Australia - The Battlestar Galactica Event

[GoldCylon]

Imagine finding a gateway to another world at your local shopping mall. Turn a corner and find yourself walking through the corridor of a giant spaceship. Through the windows are visions of space stations, galactic dogfights and giant spiders. Then you find yourself face-to-face with Colonial Warriors of the Battlestar Galactica.

The above scenario wasn't a dream. It was experienced by many Australian shoppers in the late 1970s. Okay! So it wasn’t really a spaceship. It was a promotional display to promote the Australian cinema release of Battlestar Galactica. The views from the windows were dioramas. The colonial warriors were mannequins, with sculptured heads resembling Lorne Greene, Jane Seymour and Herb Jefferson Jr.

What makes this special is that it was a Battlestar Galactica promotion exclusive to Australia. Constructed by the Sydney FX company Animads, it featured the model work of David Moss and future Oscar winner John Cox.

Flashback to 1979, Star Wars had left me with an appetite for anything with spaceships, monsters and lasers. So my curiosity was sparked when word of Battlestar Galactica arrived. The first inkling came from a photo I thought was from Star Wars. Closer inspection credited the still to something called Battlestar Galactica. It’s also possible that I saw lobby cards for the film during a cinema visit in the 1978 Christmas holidays. I was intrigued. Was this the rumored sequel to Star Wars or a direct rip-off? Time and George Lucas’ lawyers would only tell.

As the school holidays rolled up, ads for the new Science Fiction movie Battlestar Galactica blared from radio and television. Toy store shelves where cluttered with Galactica dolls, spaceships and water rockets. Very exciting indeed! Yet another surprise waited. My local shopping mall celebrated the school holidays with contests, puppet shows, and a mysterious display called ‘Space World’. With enthusiasm I journeyed to my local shopping mall to experience the aforementioned adventure.

Yahrens pass, life presents its own series of trials before a nostalgic yearning for childhood emerges. Browsing through a second-hand bookstore I came across a 1980 issue of Starlog. Squeezed within the infinite wisdom of Kerry O’Quinn, David Gerrold and Howard Zimmerman was an article about the Space World display.













The article credited the display to ‘Aussie FX’ men David Pride and John Cox.
Some internet detective work (How did we survive without it?) revealed that John Cox and David Pride where still active in the Australian film industry. Eager to find out the story behind this exclusively Australian chapter of Battlestar Galactica’s history, I organized interviews with Cox and Pride via telephone and internet. Following Space World, John Cox further developed his SFX skills on the Australian features Mad Max 2 and The Return of Captain Invincible. In 1995 he received an Academy Award for his work on Babe. He is now a member of the Academy of Motion Picture arts and Sciences with full voting rights. David Pride’s work can also be seen in Australian and International films. Notable mentions include: Time Guardian, Burke and Wills, Dark City and The Matrix.


Pride and Cox have fond memories of their early special effects work at the Sydney based SFX company Animads. John’s employment with the company came after a long campaign. ‘Basically I took a portfolio of some of the work I’d been doing at home around to various production companies,’ John recalls. That particular place (Animads) was one of the only places in the phonebook. I went back about four times over a period of nine/ten months. And kept doing things and taking them back and showing them. And then got offered work on the Galactica display.

David Pride recalls Animads work prior to the Galactica display. Much of their work would be familiar to Australian audiences. “Animads was responsible for a number of costume suits including the” St. George Dragon”, “Bucky Beaver” and “Tuffy Tooth”. As far as commercials, they did the usual run of biscuits, soft drinks and candy.

With his Animads’ work mainly focusing on prop building, David is unaware of the business dealings behind the Space World display. ‘I don’t remember how they worked the “rights to exhibit” deal; just that they wanted the displays’ opening to coincide with the premier of the film. John is also unsure of the projects origin, ‘I honestly don’t know the background of it at all. It was already done when I was given the job there. It was to tie-in with the launch of the film. So we only had so many weeks to do it in. There was a decision made to make it a portable type thing to be taken around to various shopping centers to tie-in with the opening of that movie’.












With a display promoting Battlestar Galactica, one would think Animads would be supplied with a bevy of design material from Universal Pictures. But as John recalls: ‘Not a single thing. There where some photos of the characters in it and we may have had a photo of one of the Vipers. That would have been about the extent of it. It (the film) hadn’t come out so we knew nothing about it. There was just nothing around at that time. Starlog was the only magazine that was out. Cinefx hadn’t even started at that point. Getting advance information and photos it just didn’t exist at all. The photos where still big 8 by 10 b/w or colour lobby cards. We had one photo of a group of the actors in front of a panel/control panel and that is what we attempted to copy for the last scene. We sculptured the heads for three characters I think. Commander Adama, Boomer and I think there was a girl there. It could have been Jane Seymour’s character or it could have been a generic girl.’

Fortunately the intuitiveness of Animads workers compensated for the lack of visual references by inventing their own Battlestar Galactica settings. I recall some displays featuring a tiny disclaimer – ‘Not Featured in the film Battlestar Galactica.’ Further reference material was found at the local toy store. Animads worker Phil Colville (sic) purchased and built some of Monogram’s Battlestar Galactica model kits. These where placed within the dioramas just to give them that extra Galactica touch. Apparently such economizing is not unusual to the film industry. The Galactica episode Hand of God featured Monogram’s Cylon Raider model kits. Even George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic economized with TIE fighter model kits for The Empire Strikes Back.

So impressive was Animad’s original work, that I was disappointed one image wasn’t in the film. It featured a Colonial Viper entwined in a giant spider’s web. Since John Cox couldn’t remember the spider I queried David Pride. ‘There was a giant spider in the display,’ he confirms. The legs were rigged to a rotary cam shaped wheel which was irregular in shape to make the legs move randomly. All this stuff seems real basic but it was a lot of fun to work on at the time.’

David also had fun constructing the blue space station. ‘I did most of the cladding, molding of bits and assembly,’ he explains. The main body was light ply and cast resin detail. There was only one motor turning the main shaft which in turn ran other opposing movements via bevel gears. All the lighting was small car tail light bulbs pointed at groups of plastic fiber optic bundles. I rescued the model from being thrown out a number of years ago and still have it in storage.









Accompanying David and John in their model making was model maker Philip Colevile. ‘Phil was very good at kit bashing finding bits from various plastic model kits to stick on things,’ John comments. ‘To make it look busy and interesting. Phil sort of detailed everything architecturally. David came up with all the solutions for things like the endless corridor’. The cityscape thing that was probably the first professional model I’d been asked to work on. It was really just cutting up styrene and bending plastic rods and tubes to make it look like a city. Very simplistic at the time and then David installed a raising platform that came through a circle on the ground. Two doors opened and a platform rose up and I’m pretty certain we built some little Vipers that sat on top of that. It may have even rotated as well. The top of the tower rotated.’

In today’s world of high-tech special effects, the construction of Space World might be an easy feat for model makers. John recalls the task being more challenging in 1978. ‘Fiber optics at that time where like really brand spanking new. No one knew much about them and we weren’t able to get much variation. You were only able to get only one, or two, sizes of tubing. It would have been so much easier if we could have gone and brought these Christmas trees you can buy now that already have a colour wheel that rotates. We had to build everything from scratch so something that is now really simplistic cost us a couple of thousand dollars to build.

With their hard work completed, the Animads crew were treated to a fitting reward- a free screening of the Battlestar Galactica film. ‘We saw the film. it was at the century on George St down central end of Sydney and it was in Sensurround. The whole theatre shook when the spaceships were on. It was great. It wasn’t as good as Star Wars of course but it was still great,’ John remembers with childlike glee. David shares John’s nostalgia: ‘Of course we all waited with baited breath for the film’s release. It was a time right at the beginning of the sci-fi / special effects revival and we couldn’t get enough of that kind of thing. To work on projects like this was “every kid’s dream’.

Australian Galactica fans, which missed the display in 1978, are probably wondering what became of the display. Apparently much of the models are kept at David Pride’s rural property. Exchanging emails with David Pride, I encouraged him to search his workshop for the remnants of the face moulds. Unfortunately with passing of time, the molds resemble mummified human remains found in the tombs of Kobol.

So are the photos featured here all that remains of Australia’s early contribution to the Battlestar Galactica universe. I’m certainly not the only one to remember the Battlestar Galactica Space World display. Somewhere out there in cyberspace must be others who recall the display. Perhaps they snapped the odd photo or zapped the odd Cylon or giant spider.

[FLIGHTLDR SERPENTINE]

Very interesting. I'd love to see wide shots of the displays with characters. I see definite Star Trek TOS and Space 1999 influences in their model work, too.

[GoldCylon]

It would have been very cool to see, but in the model realm there was nothing Galactica related at all. The space station was for sale about 2 years ago on eBay, and I sent the seller a question about the piece, and they never replied.