The short answer:
Star Wars for the kid in me,
Battlestar Galactica for the adult.
The long answer: It has to be
Star Wars (the original trilogy of IV, V, and VI) for the six-year-old in me whose first concept of romance was shaped by Han/Leia rather than Disney princesses, for the freakin' LIGHT sabres, for
every single one of Yoda's lines in Empire (which I still have imprinted into my
brain), for John Willliams' sweeping score and the invention of SFX, for the story that's grand and epic but so simple it's almost laughable: the Battle Between Good and Evil. Its brightly coloured archetypes - the wide-eyed All American farm boy, the tough-talking princess, the charming, sleazy mercenary cowboy, a democratic rebellion against an evil empire - are so hokey and earnest that there is something loveable about it, like a handstitched stuffed rabbit. And think about this: R2-D2 is one of the most entertaining characters in the movie, and
all he does is beep. How fantastic is that?
Battlestar Galactica... where do I begin? A huge cast of beautifully complex characters, Greek gods and the Iliad and the Odyssey and now the
Bible, superbly constructed conflict, moral ambiguity up the wazoo, heart attacks with every revelation since it pumps up the intensity like nothing else, dark dark
dark sci fi that always asks the tough questions about what it means to be human and to be worthy of surviving: these things are my cup of tea. As a remake of the old BSG, post-
Star Wars but harkening back to the darker sci fi and fantasy novels of the sixties, it trashes every single naive and over-simplified shred of idealism that
Star Wars engenders. And I love it. I laugh, I cry, I get stressed to the max, I occasionally squee, I swear at the TV, I go into cardiac arrest, I am blown away. My friends and I spend almost as much time debating the issues and the choices in BSG as we do watching the damn thing. Also, I would love any show that introduces the word 'frak' into my vocab.
Serenity/Firefly gets a special nod for being a wonderfully odd mix of things, all sort of slapped together in this rather fun, higgledy piggledy way, much like the world that the series takes place in. I really wish Joss Whedon could've had more of a free rein to do what he wanted with this, which was to make it much darker and character-based, not as much gunslinging fun and witty one-liners - although the one lines
are fantastic. Wash's dinosaur drama is still the best character intro/expositional plot bit that I have ever seen or probably ever will see.
And if we're going to talk sci fi Westerns, then I
have to mention
Cowboy Bebop. I know no other anime that has the same kind of utterly eclectic mix of maybe every movie, TV, and music genre
ever, but still manages to hold it all together. With music by Yoko Kanno, what's not to worship?
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