Where should Stargate go now?

[teacake]

gturner wrote:

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Every culture that went through the stargate was steeped in SG mission reports which described their destination, and most first-contacts were made by SGC personnel. To these worlds, SG members are a bit like a blend of the early explorers of North America, the Pilgrims, and the Founding Fathers, giving them a gravitas that future squabbling politicians can never match. Almost all of the planets, whatever their differences with each other or the current core worlds, will meet and hear out what an original SG member has to say. This makes the SG team members natural diplomats and troubleshooters. If not George Washington, they are certainly Miles Standish, Daniel Boone, Lewis and Clark, and Davy Crockett.

If Daniel Boone or George Washington popped out of a gate tomorrow I doubt they would take on any kind of active role in our life. They would be of huge historical interest but that would be about it.. and I think the SGC team would be in the same boat. Just because everybody respected Scotty didn't mean he was put in charge of anything.

I would LOVE to see Stargate set in future earth. It certainly takes more planning and plot than random medieval villages which are all the same story.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I'd still love to see how Stargate would deal with this place:

[teacake]

What the heck, I never heard of that MLB. The ships look good, the hair, the drums, the black leather gloves, the twin moons.

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^ Unfortunately that series only lasted for like 8 episodes. It was one of my favorite shows back in the day. You can watch all of them here.

[gturner]

teacake wrote:

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If Daniel Boone or George Washington popped out of a gate tomorrow I doubt they would take on any kind of active role in our life. They would be of huge historical interest but that would be about it.. and I think the SGC team would be in the same boat. Just because everybody respected Scotty didn't mean he was put in charge of anything.

Hey, you got three or four episodes right there.

They think they're so much smarter that they won't listen to the SGC personnel, and so they stick them on a morning talk show to discuss their uniforms and what it was like to use toilet paper instead of the stones. Friction, arrogance, historical blindness, and a clash of personalities and perspectives, with some people of course siding with the SGC team, perhaps exploiting them for political opportunity to get some cheap jabs at an opponent, and others trying to get some celebrity to rub off on them.

I would LOVE to see Stargate set in future earth. It certainly takes more planning and plot than random medieval villages which are all the same story.

Me too. There's not a whole lot you can do with just a village elder.

[teacake]

Oh those are great ideas gturner!

But we do need a decent budget for it, unless you're just going to cgi some flying cars into the driveways of Vancouver suburbs. What are earths big problems now would be interesting.. hopefully it doesn't look like Trek's bland parkland style.

[DWF]

Either way you go with it's a continuation or a reboot it's going to take money, smaller budgets is just going backward in my mind. And I would like to see both Martin Wood and Robert C. Cooper involved somehow in any return of Stargate.

[Mister Fandango]

DWF wrote:

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Either way you go with it's a continuation or a reboot it's going to take money...

Really? I thought television shows were made for free. Learn something new every day.

[DWF]

Mister Fandango wrote:

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Really? I thought television shows were made for free. Learn something new every day.

Maybe I should've made my point a little plainer then, it'll take more money than before filming in Vancouver isn't as cheap as it used to be and the locations are for the most part gone. All the talk of getting rid of the "Rein fair" look of SG1 is going to take some money, more money than it used to take.

[gturner]

DWF wrote:

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Maybe I should've made my point a little plainer then, it'll take more money than before filming in Vancouver isn't as cheap as it used to be and the locations are for the most part gone. All the talk of getting rid of the "Rein fair" look of SG1 is going to take some money, more money than it used to take.

The "Stargate Futures" idea I tossed out should be cheaper than the Rein Fair look because you could shoot it on normal city streets and on sets used for normal shows (offices, houses, factories, etc). That would mean the budget wouldn't need to be much higher than any other random TV show.

[teacake]

But the Ren Fair look, isn't that just a bunch of crap they have left over from other shows? Costumes, huts..?

[gturner]

I would think, but those costumes generally take a bit of time to get into, and everybody visible in a scene has to wear them, so you can't just have random people in the background. That also limits filming locations to spots where no outside people or bulidings are visible in the background, which can be especially troublesome if you're shooting lots of overs and need the background behind both conversing actors to be consistent with other wide-angle shots of the scene.

Setting the show in what looks like a modern period gets rid of that, and opens up any city, small town, or rural area as a filming location. The one snag to deal with in the storyline is cars, which on most sci-fi shows set in the future need to look both different and "futuristic."

Modifying one car to look halfway believable as a future model is difficult, and unless CGI is used to fill in the background traffic (or flying cars, of course), any production would need dozens of futuristic cars. As far as I can remember, Stargate avoided that whole problem by never having cars on other planets. (Can anyone remember an episode with aliens in cars?)

That can be an important piece of backstory for the new show. We populated hundreds of alien worlds, and not a darn one of them had cars. We couldn't use Goa'uld, Asgard, or Ancient car technology because they didn't have any, either, darn the luck.

So when we expanded into the galaxy, we just had to take our cars with us, jeeps and Hummers at first, and then road vehicles once we started building roads. Since shipping gas through a stargate is also inefficient, and since almost none of the planets we were settling had decades of exploration geologists hunting petroleum reserves, we started sending electric cars and more Naquadah generators to support the grid. So the production company can go buy or lease a bunch of Nissan Leafs, Chevy Volts, Teslas, and whatever else is on the market and write them off as an expense. They'll keep showing up on just about every planet the SG teams visit.

But as the off-world populations expanded, demand increased to inconvenient levels. Since shipping millions of cars through the Stargate system is inefficient, if not downright stupid, we made duplicates of our car factories and shipped the tooling. So every planet ended up with couple of early 21st century car factories and just kept on making the same basic designs. Being planetary monopolies, none of them really faced any competition, anyway, so there wasn't much push to change what worked, with occassional retro-styling coming and going (like the new Mustangs and Camaros) as local oil reserves were finally developed.

The show could even play with the mix for comedic affect, kind of like recurring jokes about cars in the old Soviet union. Jack O'Neill, early in a typical episode: "And today, boys and girls, we're on the Chevy planet. Gotta love Chevy." Sgt: "That's what you said about the Ford planet." Jack: "And it was just as true there."

That highlights another odd advantage this show might have. With the rising use of DVR and other technologies, commercials are often getting stripped. In saving production costs by leaving lots of everyday items the same, centuries later (perhaps with clever tweaks), it is a perfect vehicle for product placement.

Product placements can't be stripped by DVR's, rips, or any other means, and that might be a strong selling point with advertisers who'd rather have Jack or an alien talk endlessly about the durability of a Ford F350, proving itself over centuries, than airing a Ford F350 ad that would get stripped by everybody's DVR's anyway.

The placements would even be in the season box sets, forever and unchanging. That's a potential selling point to the network suits, as this would be one of the few shows where the characters could consciously talk about existing products with amazement, even discuss them with awe and admiration (You're still using these! -- Yes, those are the most useful thing we brought through the gate!), without the whole scene looking ridiculous and forced.

Lower production costs, higher revenue (hopefully).

[teacake]

I dunno.. I'm not sure Cargate sounds any more exciting than Rengate.

[gturner]

Well, I'm throwing in cargate as a necessity because without cars anything they shoot in a city or suburb would have to be digitally edited to remove the vehicles, or they would have to remove vehicles from the actual areas where they shoot, which still wouldn't explain the curbs, pavement, and white lines marking parking spaces. They could still do indoor shots without cars, and could rely on those for some planets, but it would be hard to present city shots without the street scenes and obvious roads between blocks of buildings. It also frees them to use tons of stock footage of Earth cities from around the world to reflect how the different countries recreated their home environments on other planets.

So my thought is that not only is it cheaper to leave the cars in, they could also support the story in clever ways when needed, and be ignored when not. They'd also provide a useful and obvious benchmark for the relative technology levels and freedoms on different planets. If the cars are all different and modern looking, it's a good bet it's a reasonably advanced world. If they're all small, black, and similar it's probably not. If there are almost no cars and the buildings are run down, it's an obvious clue that not every planet or people really advanced much. And occassionally they hit the planet with flying cars, for contrast.

It's not really a feature, but more of a bug fix that lowers production costs, and frankly, most viewers wouldn't imagine a future without convenient high-speed personal transportation. Of course for many episodes the SGC people might not even make it out of the gate complex, because many societies might be more than paranoid about what might come through the gates, including humans from planets they despise. I'm sure Jack's arrival at the Nation of Islam planet will be interesting.

Cars, especially future ones or special ones, can also make for very interesting action sequences, such as in the Matrix. Stargate mostly relied on small groups of infantry shooting at each other, shooting at bugs, running around, or standing in front of consoles. Hopefully the addition of car chases or crashes, with the twist that some cars are definitely not equal, would expand the program's visuals and change its look while providing something the viewers can relate to. Heck, whole series have been built around advanced cars with talking computers.

[teacake]

I want weird looking vehicles, like the Oka. And I want people living in them, nomadically. And I want it to be in a rugged and dangerous setting where keeping the tech working is the biggest focus because without the tech you will die. Deserts are also good.

I don't suppose we can manage all that in Vancouver though.