Battlestar Galactica showed fandom a better way

polygon.com:

Twenty years ago, writer-producer Ronald D. Moore refused to give a crowd of angry, disappointed sci-fi nerds what they wanted.

This was Galacticon in Los Angeles, a convention organized by actor Richard Hatch to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Battlestar Galactica’s maiden broadcast. Hatch had spent the past eight years rallying fans of the 1978 space opera in which he’d played the daring Colonial warrior Apollo, hoping to convince Universal that the property was ripe for revival. And Hatch wasn’t fooling around — according to So Say We All: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Battlestar Galactica by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Hatch spent $50,000 out of pocket to finance and direct a proof-of-concept short film called Battlestar Galactica: The Second Coming. It was essentially a pilot for a sequel series in which he and a few other actors from the original would reprise their roles alongside a new generation of characters. The Second Coming was exactly the sort of “legacy sequel” that would become popular years later in the 2010s, and the fans were fully behind it, with many even donating their own costumes, props, and visual effects expertise to the project. A trailer was screened at conventions in 1999, to what Hatch described as standing ovations.

What Moore screened for fans at Galacticon in October 2003 got a considerably cooler reception. (“Polite, but hostile,” as Kate O’Hare described it in the LA Times.) Moore had come with five minutes of footage from the totally reimagined Battlestar Galactica miniseries that was due to premiere on cable that December. The audience knew better than to get their hopes up, and so did Moore — he and co-producer David Eick’s script for the miniseries