Battlestar Galactica fans have been waiting years for this, but no one would expect that we’d get the first trailer and announcement of the release date only days from the beginning of the series. The long-promised BSG prequel continues the adventures of the young Will Adama that we were introduced to in Razor Flashback (not the one from Caprica).
All we’ve really been wanting is more story; a further exploration of the lore of the amazing television series. From the new trailer, it seems were getting so much more. Where Razor was a dense, dark, low-budget web series, Blood and Chrome looks like it has production values which exceed the original series, really outlining the idea that the humans’ technology was more sophisticated before the Cylon attack at the beginning of the series.
This one was produced for Syfy by Universal Cable Productions in conjunction with Machinima, who will get to carry it first. The short series (in total about the length of a feature film) is divided into 7 installments which will be released on Machinima weekly beginning this Friday.
The synopsis is thus:
This highly anticipated chapter in the Battlestar Galactica saga takes place in the midst of the first Cylon war. As the battle between humans and their creation, the sentient robotic Cylons, rages across the 12 colonial worlds, gifted fighter pilot, William Adama (Luke Pasqualino, The Borgias), finds himself assigned to one of the most powerful battlestars in the Colonial fleet: the Galactica. Full of ambition and hungry for action, Adama quickly finds himself at odds with his co-pilot, the battle-weary officer Coker (Ben Cotton, Alcatraz). With only 47 days left in his tour of duty, Coker desires an end to battle as much as Adama craves its onset.
“With its top-notch storytelling, pulse-pounding action, and cutting-edge visual effects, Blood & Chrome is the perfect extension of the Battlestar Galactica universe,” said SyFy exec Mark Stern. “We are thrilled to see this hotly-anticipated event premiere on Machinima, an online network that is unparalleled in its delivery of high-class digital content to millions of viewers.”
He’s not wrong there, Machinima has been on the bleeding edge of web series with great writing and production values lately, and this will be one more feather in their cap.
More importantly, however, it is one step closer to legitimizing the short-form science fiction serial. It’s exciting to see these get better and better each year as the networks, websites, and advertisers find the value in short, high-quality content. We can look forward to the trend continuing, I think.
Blood and Chrome premieres on Machinima November 9, 2012, and will be shown in its entirety on Syfy in the spring.
