Remember When We Were Positive 2017 Couldn’t Be As Bad As 2016? Those Were The Days
Rewind your calendar just a few weeks. Remember when we were hiding our most cherished celebrities, anxiously waiting out the final moments of 2016 and hoping, that after twelve months of constant obituaries and eulogies that the Grim Reaper would just play out the clock? Remember how we are all positive that 2017 was going to be better and we wouldn’t have to say good-bye to so many actors and teachers, musicians and scientists, explorers and philosophers?
Yeah, about that.
Less than a month and a half into 2017 and we’ve already lost the likes of Mary Tyler Moore, John Hurt, Miguel Ferrer, Mike Connors, William Peter Blatty and Masaya Nakamura among others. Today we added Richard Hatch, known to an entire generation of science fiction fans as Captain Apollo, to that list.
He was 71.
Born in 1945, Hatch began his career in 1970 appearing as a regular on the soap opera All My Children for two years. After that he would spend the next few years guest string on various prime time TV shows before landing the role of Captain Apollo in the original Battlestar Galactica. Even though the show only lasted a single season, Hatch became synonymous with the sci-fi classic and worked tirelessly for years to try and resurrect it. The 2004 re-imagining under producer Ronald Moore was in no small part a result of Hatch’s relentless efforts.
In fact, Hatch would land the role of Tom Zarek, a terrorist turned political agitator, in the remake. Hatch also wrote several Battlestar Galactica novels and was a fixture on the fan convention circuit.
Last May, Dynamite comics announced they were publishing a new Battlestar Galactica comic book series starring the original characters and set in the original show’s timeline. The series debuts this August, so here’s hoping the first issue is dedicated to Mr. Hatch.
Image via 2015 North Texas Comic Book Show
