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Kobol or COBOL?
People laughed as the Galactica universe's history unfolded. "By the Lords of Kobol" Commander Adama and his people were fond of saying. Kobol? What kind of name is that for a world?
It immediately reminded many programmers of the COBOL programming language, which was devised by a committee in the late 1950s and early 1960s. COBOL, meaning COmmon Business Oriented Language, was developed for the first mainframe computers used in industry for accounting applications and industrial data processing.
COBOL simplified many programming tasks which had been tedious and complicated, but was itself deemed cumbersome by programmers who wanted more efficient languages. COBOL remains in widespread use today, even on PCs, but it is considered the first of the business programming languages and all others have been influenced by COBOL in some way.
The Lords of COBOL are the original committee members who set down the requirements for the language, determining for generations to come how programmers would write their application code. Love it or hate it, you had to do things the COBOL way for many years.
Technically savvy fans of the original Battlestar Galactica series have always assumed that KOBOL was inspired by COBOL.
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The Girls of Galactica
The original show featured three beautiful ladies: Jane Seymour at Apollo's wife Serena, Maren Jensen as Apollo's sister Athena, and Laurette Spang as Cassiopeia.
The Ron Moore Galactica features Katee/Katie Sackhoff as the gender-changed Starbuck, Grace Park as the gender-changed (and species-changed) Boomer, and Mary McDonnell as (now former) President Laura Roslin.
Other women appeared on the original show, including Anne Lockhart as Sheba, but Ron Moore has beefed up the cheese cake in his casting.
Tricia Helfer plays the Cylon "Six", Lucy Lawless has appeared as another Cylon model, Kandyse McClure plays the fickle Anastasia Dualla, and Nicki Clyne plays Cally
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Battlestar Galactica fans have an opportunity to win one of five copies of Richard Hatch's collection of essays So Say We All: An Unauthorized Collection of Thoughts and Opinions on Battlestar Galactica in the SF-FANDOM BSG ESSAY CONTEST.
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Battlestar Galactica emerged from the chaos of the Hollywood feeding frenzy which erupted in the wake of the initial success of George Lucas' Star Wars. Released in 1977, Star Wars proved that quality space opera could be produced on a relatively low budget. A sub-genre or step-child of science fiction, space opera translated the old swashbuckling adventure genre into a spaceships-and-rayguns setting. Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were the most famous space opera heroes for decades, but their popularity helped spawn dozens of low-budget space opera movies in the 1950s.
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The classic space opera movies were characterized by spinning disk-shaped alien ships and cigar-sleek human spaceships (usually sporting the American flag). Space stations used classic spinning wheel designs, and often enough the rayguns looked more like .38 calibre snub-nosed police issue weapons. The 1960s gave us boring melodrama in the form of 2001: A Space Odyssey and exciting but socially condemning Planet of the Apes. Oh, there were other movies, such as Journey to the far side of the sun, but they cheated. The fun had been sucked out of space opera's sails.
But Lucas changed all that. What's more, he invented a whole new technology for creating special effects, and suddenly the technological leap which had been achieved on the big screen seemed feasible for television. Now, television space opera had been around for years, but mostly in the form of BBC-produced low-budget SF adventure shows and some independent productions. The best of the lot was Space: 1999, which was hard to find on American television.
John Dykstra, who had worked on the special effects for Star Wars, teamed up with Glen A. Larson (better known, perhaps, for The Six Million Dollar Man) to bring a Star Wars-quality production to television. They wanted to create a serial-length, militaristic SF epic drama that would portray a new but familiar-seeming world to the American television audience. Unlike Lucas, who divorced his story from as much as possible, Larson and Dykstra decided to dip into populist archaeology. They drew upon the writing of Erik Van Daniken (author of Chariots of the Gods) for inspiration.
Van Daniken's premise was simple: huge ancient monuments and undecipherable symbols and emblems left by forgotten cultures around the world imply that Earth may have been colonized many thousands of years ago by members of or survivors of a farflung space-faring civilization who lost contact with their homeworld and devolved into our historical human cultures. Van Daniken's ideas have been mirrored and filtered by numerous writers through some pretty bizarre theories, but the core concept remains essentially valid in the eyes of many enthusiasts even today.
Now, if we assume for the sake of inspiration that all pyramid-like structures around the world are the result of a collective memory of more ancient structures, and that many ancient mythologies are garbled versions of a once vibrant social history, we can devise a fictional past in which survivors of an advanced civilization find Earth and settle down here. In fact, many science fiction writers have published books and short stories based on that premise -- Van Daniken wasn't really proposing anything new. He just figured out a way to make more money off the idea than the science fiction community.
So Dykstra and Larson cooked up a fantastic ancient history in which Earth was really just the last of a group of colonies established by a once-advanced world, Kobol. The civilization of Kobol was ancient, and it experienced a long and prosperous period in which Kobol was ruled by nine leaders in succession, the Lords of Kobol. The ninth and last Lord of Kobol initiated the great migration which led to the founding of the Twelve Colonies and the colony on Earth.
The fact that there were thirteen colonies implies there were thirteen major sub-groups among Kobol's people. Some of the distinctions between different groups were characterized through physical attributes peculiar to those groups. Some of the distinctions were characterized through differences in language. But the thirteenth colony, apparently, was comprised of many people from the other twelve sub-groups. We can infer that because there are so many different ethnic groups among Earth's people.
The knowledge of the colony on Earth was somehow conveyed to the Twelve Colonies, which means that there must have been communication between the Earth colonists and their brethren in space for some period of time. But eventually, that contact was lost. Nonetheless, as we supposedly retained glimpses of our ancient brothers in our traditional epics and religious writings, so the Twelve Colonies preserved memories of us in their traditions. And by scouring the ancient words, Commander Adama was able to give hope to his people and promise to lead them to Earth.
Well, that was the premise of the show. It served the producers and writers well enough when they needed to devise character names and terminology, but they were often made the butt of jokes by people in the general media who didn't get the concept. We'll explore some of the these themes in other pages. Click on the links below for more.
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