Just wondering… does anybody else think this is a Newhart reference?
And is the question itself already well into Geezer territory?
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Comics I Don't Understand 
Yes, I think this is a Newhart reference. (Although it only occurred to me after reading your comic.)
Definitely Newhart reference. And I never saw that episode, or any episode of Battlestar Galactica.
Arthur, ain’t cultural osmosis grand?
Or Lost, or…there was another (Sopranos?) show that had a “it was just a dream” ending. Of course I suppose those could have been Newhart references (what is it referring to? Means nothing to me).
And this sounds like a good idea to me – I liked old Battlestar Galactica and watched half of one episode of the new one and said nope. There are lots of ways it could have been made better; switching genders was not one of them, and the stuff (that I saw mostly in references) about changing what the Cylons were only made it worse.
What else could it be but a Newhart reference?
Not a geezer tag because everyone still references and talks about it.
Jjmcgaffey – The TV series Dallas had an entire season that turned to be a dream. I’m pretty sure the Newhart dream ending was a winking reference to that. The only other series that comes to mind was St. Elswhere (?), where it was supposed to imply that the entire series took place in a little boy’s imagination. But this is all attributal to cultural osmosis, since I never watched any of those shows. As for Battlestar Galactica, if there hadn’t been the original series in which Starbuck was male, this joke wouldn’t be near as funny as it is.
There’s a Breaking Bad alternate ending out there that was a Newhart reference. Maybe this is a reference to a reference 😁
Yes, Newhart. Likely a geezer as well.
jmccaffey, I’d bet you haven’t seen the original Battlestar Galactica for some time. I loved it when I was a child. It was a cheap Star Wars knockoff that came to my TV every week! However, many years later, as a grown-up man, I found it on a tv station and tried to watch it. I literally could not get through a single episode. They also showed The A-Team on this station and it was laughably bad but at least watchable. I agree that new BG stinks to high Heaven.
And here I was thinking it was Ishmael waking up in the boarding house and I’m going, but he boarded with Queequeg, not Starbuck!
The thing about the original Battlestar Galactica series was they spent most of the budget in the first two episodes. So, for later episodes, they blatantly swiped plots from other movies and TV shows, which their hypothetical audience of 10-year-olds might have missed, but pretty much any media-aware adult would not. Even the 10-year-olds notice that almost all the special effects shots were re-used over and over. Every dogfight between Vipers and Cylons had the exact same shots, just edited slightly different.
They had a solid idea for a series, but didn’t have the budget to execute it. The less said about “Galactica 1980”, the better. All the effort went into the pilot, and they didn’t have enough material to fill the rest of the season.
My impression at the time was that the Newhart ending was, besides of course a brilliant trick on its own, meant as a deflation of the St. Elsewhere ending — which was vastly inflated. It was pretty recent at that time — we’re talking 1988 and 1990.
The Sopranos finale, though still a matter of controversy, was not a dream sequence trick at all. There were, however, a couple of episodes in the last season where Tony, hospitalized and near death, imagines or in some way experiences an alternate reality and identity.
I thought the 2004+ Battlestar Galactica was pretty much superb in many of its dimensions. I had no familiarity with earlier versions, so the gender switches were only something I knew were being reported on. Yes, time jumps were awkward, and yes, the metaphysics of what the cylons were and what counts as being really a cylon were muddied. But as an essay on government it was remarkable.
Apparently I’m the only geezer here who has never heard of that final “Newhart” episode (see the end of the list).
P.S. @ Mitch4 – An “essay on government” would be infinitely better than the pseudo-theology that contaminated the latter part of the original “BG” series.
Old enough to remember the big push for the original BG, including merchandise that didn’t match anything in the show (designed off early production art?). The pilot pinned everything on vile, immoral politicians who sign peace treaties. Trust your military! The mock theology appeared to be an attempt to wed “The Force” to vague television Christianity (angels, good and evil, the Man Upstairs). Later, the pilot for Buck Rogers — with the same producer — recycled the don’t-trust-civilian-dupes theme.
Galactica 1980 appeared to be an attempt to salvage the money and merchandising with a cheaper version of the show. It was like the final season of Batman, which resorted to black-backdrop sets and traded campy style for laughless sitcom.
I loved Knight Rider when I was a kid, but as an adult I saw an episode of it, and it was completely unwatchable, even with nostalgia goggles.
I thought the new BG was quite good for the first few seasons, although it fell apart rather badly near the end.
I was in my teens when the original BSG came out and mostly hate-watched it. I made it four or five episodes into new BSG and decided a) I hated most of these people and didn’t care what happened to them, b) Baltar’s trippy fugue state hallucinations annoyed me no end, and c) they informed me all too quickly that the only character I liked was a Cylon. I gave up with Starbuck sinking into a gas giant and didn’t care. The only good part was Adama’s speech about why you don’t use the military for policing.
But this particular comic is actually fairly funny for Pop Culture Shock Therapy.
The writers of the reboot BG thought that if they said — and re-emphasized at the beginning of each episode — the the Cylons had a Plan, then they were excused from actually plotting and coming up with said Plan…
I only vaguely remember the old series (and never watched the reboot) but there were some nice models built of the spacecraft.
http://www.davesmodelworkshop.com/2017/07/incredible-original-1970s-filming.html
Did everyone else realize that the last Newhart was dream while watching it – and who was dreaming it – or am I the only one? I told Robert both long before the end was revealed.
I know that there are other shows but I can’t remember which – oh, one was “Married with Children”. They had written Katey Sagal’s pregnancy into the story line and she miscarried, so they went with a dream.
CBS this year, while not going with a dream, had wives die during the summer break on two shows and pick up the story lines in the fall a year later. I worked on “Blue Bloods” but not on “Kevin Can Wait”.