"BATTLESTAR CRAP-TICA"

The original draft was written on an electric typewriter, which lacked square bracket [] characters. Unlike the draft it was a sequel to, this draft did (thankfully) have right margins. All spellings, punctuation, capitalizations, weird switching between script and prose, etc. are as in the original.

You have been warned.

There are those who say that what we thought came from down here actually came from out there; that the technology of the Egyptians, the Toltecs, and the Myans was not our own. There are those who say that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive.

And then, there are those who don't say that, and for them, we present ...

The pylons engage the CRAP-tica, which in case you missed the last episode, is now the Ponderosa. Pylon shots fly every which way, scratching off the paint on all sides of the Battlestar. When the smoke clears, and the pylons decide to leave for the day, a change has taken place.

They all turn their heads slowly toward the window as the camera zooms in on the stars and the band plays eerie music.

Once more, the band plays some eerie music. Meanwhile, Starbuff has his hands full shooting at tie fighters and trying to drive Darth Vader's theme out of his head.

Pushing a little button on his panel marked "Return from crossing the network barrier - do not press," he suddenly disintegrates and reappears in the universal universe, galaxy ABC. Naturally, he has no trouble locating the CRAP-tica (after all, he only has a whole galaxy to explore).

Soon enough, all the wipers and their pilots are on board.

The two wipers speed noisily through the soundless vacuum of space toward the pylon base tar, which is still the better part of a light-secton away. Suddenly, a big old cloud of things are sighted heading straight for their wiper craft.

Appalling presses his "TURBO" button and speeds off into battle. Starbuff follows his example, but as he presses his "TURBO" button, he is suddenly aware of just how fast he is travelling.

The wiper suddenly comes around in a long, sweeping arc, coming up right behind the pylons. The superchanged Turbos then shut off.

Appalling closes his hatch, presses Turbo, and launches out over his own father.

Four tiny figures launch from one side of the CRAP-tica in time with the bacground music. Four trails of steam follow the craft from behind, the useless remnants of once-powerful fuel. Naturally, the exhaust wouldn't spread out in a big fan, because that's what it's supposed to do in space! But what can you expect from a people who fight galactic battles like they would World War II dogfights?

They all push their Turbo buttons and speed off toward the pylon mass. As they approach, each pylon raider fires a blast in a random direction for no apparent reason, and doesn't fire again for quite some time.

Alpo-low makes the first move. He pushes fire once, and watches the twin "laser" shots jump from pylon to pylon, destroying sixteen total. "Not bad," he thinks, "But I could've done better."

Next is Appalling. He decides to try a new twist, and takes a shot at a reflective meteor which was conveniently placed directly behind his wiper. The shots bounce off the meteor, killin twenty-seven pylons. "Well done," he thinks as he pushes a button on his panel which causes a hand to appear and give himself a pat on the back.

Now, it's KaBoomer's turn.

Now, it's Athinner's turn. Sexy, stupid Athinner's turn. She's the only wiper pilot in the fleet that has the Appalling (sic) average of .95 pylons per shot! She's frequently called, "Old waste waist."

This time, her average is a little better; she averages 1.02 pylons per shot. This time, she shoots down 24 pylons with 23 shots. She's not the best aim in the fleet, but they needed a dull-shooter on their patrol when she was hired.

As the pylon lowers his her head, Starbuff gives her a good swift kick to her breadbasket. The pylon falls backward onto her read end.

Starbuff enters his wiper, closes the hatch, and engages a myriad of controls on his instrument panel.

Soon, all six wiper fighters are back on board, and Starbuff is given a relaxant to help him recover from the in-flight movie ("Planet of the female computers" - chosen by Antagonice, of course).

A hush falls over the crew as the band plays dramatic music.

Instantly, a single blob of chocolate fudge springs from the firing port on the front of the CRAP-tica. The blob flies ever closer to its target and ...

It hits! The entire enemy base tar is enveloped in brown gook! Instantly, the corrosive sugars in the chocolate fudge ice cream torpedo begin eating away at the base tar, and when they are done, nothing remains.

He walks across the Battlestar until he comes to the lab.

• In the original, the spoken lines are unindented on the first line of text but indented by 3 spaces on the subsequent lines of text. There seems to be no way to do that kind of indenting in HTML. I don't even know if it's possible in Microsoft Word.
• The Recon Viper's computer in Galactica was named C.O.R.A.. For some reason, while I was writing this, I thought its name was Alice. Hence, "Antagonice."
• "Carrion" was supposed to be a play on "Carillon." In the series pilot, Carillon was the pleasure planet of the Ovions. When I wrote this, however, I had Carolon confused with the 12 colony planets. Shame on me.
• "Food disks" came from an episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
• At the time I wrote this, I had not yet taken high school physics. My knowledge of special relativity came entirely from science TV shows, like Sagan's Cosmos and this one PBS special on relativity with Peter Ustinov. I refused to accept the notion of contraction in the direction of motion, preferring instead to assume that a fast-moving object merely "curved" in all directions. I later learned the error of my ways.
• "Treated glyceryl" was supposed to be soap.
• Veeblefitzers (officially spelled "veeblefetzers") I got from Mad Magazine.
• In my senior year at high school, I described myself as ... a socialist. What it really was, of course, was that I was envious of everyone who had more than me.
• You kids these days are probably too young to remember, but back in his heyday Steve Martin's catchphrase was, "Well excuuuuuuuse me!"
• "Freeze runners!" is, of course, a reference to Logan's Run.
• "Your hand is purple!" came from a Bert & Ernie sketch on Sesame Street. Bert accidentally submerged his hand in purple paint, so Ernie covered it up with a mitten. Then he had to cover up Bert's other hand with a mitten so they'd match. Then since Bert had mittens on, Ernie put a round-the-neck long scarf on him, and a long heavy fur-lined coat, and pulled the coat's fur-lined hood over Bert's head. Now they were ready to go for a walk out in the bright sunny summer air.
• The Egyptian look of the Viper pilots' helmets on Galactica wasn't accidental. The series was rife with Mormon imagery, and ancient Egyptian civilization played a huge part in the Mormon mythos. Hence the Giza pyramids in the second episode, when they visited Kobol. (And "Kobol" came from "Kolob," the planet the Mormons' Heavenly Father lived on.)
• And how do we know that the pylons used the same kinds of handguns that the Colognial Warriors do? Because in Galactica, the Cylon and Colonial handguns both fired blue beams!
• "Just took a guess" came from an episode of The Partridge Family. Danny went on a date with Jody Foster. The two of them had previously expressed their affection for one another by punching each other in the arm. So when Keith guessed that Danny had punched her in the arm on their date, Danny replied "Were you following me?!" — to which Keith replied "Just took a guess."
• At the time I wrote this, I didn't realize that fudge was an actual thing. I just thought that "chocolate fudge" meant ice cream that was more chocolately than "chocolate."