joebear said:
Long seen as a cheap knock off of Star Wars, Galactica has finally come into its own as the most-watched science fiction show on television, taking in 3.1 million viewers compared to just 3.03 million for UPN's Star Trek: Enterprise -- a significant accomplishment because Enterprise is on a broadcast network, while Galactica is only on cable.
Taken from IMDB
http://www.imdb.com :
There were contemporary news reports that either George Lucas or his studio considered legal action against the producers over alleged similarities with the Star Wars saga. Although "BSG" was indeed created to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars, nothing came of this controversy.
It's also possible that they didn't think it would be a good idea to accuse someone of stealing your ideas when you had "borrowed" ideas from someone else. According to IMDB, Star Wars was:
Derived from (among other things) the Akira Kurosawa film "Kakushi toride no san akunin" (1958). Obi-Wan Kenobi was modeled after a Samurai warrior, and C-3PO and R2-D2 are derived from a couple of petty crooks he conscripted to help rescue a princess. Two characters in the Japanese film (also known as "The Hidden Fortress") were split to produce four in "Star Wars" - aspects of 'Toshiro Mifune' 's samurai character became Ben Kenobi and Han Solo, and aspects of the Princess's character became Luke and Leia. (Early production art exists showing a female lead character rather than Luke.)
And:
Alejandro Jodorowsky had originally planned on filming Dune in the early-'70s, and had enlisted the help of Jean Giraud and H.R. Giger to create the movie's visual style. According to Jodorowsky, "The project was sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Their message was 'not Hollywood enough'. There was intrigue, plunder. The storyboard was circulated among all the big studios. Later, the visual aspect ofStar Wars (1977) strangely resembled our style."
Ultimately, I think it's possible that the threat to sue was only a ploy to avoid getting sued by Universal Pictures:
The origin of R2-D2 can be found in the "drones" Huey, Dewey, and Louie from the film Silent Running (1972). Upon meeting Douglas Trumbull, director and special effects chief on Silent Running (1972), George Lucas commented on how much he liked the designs of Douglas Trumbull's two-footed robots in the film (which were operated by bilateral amputees). Four years later, a functionally similar design appeared as R2-D2 in "Star Wars". Universal Studios, the distributor of Silent Running (1972), noted the similarity between the robots (and the similarity of "Star Wars" (1977) to the Buck Rogers (1939) serials of the '30s), and promptly sued 20th Century Fox for infringement. The lawsuit was eventually settled when Fox countersued over Battlestar Galactica (1978) (TV), which bore a striking resemblance to "Star Wars".
