After studying industrial design at California State University, Long Beach (where he was a member of Phi Kappa Tau fraternity), in 1971 he landed a job working with Douglas Trumbull on Silent Running filming model effects, when Trumbull hired recent college graduates due to the film's low budget.
Lucas formed his own special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), based in warehouse premises in Van Nuys, and appointed Dykstra to supervise the new team.
However, tensions arose between Dykstra and Lucas, the latter complaining that too much time and money was spent on developing the digital camera systems and that the effects team did not deliver all the shots that he had wanted causing the production to run behind schedule.
As Universal then opted to make Galactica into a weekly series, many of Dykstra's effects shots were recycled and used repeatedly throughout the show's single season run.
Lucas was also reportedly unhappy about Dykstra using the equipment (that had been developed and paid for from the Star Wars budget) on a production that was essentially a competitor.
He stated in an interview that ran before the commercial that he got out his "Special Effects Atlas" to provide a world that "not only looked different" but also had some "very unusual inhabitants": the "Space Fish".
In 1987, Dykstra directed the full-motion video game Sewer Shark, originally intended for Hasbro's VHS-based NEMO console.