Producer Of 'Knight Rider' And 'Battlestar Galactica' Dies At 77

Glen A. Larson, who produced some of the most iconic television shows of the '70s and '80s – including the Six Million Dollar Man, Battlestar Galactica, Magnum, P.I. and Knight Rider, died Friday at age 77.

The Los Angeles Times quotes the producer's son, James, as saying he died at UCLA Medical Center in Santa Monica of complications from esophageal cancer.

Prior to his television career, Larson was a singer in the The Four Preps.

The Associated Press says that he also composed the theme songs for Knight Rider, starring David Hasselhoff, and the orchestral music for Battlestar Galactica.

"He was sort of an icon," James Larson was quoted by the AP as saying. "There are a lot of interesting things like that."

Glen Larson was nominated three times for an Emmy, once for a Grammy for the original score of Battlestar Galactica, and received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1985, according to the AP.

According to Hollywood Reporter:

"Larson also wrote and produced for such noteworthy series as ABC's It Takes a Thief, starring his fellow Hollywood High School alum Robert Wagner as a burglar now stealing for the U.S. government, and NBC's McCloud, with Dennis Weaver as a sheriff from Taos, N.M., who moves to Manhattan to help the big-city cops there.

"After ABC spurned the original pilot for The Six Million Dollar Man (based on the 1972 novel Cyborg), Larson rewrote it, then penned a pair of 90-minute telefilms that convinced then-network executive Barry Diller to greenlight the action series, which starred Lee Majors as a former astronaut supercharged with bionic implants.

"Other shows Larson created included Alias Smith & Jones, B.J. and The Bear, Switch (another series with Wagner), Manimal and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. He spent his early career at Universal Studios, inventing new shows and reworking others, before moving to 20th Century Fox in 1980 with a multiseries, multimillion-dollar deal."