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Starbuck vs. Starbuck, or: Don’t Make Me Lose Face!

I promised myself I wouldn’t write about Andrew Breitbart’s unintentionally hilarious “Big Hollywood” site; it’s too easy and pointless a target, for reasons John Rogers has already explained. But I just can’t help linking to Dirk Benedict’s zillion-word essay on why the new Battlestar Galactica has “castrated” Starbuck. It’s too much (unintentional) fun to resist.

Now, granted, most of it isn’t even new, since the legendarily chest-thumpin’, cigar-huffin’ actor wrote pretty much the same piece four years ago for Dreamwatch magazine when the new Battlestar Galactica started. But transferring it to Big Hollywood opens it up for comments from the BH readership. Anyway, a few samples of the Benedictine Doctrine:

There was a time, I know I was there, when men were men, women were women and sometimes a cigar was just a good smoke. But 40 years of feminism have taken their toll. The war against masculinity has been won.

One thing is certain. In the new un-imagined, re-imagined world of “Battlestar Galactica” everything is female driven. The male characters, from Adama on down, are confused, weak and wracked with indecision, while the female characters are decisive, bold, angry as hell, puffing cigars (gasp!) and not about to take it any more.

Faceman is not the same as Facewoman. Nor does a Stardoe a Starbuck make. Men hand out cigars. Women “hand out” babies. And thus the world for thousands of years has gone ’round.

Given that any of the other A-Team members could easily have kicked Face’s ass — and I’m including Amy — I don’t see where he gets off thinking he’s so tough, but then, this is the same guy who thought that one of the best things about The A-Team is thatthe conservative politics of the show make it one of a kind in today’s soft liberal leftist world of sit-coms.” and claimed that “America is dying, basically, from what it feeds itself. Not smoking. We are a gluttonous, lazy, whining culture.” Oh, Dirk. I kind of like what Katee Sackhoff said in 2006, the last time this piece came up:

If you add up the amount of time Dirk Benedict spent playing the character, not the years obviously but the number of episodes, I’m more Starbuck than he is, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Incidentally, since I was talking about Galactica creator Glen A. Larson earlier, I was curious to see how he reacted to the new series. I discovered that he expressed vague reservations until Universal agreed to give him a producing credit on the new show, but as soon as that dispute was settled, he sensibly said that he was happy that “that they went to the core story, and that is what we started with. It’s great to see something have legs after all this time.” I would think it makes more sense to be happy that your show/character can still inspire a “re-imagining” after all these years, however far removed it is from (or better than) the original. (UPDATE: Of course, I should add that the real difference here is that the creator of the original show gets money from the remake; an actor doesn’t.)

Finally, even though the sound’s out of sync, here’s audio-visual proof that Face/Starbuck is a wuss: he gets thrown out of a window and the other three guys have to do the tough stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35KaEiuNgkQ

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