What better way to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Battlestar Galactica this week than by disillusioning fans? We'll do that by letting you know just how unoriginal the show's robotic bad guys really were. It's not enough that they looked like Darth Vader's cheaper, silver cousins - now we find out that they were originally intended to have been very similar to Doctor Who's favorite alien cyborgs, as well.As part of a retrospective look at the creation of BSG's Cylons, original designer Andrew Probert revealed the hidden Dalek-eque origin that we were all spared:
Originally the Galactica motion picture (for overseas distribution) was filmed with dialog explaining that the Cylons were creatures. They were blind and created helmet scanners to see. That explains the helmets... The living Cylons were changed to robots for the TV series because of an hourly body-count limitation for prime-time television. There was, however, no limit to how many robots could be ‘killed' per hour so they became robots and dialog was revised to explain it all.
It's not often you'll hear us saying this, but thank the Gods for network TV standards and practices. It's not that we're against the idea of Daleks with legs per se, but if the Cylons had been armor-wearing aliens in the original show, it's unlikely that we would've gotten the various twists, turns and headfraks provided by the sleeper agents in Ron Moore's reinvention of the show. the true history of the cylons [Darth Mojo]