By Cat Eldridge: Fourteen years ago this week, the Stargate SG-1 series ended its decade-long run. Based on the Stargate film by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, it was created by Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner. The former was a writer for Forever Knight and Highlander; the latter was a writer on such series as War of The Worlds, Time Trax, Star Trek: Voyager and The Outer Limits. Both had worked together on The Outer Limits.
It started off as a Showtime series running there for five seasons before moving to Sci-fi for the last five seasons. The creators were the primary producers.
The primary cast was Richard Dean Anderson (as Col. Jack O’Neill), Michael Shanks, Amanda Tapping, Christopher Judge and Don S. Davis. Much later on the series, several Farscape alumni would show up as Claudia Black and Ben Browder would join the cast.
The show would spawn the series Stargate Atlantis, Stargate Universe, and a Stargate Origins miniseries and two DVD films as well, Stargate: The Ark of Truth and Stargate: Continuum. Wiki lists a series that I wasn’t aware of, an animated television series called Stargate Infinity. There is an audio series as well.
It off course has the usual collectibles — novels, action figures, t-shirts. Some have become quite expensive. The General Jack O’Neill Stargate SG-1 Diamond Select figure mint now fetches several hundred dollars.
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The original series seemed very well constructed, with relatively few swerves in worldbuilding, so that if you happened to see episodes out of order (as I did), you could see an early episode in which there were vague hints of (say) the Tok’ra – and although the characters didn’t know everything about them yet, everything that happened in the episode would be consistent with what was eventually revealed about them (this in contrast with (say) Buffy or Star Trek, in which it’s more difficult to imagine a consistent picture of demons or Trill behind the scenes of various episodes).
P.S. A friend of mine has a theory about the planned ending for Stargate Universe (which was cancelled early)
One of the things I liked best about Stargate, especially in the early seasons, was how clear it was that the producers and writers knew about standard science fiction tropes and were willing to break them in creative ways. An SF show whose writers know nothing about SF will hit upon all the cliches and mistakenly think them original. Stargate knew how to make me groan “Oh, not another robot duplicate show” and then startle me with how the rest of the episode went.
I love “Stargate SG-1” and liked “Stargate Atlantis” a lot! One of my favorite SFF series. 😀
I never finished “Stargate Universe” (I had very mixed feelings about it) and never saw the cartoon, though. I vaguely recall seeing “Stargate Origins,” methinks.