Glen Larson and Don Bellisario originally wanted the Cylons to be human reptiles that had warred with the humans for endless generations.  As they tried to float their concept through Universal Studios Television, studio executives became uncomfortable with the idea of heroes slaughtering living, thinking beings every week.  To make the series more acceptable, they transformed the villians to be robotic opponents, mere machines whose destruction had no moral implications.  The idea of a living enemy race faded away.

The Original Reptilian Cylons

Glen Larson wasn't ready to completely dump his reptile race.  Rather than abandon the concept completely, he worked it into the background history of the Cylons.  Instead, the original living Cylons were a long dead race, whose ancestry gave the machines their name.

Reptilian Cylon Warrior

Like their later machine counter-parts, they were controlled through a strict dictatorship led by The Imperious Leader.  Through his novelizations, Glen Larson explained that the Imperious Leader held his high position because he possessed three brains, two of which had been artificially embedded into his head.  Only a select group of Cylons could survive this procedure.  The three brained leader commanded through a staff of two-brained reptiles who ensured discipline and order throughout the unaltered one-brain beings. 

The Imperious Leader

Yet, the living Cylons were complex.  They were as intricate and fascinating as human society, with craftsmen as well as warriors, priests and scholars as well as scientists.  Their technology was far advanced of the humans, allowing them to move planets and create independent thinking machines. The Cylons saw themselves as the highest order of the universe and sought to control and in some cases cease the development of other races.  To accomplish this high goal, they built robot warriors to provide the force behind their commandments.

Cylon Tribal Society

These machines became their undoing.  Assuming the premise that the Cylons were imposing a perfect order on the Universe, the machines saw the flaws in their own creators.  They turned on them, making them the first targets of their military might.

The Machines Turn on Their Creators

The robots exterminated the reptiles and replaced them, assuming their name and culture.  Seeing themselves as the new, perfect order, the Cylons began to force other races into a vast alliance, ordering conformity under pain of death.

Slaughter of the Reptiles

The artwork shown here was developed for a television movie re-edit of Battlestar Galactica:  Experiment in Terra.  The late Lorne Greene narrated a historic introduction that partly detailed the Cylon history.  Glen Larson, thought his novelizations of Battlestar Galactica and The Cylon Death Machine, explained much of Cylon society and history that showed how he would have created the Cylons had Universal Studios not objected to the concept.

Thanks to Peter Noble of ColonialFanForce.org and Cylon.org for this material and his great friendship over the years.