Stargate Odyssey
In November of last year, Roland Emmerich announced that he was working on a TV spin-off to his latest disaster movie, 2012. The proposed spin off series is to be called 2013 and will follow on from the events of the movie, following a group of survivors to an island off the coast of Africa, where presumably the survivors will find a pile of unused Lost scripts. Whether 2012 was actually a disaster movie or a disaster of a movie and whether 2013 will need to have its title updated if it runs for more than one year are questions probably best left unasked. One question that might be worth asking is if Emmerich honestly thinks that this proposed spin off has a chance in hell of being anywhere near as popular or successful as the only other TV spin off from an Emmerich movie?
The Stargate movie was released in 1994, written by Emmerich and Dean Devlin and directed by Emmerich himself. The movie was a big success for MGM, who own the rights to Stargate and who decided to make a spin off to the movie called Stargate: SG1. Since SG1 first aired in 1997, Stargate has been on our TV screens for a total of sixteen years. Or seventeen years if you count the animated Stargate series, Stargate: Infinities. But please don’t, nobody else does…
SG1 ran for a total of ten seasons and remains that longest running consecutively aired hour long Sci-Fi series in America with two hundred and fourteen episodes having been aired. During the eight season of SG1, Stargate: Atlantis began to air and the two series ran concurrently for three years up until SG1‘s cancellations. Atlantis ran for two more seasons after that, finishing in January of 2009 with a milestone hundredth episode. In October of 2009, Stargate: Universe came to air, is in presently in the final weeks of its debut season and has been renewed for at least one more season by the Sci Fi network. Despite initial criticisms labelling the show as “Stargate: Voyager” because the setting of the series is in a spaceship, the series has already proven that it can deliver every bit as much as the previous Stargate shows. There has also been two direct to DVD movies with two more possibly scheduled for production after MGM recovers from the current financial woes that have even brought Bond to a halt.
Since 2007, the caretakers of Stargate have been Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner, who developed the SG1 series and MGM who own the rights to the Stargate TV franchise. None of the success that Stargate has achieved since the debut of SG1 has had anything to do with Emmerich or Devlin and they’ve criticised the shows whenever a chance came up to do so and saying that their vision for Stargate is the real version and that the vision that’s endured since 1997 is basically a crass fraud. But MGM’s financial woes have put a halt on development of any feature films for the time being. So Emmerich and Devlin have to hold off on their “real” Stargate sequels, which give Emmerich a chance to bring 2013 to life. Will 2013 be a vindication for Emmerich? Will it out do the success of Stargate? My crystal ball says “no”.
Despite the fact that Stargate is one of the most successful scf-fi shows in the world and the fact that it airs on a station called Sci Fi (I still can’t get my head around SyFy), it doesn’t seems to have many of the usual sci-fi fans. No matter what walk of life you’re in or where your friends come from, whether you consider yourself a nerd or not, you’re guaranteed to know at least a handful of hardcore Star Wars fans. It’s the same with Star Trek, though Trek does get scorned a little more than Wars does by the general public. Hell, if I wear a Browncoat t-shirt into work on any given Friday, at least one person will tell me what a big Joss Whedon fan they are, even though they’ve never seen an episode of Firefly (which is a damn shame). Stargate fans are hard to find. I honestly don’t think I could name two people that I know well who are Stargate fans. Part of this may be due to the fact that Stargate fans are collectively known as “Gaters” which sounds for all the world like it should be a Florida-based basketball team.
In 2005, I went to the Wizard World convention in Los Angeles, and given the nature of the convention, almost every kind of nerd fandom I can think of was pretty well represented there. It was primarily comic-oriented, so it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that the bulk of the people who were out in costume would be there dressed as comic characters. It wasn’t until I noticed so many other people who were representing a multitude of tv shows and movies that I realised how under-represented and down right ignored Stargate was. Even in a room with a few thousand other nerds, Stargate fans are still the folk who end up going to the Prom alone.
But almost anyone with even the most peripheral knowledge of Stargate will be able to tell you one thing they know about the franchise, and that one thing is that the main cast member in SG1 was Richard Dean Anderson. To this day, he remains one of the most enduring symbols of the Stargate franchise, having appeared in numerous episodes of both Atlantis and Universe (including both series’ pilot episodes) and the two direct to DVD movies.
The producers of the three Stargate series have always chosen their actors with great care, knowing full well that incorporating actors from Star Trek, Farscape and Firefly would be virtually guaranteed to bring in new viewers, as well as ensure that the quality of the show remains constant.
A few months after SG1 aired its last episode I got a message on MySpace (yes, it was that long ago) from one of the Dublin Browncoats. I had met the Browncoats a few times and had enjoyed having a few pints with them while talking about nerdy things, but talk had never turned to anything Stargate related. The MySpace message said that Richard Dean Anderson was in Dublin for the midnight launch of Halo 3, and asked if I’d like to join herself and some of the other Browncoats in Dublin to meet RDA. Seeing that my social calendar was fairly quiet at the time, I said I’d love to.
After a little bit of research that day, I found out that Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk from Firefly were all in the voice cast of Halo 3 and one of the characters was even to be named “Sergeant Reynolds” after Nathan Fillion’s Firefly character, Malcolm Reynolds. Add this to the fact that RDA is most widely knows for playing MacGyver, and I was pretty convinced that I would be the only person there who was looking to see the guy who played Jack O’Neill for the better part of a decade.
The plan was to meet in Dublin city centre at 6PM to scout out the location that RDA was due to be appearing at and then when we were to go for dinner in the nearest convenient pub. Even though I didn’t know the Browncoats all that well, it was a plan that I could get behind. So before meeting the Browncoats, I went to the local comic shop to pick up an SG1 comic, or poster, or magazine. Hell, even a MacGyver DVD would have done the trick. You can’t go to meet RDA at a video game launch where you have no intention of actually buying the game without having something for him to sign. That’d just be rude. I ended up buying a badly written SG1 comic that had a pretty good photo cover. Stargate merchandise is pretty hard to find in retail stores, even in comic specialty stores. I didn’t have time to put an order in with QMX for merchandise and wait six weeks for delivery, so I had to make do with what I could find.
According to what I’d been told on MySpace, RDA was supposed to be appearing at a store called Game which was in Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre, the building next to where I was working. So periodically during the day, I’d go to check out what was happening in Game. And through the day, all of the signs were pointing towards something pretty big happening, the store was being cleaned, floor space was being cleared, promotional material was being hung up all around the main shopping centre that Game was located in, and most encouragingly of all cameras were being set up inside and outside Game. Yeah… there was no question I was going to meet Jack O’Neill that night.
When I met up with the Browncoats outside the main shopping centre at six o’clock (a full six hours before RDA was due to appear), we went up to the Game store and started asking questions to anyone who was around. They pretty much confirmed what we knew, which was that Halo was being launched at midnight, that the store was opening at midnight and that there was a strong rumour that RDA would be there to launch the game.
After we found out what we knew already, we decided to head to the nearest bar to have a few pints and grab dinner. I’d only met the Browncoats a few times and some of the people I was with that night were total stranger to me, but we all knew a good idea when we heard it. Even in the company of nerds, beer is the great equalizer. But nerds as a whole are generally very welcoming people anyway.
In between eating and drinking and talk of Firefly there was little mention of RDA or anything else Stargate related. But it was an opportunity to do a bit more research on what was happening that night. Mobile internet wasn’t as effective back then as it is today and all that we could ascertain was that RDA was indeed in town, that he was staying in one of three possible hotels in the city centre and that… the day was Thursday.
After searching for information online, we started making phone calls and each phone call that was made gave us more information but each phone call that was made also gave us conflicting information. RDA was apparently going to be at Game in the Stephen’s Green shopping Centre, at Microsoft HQ, at a rival video game store on the Northside of Dublin and doing a live interview with Ireland’s national broadcaster RTE all at the same time.
A big part of what I love about Stargate is that despite it’s sources of mythology, it keeps it’s own continuity in tact. Most franchises that have multiple writers can’t keep a coherent timeline established. Star Trek suffers from this more than most. In the sixteen years worth of episodes and three live action series, Stargate has drawn from Egyptian mythology, Roman and Greek mythology, the legend of King Arthur and has even shown us Roswell aliens. All that is without even mentioning the times that the franchise has tackled religious fanaticism and difficult subjects like rape and slavery. No matter how big the franchise grows and how deep the mythology becomes, Stargate has always been very accessible and it’s always been consistent in its timeline and in the facts presented.
The facts that we were getting that night in Dublin City were anything but consistent.
At about eight o’clock, we went back to Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre to see what was happening and there was a huge amount of activity happening all around the front of the building. More cameras were being plugged in, food stands were being set up, and equipment trailers were being off loaded. The situation was still the same in that nobody could tell us exactly what was going to be happening or who was going to be appearing, but out of all the options we knew of and all of the events going on around town, this looked like the best bet for some RDA action at midnight. One thing that we did find out though was that the shopping centre was going to remain locked up tight to anyone who wasn’t working there until ten o’clock.
So faced with the prospect of a two hour wait before we could even start queuing, we made another group decision to go to another pub and wait there for a while. We spent roughly two hours in another bar and somehow managed to add three more people to our group by the time we went back to the shopping centre. None of the three new folk were big Stargate fans. I made a point of asking.
When we got back to the shopping centre just after ten o’clock, the place was in a frenzy. There was already a queue of people a few hundred yards long, music was blaring from a stack of speakers about fifteen foot high, three girls who must not be able to feel cold were handing out free cans of Red Bull and there were was someone walking around in a fairly cumbersome looking Master Chief outfit.
Over the course of the next ninety minutes, we moved from the exterior of the shopping centre to a small cordoned-off area outside the Game store. Barriers were erected and very strict lines were set up where people were told to wait. The front of the actual store was hidden from view by two curtains, indicating that there was indeed something or someone that they were hiding. While we were waiting, we played video games, read comics, watched the teenage boys go wild over two girls who were dancing outside the store to whatever cheesy music the cheesy DJ was playing, and generally we managed to entertain ourselves while speculating endlessly about where RDA might be.
At about a quarter to twelve, fifteen minutes before the launch, we collectively had one of those weird moments. You know when you’re in a big group of people, maybe a few hundred or more, and all at the same time, every single person stops talking all at the same time? Well, that’s what happened. The music stopped, the DJ stopped, and we all stopped. Then… the music started up again, but not the same music. It was the theme tune to MacGyver. Every single person in the building, whether they were Gaters or gamers or just people who liked to stand in queues, cheered wildly and the party atmosphere was turned up to eleven.
Now, I should probably mention at this point that out of the dozen or so people in the group that I was in, only one of us actually had any interest whatsoever in actually buying the game. If the “we’re with him” plan didn’t work for the rest of us, we had a contingency plan to buy the game so as to meet RDA and bring the game back the following day to get a refund or at the very worst, get store credit. It was worth that effort just for the chance to met RDA.
So, it was with that plan that at five minutes past midnight (nothing ever happens exactly when it’s supposed to in Ireland. It was midnight-ish, which was close enough) when the curtain came down from the front of Game that we marched slowly in to the store. I had my much read issue of the SG1 comic in my hand ready for RDA to sign. And when I got in to the store, I saw… nothing. Jack O’Neill wasn’t there, MacGyver wasn’t there. They couldn’t even organise a minor Irish celebrity… which was probably a blessing in disguise.
To this day, I can’t help but think that who ever had to edit the footage that the video cameras recorded that night had to edit out a lot of footage of people just looking disappointed. Because we were in the middle of a tightly controlled queue, we had to shuffle around the racks and wait in line to actually get out of the store. When we were outside of the store itself, we started talking to some of the media guys and it turned out that one person we talked to was on staff for RDA. He genuinely was due to be there that night but got delayed in traffic and had to divert to an alternate location. We told him out story and told him how much we were looking forward to meeting RDA. There was nothing he could do for us that night but if we could be at Dublin airport at nine o’clock the next morning, he would be able to organise for us to meet RDA and actually get photos with him. It was a tempting offer, but work commitments kept any of us from taking him up on it. So instead we cut our losses and walked down the road to commiserate with some Chinese food.
Before that night, and many times since, I’ve travelled to various parts of the world and have met quite a few people that I admire, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s been in anything that’s Stargate related.
Though that night didn’t quite work out the way I hoped it would, it was a massive amount of fun. A group of people, some who at the start of the night were strangers to each other, went on a quest. Along the way, they found mystery, they found comedy in the drama, they found friendship and they ended up having a very entertaining night.
Basically… it was a Stargate night. But not the Stargate that Roland Emmerich would have us watch.
– Simon Fitzgerald
Richard Kelly does not make “normal” movies, that is, films in the style or manner of the day, and especially not the cookie cutter style of storytelling found in most studio pictures or CBS police procedurals. The better art films, on the other hand, follow either the style of, say, Terence Mallick’s Badlands, which is also the new “international” style, somewhat distanced from the action and often visually beautiful and about “real” people, or they follow the juiced up musical Scorsese style of Mean Streets. 