; Boomer, another Viper pilot who is always a reluctant participant in Starbuck and Apollo’s adventures; the cartoonish but delightful villain, Baltar; and Apollo’s beautiful sister Athena, as well as the refugee “socialtor” (i.e., space-hooker) Cassiopea, both of whom have a thing for the aforementioned Starbuck. They weren’t deep characters, but they were likable and highly appealing as character types. In addition, the chrome-plated, red-eyed Cylons scared the hell out of me (but in a good way), and I even liked the show’s overt religious elements, which, being based on the locally dominant faith of my home state, were always hauntingly familiar even though I didn’t quite understand why until years later.

Over the years, I’ve learned that many of Battlestar‘s problems were due to behind-the-scenes forces that conspired to make the series far less than it could have been: the network’s insistence that it be dumbed down and pitched at children, for example, and the constant budget battles that seem to plague all science-fiction projects on TV. I’ve always believed that if the Galactica premise had been properly handled, if the refugee scenario had been fleshed out and made realistic with more privation and less disco-dancing, if the show had just been made for adults instead of kids, then the series could’ve been something truly great.

Well, it seems that somebody somewhere must’ve read my thoughts, because now we have the 2004-05 version of Battlestar Galactica, and based on the four-hour pilot mini-series and the two regular production episodes I’ve seen, it is everything I’ve always said I wanted. It is grown-up and gritty; the logic of the show’s scenario has been carefully thought out and everything makes sense. There is a constant sense of impending doom and the villains are slick and scary Machievellians who display not a trace of buffoonery. You really believe that humanity is on the verge of being wiped out. But somehow, even though the new series is the fulfillment of all my Battlestar wishes, I still haven’t decided whether I like it. And I’m not entirely certain if my reluctance to accept the new show is because of loyalty to the old one, or if the new version really is missing something vital.

I’ll be back later to talk about what I like and don’t like about the new Galactica, and whether it’s ever really possible to do a satisfying remake of anything…