A long time ago — Sept. 17, 1978, to be exact — in a Hollywood far, far away, TV producer Glen Larson cracked the code for how to bring a Star Wars-size spectacle to the small screen with the series debut of Battlestar Galactica. Produced by Universal and premiering on ABC, Galactica follows the titular spaceship on its journey across the cosmos, transporting the human survivors of an apocalyptic attack in a distant galaxy to the mythical planet Earth, while their enemies, the robotic Cylons, give unrelenting pursuit.

Boasting a budget that was only $4 million less than George Lucas’s space opera (a reported $7 million versus $11 million) and a runtime that was almost a half-hour longer (148 minutes in its original airing versus 121 minutes), Galactica’s pilot episode, “Saga of a Star World,” made a ‘Forceful’ showing in the ratings and launched a sci-fi brand name that’s endured across four decades through additional TV shows, comic books, and video games. More important, Larson forced the usually forward-thinking Lucas to play catch up; two months after Galactica premiered, Star Wars made its initial foray into television in the form of The Star Wars Holiday Special — a legendary disaster that kept the franchise off the airwaves until the mid-’80s.

Larson’s success was something many in the industry had been trying to achieve since Lucas rewrote the rules for the movie industry in the summer of 1977. Paramount, for example, redoubled its efforts to get its own space-based franchise, Star Trek, out of dry dock, fast-tracking a new TV series that soon morphed into a feature film. Meanwhile, Larson — whose résumé at that point included shows like Alias Smith and Jones and Switch — reminded the powers that be at Universal about a sci-fi story he had pitched them back in the late ’60s called Adam’s Ark about a Howard Hughes-like recluse who assembles a group of Earth’s finest minds and blasts them into the cosmos to avoid a looming terrestrial apocalypse. At the time, the studio had little to no interest, but as Larson recounted in a 2009 interview, that changed practically overnight when kids across the country started talking about lightsabers and X-wings. “Star Wars comes along,” he said, “and every network desk has scripts on it.”

According to J.W. Rinzler’s book The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Lucas himself wound up in possession of Galactica’s pilot script when Universal sent a copy to his office in the fall of 1977, alerting him to what they were working on. It’s not as if the project was a total surprise to the filmmaker, of course. After all, the studio had already employed two key Star Wars collaborators in the preproduction process: concept artist Ralph McQuarrie and Industrial Light & Magic co-founder John Dykstra, who had had a falling out with Lucas during production.

View photos The robotic Cylons were the primary villains of Battlestar Galactica. (Photo: Universal Pictures/Courtesy: Everett Collection) More

Meanwhile, Larson had tweaked the original Adam’s Ark premise so that his futuristic “ark” began its journey in space rather than on Earth. He also tweaked the title to incorporate that all-important S word. In fact, the 500-page draft that landed on Lucas’s desk was titled Galactica: Saga of a Star World, and that title was just one of the things that the filmmaker objected to. As McQuarrie is quoted as saying in Rinzler’s account: “It was a problem for George, because they had an emperor, stormtroopers, rocket fighters; they had a lot of things that figured in Star Wars, and it was beginning to look like a Star Wars rip-off.” For his part, Dykstra fessed up to certain similarities in his work on both properties. “The effects were the same, and maybe I feel guilty about that,” he admitted in Dale Pollack’s seminal 1983 biography, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas.