What would you do if you had the angelic voice of a Cylon? Order a pizza? Take up yodeling? Hijack the overhead pager at Wal-Mart?
Besides putting a Little Caesar’s worker into a coma, your Cylon voice would make every spoken word sound more fascinating. You could also make your Cylon toaster “talk” and sing Cher’s “Believe” without Auto-Tune.
So who’s responsible for the voice that makes people screech “Felgercarb!” and pray for mercy upon hearing it? One actor: Michael Santiago.
The actor’s voice was put through an ARP 2500 synthesizer, an EMS 1000 vocoder (some sources say it was actually the EMS 2000), and other fancy 70s equipment to achieve the sound of Cylons.
Santiago is credited with additional voices on numerous movies and TV shows including The Incredible Hulk (1978), Magnum P.I., and The Archer: Fugitive From the Empire (1981), though further details about him are scarce. Those details alone would make him worthy of a $20 at-the-table photo at a convention near you.
Note, however, this video’s description claims Santiago was not the voice of the Cylons. There doesn’t seem to be any further proof, so it’s best to draw your own conclusions.
In addition to the Cylon Centurions and their gold-colored commanders, other Cylons made a non-chromatic splash in the show. The IL-series Cylon, Lucifer, was voiced by Jonathan Harris, well-known for his role as Dr. Zachary Smith in the 1965 series, Lost in Space.
After years of terrorizing the cosmos, Harris later became a veteran of Pixar films after voicing Manny the praying mantis in A Bug’s Life and Geri the Cleaner in Toy Story 2.
Check out both Santiago’s and Harris’ Battlestar voices:
Another IL-series, the pathological lying frakker, Specter, was played by Murray Matheson in the episode “The Young Lords.” Matheson appeared mostly in TV series such as The Twilight Zone and Hawaii Five-0.
And where would the Cylons be without their leader’s voice to decree the extermination of humanity? Actor Patrick Macnee pulled double duty on the series, not only voicing the Imperious Leader, but also providing the opening narration heard in the show’s intro.
Then there was the time that a Cylon sounded suspiciously like Space Ghost.
For the Galactica 1980 episode, “The Return of Starbuck”, actor Gary Owens voiced Cy, the Cylon who befriends Starbuck after they are both stranded on a foreign planet.
Owens is best known for voicing Space Ghost, Blue Falcon from Dynomutt, Dog Wonder, and even appeared in Mark Hamill’s 2004 film Comic Book: The Movie.
Cy’s voice has a decidedly Hanna-Barbera quality to it that just doesn’t fit with the Cylons of yahrens past. It’s for the best that this was the last episode of Galactica 1980—if it had been allowed to continue in this vein, the Imperious Leader would have ended up sounding like a despotic Fred Flintstone.
Watch your shows. Wear your shows.
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