the Wagnerian castle-dwellers of Battlestar Galactica.

I've a feeling that in 1978 CE the producers of Battlestar Galactica somehow got ahold of Wagner's Ring helmets and decided to build their Episode 11, The Young Lords, around these Siegfried costume props.


The fearless guerilla teen Kyle (Charles Bloom) confidently tells Colonial Warrior Starbuck that his siblings are a well-oiled army that've been successfully striking Cylon targets long before he gracelessly wrecked his Viper on their homeworld.

On the planet Attila (which given the context just also happens to refer to the latter chapters of the Burgundian Song of the Nibelungs) Starbuck is rescued by the operatic clad martial family which includes young Valkyrie-esque vixen Audrey Landers as Miri, the eldest daughter:

[yes, they ride unicorns!]

Of course flyboy Starbuck's flirty bad boy charm wins her over pretty quickly.


After using B-roll long shot of an actual Rhineland castle, there's closer interiors/exteriors of a Universal Studio's Stage 30 set I'm almost positive they used the year before in a 1977 CE S3 episode of The Bionic Woman, "Escape To Love" (or it's some other Californian medieval folly).

To compliment Kyle's winged helmet, we have his younger brothers' horned ones:


The original Battlestar Galactica's an amazingly weird mélange of ancient culture callbacks, polytheistic/monotheistic religious tropes (shooting at Luxor, the tribes named after Hellenic constellations, Mormon wedded "sealing", a satanic Count Iblis, etc.), and explorative/migrant reconnective spacefaring possibilities, so to see Germanic Romanticism with its amplification of the Norse Lore getting Volsung'd into it this way, at least for one episode of a TV space opera, is something of a ridiculous delight in terms of watching the show's retro-ness unfold in the now.

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Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.

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