Battlestar Galactica is an American science fiction franchise created by Glen A. Larson. The franchise began with the original television series in 1978, and was followed by a brief sequel TV series in 1980, a line of book adaptations, original novels, comic books, a board game, and video games. A remake of Battlestar Galactica aired in December 2003, beginning with a two-part, three-hour miniseries developed by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. This led to a weekly TV series which ran for four seasons between 2004 and 2009. A prequel TV series, Caprica, aired in 2010. A two-hour pilot for a second spin-off series, Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, was filmed, with plans of continuing it into a regular series. The series was eventually scrapped. All Battlestar Galactica productions share the premise that in a distant part of our galaxy, a human civilization lives on a group of planets known as the Twelve Colonies, to which they have migrated from their ancestral homeworld of Kobol. The Twelve Colonies have warred for decades with a cybernetic race known as the Cylons, whose goal is the extermination of the human race. The Cylons offer peace to the humans, which proves to be a ruse. With the aid of a human named Baltar (an inadvertent aid in the 2003 version), the Cylons carry out a massive attack on the Twelve Colonies and on the Colonial Fleet of starships that protect them. These attacks devastate the Colonial Fleet, lay waste to the Colonies, and virtually destroy their populations. Scattered survivors flee into outer space aboard available spaceships. Of the entire Colonial battle fleet, only the Battlestar Galactica, a gigantic battleship and spacecraft carrier (analogous to an aircraft carrier), appears to have survived the Cylon conflagration. Under the leadership of Commander Adama, the Galactica and the pilots of "Viper" fighters lead a fugitive fleet of survivors in search of the fabled thirteenth colony known as Earth.
