I was surprised and amused recently to learn that Galactica 1980 — the abortive first effort to revive the Battlestar Galactica franchise, years before anyone ever heard of that Ron Moore fellow — is coming to DVD. I was less amused when I got a look at the cover art and saw that some marketing genius somewhere has tagged the show as “The Original Battlestar Galactica‘s Final Season.”

Come on, guys… hasn’t the reputation of the original Galactica suffered enough in recent years? G80 was a spin-off of the original show, not another season, and I don’t know of any fans of Classic BG who consider it to be “official” in any way. Mostly, we try to forget it ever happened. Saying that it’s part of the original series is like claiming that you haven’t seen every episode of M*A*S*H until you’ve seen AfterM*A*S*H, too. Or, as my buddy Dave put it when I IM’d him with this news:

Talk about spin in order to sell more DVDs. Let’s face it, if they called it, “A really crap show that has almost no connection to the original series, and is so low budget they couldn’t afford Cylon costumes, but it’s cool if you’re a fan of Cousin Oliver,” I don’t think many people would buy it.

Yeah, that about says it all…