Bryan Singer to Direct Fox's GALACTICA Pilot!!

I am – Hercules!!

About 16 months after “Star Wars” made box office history in 1977, ABC, Universal and “Star Wars” special photographic effects supervisor John Dykstra launched an unauthorized TV version. Never mind how much the bad-guy robots looked like silver Darth Vaders; Starbuck sounded different enough from Skywalker and Apollo different enough from Solo that absolutely no credit need be given to George Lucas whatsoever.

Apparently neither the show’s half-baked “Chariots of the Gods” backstory nor its pitiously bland characterization and dialogue were enough keep young Tom DeSanto away from the set, because the two-hour Fox pilot for a possible new “Battlestar Galactica” series is going to be the next directoral effort for DeSanto’s longtime creative partner, Bryan Singer.

This will be the first TV project for Singer, who previously helmed some very good movies titled “The Usual Suspects,” “Apt Pupil” and “X-Men."

If “Galactica” goes to series, it’s expected to debut on Fox a year from autumn.

Singer and DeSanto would serve as executive producers of such a series, as would “X-Files”-“Night Visions” writers Dan Angel and Billy Brown.

Singer was in the sixth grade when “Galactica” debuted on ABC. One wonders exactly how old DeSanto was in 1978, for the producer describes himself as a “die hard” fan of the show who has dreamt of bringing it back for 10 years.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “The next-generation ‘Galactica’ will be set after the seventh-millennium time frame of the original series.”

(For the record, the proposed Fox series will not be the first next-generation "Galactica" series. That would be "Galactica 1980," a 10-episode wonder set decades after the original. If memory serves, it featured the offpsring of the original characters on Earth, battling Cylon evil with the help of "futuristic" motorcycles.)

"Our goal is to take the 'Galactica' franchise and move it forward in both style and character while bringing the scope and sensibility of epic science fiction filmmaking to the small screen," Singer told the trade paper.

No word yet on when Steven Soderbergh might be launching "Tales of The Gold Monkey: The Next Generation."