Battlestar Galactica fans who space out during the show's end credits are in danger of missing five seconds of bloody good fun.

At the end of each episode, animated versions of the show's creators hack and slash each other in new and creative ways. Blood spurts, faces melt, bones dissolve – over the years, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick have been eaten by sharks, beheaded by knights, shot by Cylons and mutilated by many other crazy methods.

The brutally funny black-and-white bits are made by self-taught animator Jerry Hultsch, a high school buddy of Eick's who has been cooking them up since the series' inception. Working alone for the first three seasons, Hultsch used imaginative methods to spoof sci-fi and horror flicks and poke fun at the Galactica brain trust's creative process.

"I would take hammers to watermelons to make blood splatter," laughs Hultsch.

Many couch potatoes might miss the clips, known as end-credit logos in industry jargon, if they're busy switching channels or shutting off their TVs before the final credits roll. But die-hard Galactica fans who sit through to the bitter end are rewarded each week with a gory glimpse behind the scenes at R&D TV, Moore and Eick's production company. The cartoony clips deliver a refreshing blast of B-movie humor that's a perfect foil for the space opera's somber themes.

While every TV show has a show-closing production logo, they're usually not as creative as Galactica's. In one minisode, Moore squishes Eick into a ball and shoots him into the office basketball hoop.

Other than a few things made in 2-D animation, all elements in Hultsch's clips are real. Actual people model for Eick's and Moore's bodies in front of a green screen. Then the actors' heads are erased frame by frame in Photoshop and After Effects, and cylindrical necks are pasted onto the headless bodies. Photographs of Eick's and Moore's heads are slapped onto the necks and their expressions are painted. The whole process takes as long as cel animation.

"Everyone who sees these logos thinks they're [computer generated] because the precision is so exact," said Eick in an e-mail interview. "But the truth is they're better than CG – more personalized, more human, more artful than CG can ever be."

Over the past three seasons, Hultsch has played every role in the production of 50 skits, including writer, designer, animator, voice actor and Foley artist.

"I'm pushing 40 and I was staying up several nights in a row to make deadlines," says Hultsch. "It's an unbelievable amount of work for one person." For season four, Hultsch started an animation studio in Arizona and hired a team of 20 interns to work on the clips. What used to take him up to four weeks now takes the studio five days.

As a result, this season's end-credit logos will be a bit more elaborate than previous efforts, riffing on movies from different genres and paying homage to great directors like Alfred Hitchcock, Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. A special guest appearance by the Galactica cast is planned for an upcoming animation.

The idea for the over-the-top logos came after Eick saw a stop-motion short made by Hultsch that featured Star Wars action figures. Eick was so impressed he asked the former actor to make a logo for R&D TV.

Originally Eick wanted his and Moore's 2-D selves to arm-wrestle and break off each others' appendages each week, but Hultsch thought it would be more interesting if they offed one another in different ways after every episode.

"I thought about what would happen if we had cartoon avatars who could metaphorically 'kill' each other the way Ron and I would respectfully strangle each other during a story debate or edit room wrestle," Eick said. "When the time came for us to decide what the show's company logo would be, I called Jerry and we started talking about the insanity of a concept where not only would you have this violent, irreverent 'story' that must be told in no more than five seconds, but that it would change every week. I still can't believe he pulled it off and the truth is he's the one bleeding and dying to make it happen. But hey. It sure is funny."

The big cheeses at the Sci-Fi Channel have been so impressed with the logos that they're now negotiating with Hultsch to make webisodes for the channel's website.

Beyond the novelty of seeing a new animated bit each week, there's another bonus for Galactica fans: Hultsch embeds easter eggs in the animated closers. The names of directors and writers of movies being spoofed can be seen on binders atop file cabinets in the office scenes. Hultsch drives any cars that appear in the background, is pictured in a photo on the execs' office wall and plays a nerdy thug who appears in animations from seasons one and four.

While Hultsch likes making cameos, he said what he enjoys most is "robbing David Eick of his masculinity any time I can."