Just over forty years ago, Frank Frazetta hit his cultural peak. As far as Frank’s work reaching a mass audience in the USA, his concept art for the original Battlestar Galactica TV series, which was reproduced in the pages of TV Guide. was his high-water mark.

As I’ve pointed out before, in regard to Frazetta’s work on the Buck Rogers comics, most people don’t associate him with space opera. However, when he did venture into the realm of interplanetary adventure, Frank was a force to be reckoned with.

Frazetta had been approached by George Lucas to do concept art for Star Wars. Frank, who made several house payments by way of his movie posters for Hollywood in the the early ‘60s, wanted the same deal he was getting from every other client by the mid-’70s: creative freedom and ownership of the originals. Lucas wouldn’t go for it. His loss.

The producers of Battlestar Galactica were more accommodating. As Frank put it in 2001:

"The simple answer is that I got to paint what I wanted and I retained my originals and my copyrights. I wouldn't have been able to keep either if I had taken the Star Wars job and I would not have had much creative freedom. That would have been a step backward for me."

As far as we know, Frank did four BSG paintings. All of them were published, in black-and-white, as ads in the pages of TV Guide. Getting back to my comment about “peak Frazetta”, TV Guide was the biggest money-maker, with the highest circulation, of any American magazine of that time. It was raking in over half a billion dollars in revenue in 1979 dollars.

Frazetta had never been published in a venue that came even close to those kind of numbers. His movie posters and album covers only numbered in the low millions, tops. TV Guide was the Big Time. If Time magazine had done an article on Frank in 1979, it would not have reached as many people as those ads in TV Guide.

The sad part of all this, is Frank painted that awesome concept art but the BSG producers really didn’t follow his lead. Frazetta was reading the early drafts of the scripts and giving them his pulpish, balls-to-the-wall interpretations. The suits went in a more boring direction. Their loss.

So, below you will find the four glorious Battlestar Galactica painting by Frazetta, along with my commentary. What coulda been…

This first painting, usually called “Cylon Death Machine”, features Athena, Apollo and Starbuck. It adheres fairly closely to what we eventually saw in the series.

This second painting, generally known as “Attack”, allows Frazetta to get his cheesecake on. We never saw anything this sexy in the actual TV series.

A painting depicting the “Kobol/Planet of the Gods” story arc. Here’s where Frazetta starts going his own way. Total bad-ass pulp space opera. It’s so different from what was actually filmed, I had no idea this was connected to BSG until the twenty-first century.

The “Count Iblis/War of the Gods” painting. Frank was setting things up for total “Space Wizard” coolness…and the BSG guys gave us their lackluster rendition instead.

Finally—as a DMR bonus—this painting has been touted on the Net as being concept art for BSG, but Frank’s “ ‘91 “ date is there for those with eyes to see. I have to admit, if some hot chick in a winged helmet had led the Cylon invasion, that woulda rocked.