What are your thoughts on this?
Should a new Stargate show be a reboot or a revival?
- Thread starter Wingcommanderdarkwolf01
- Start date
I say revival. The shows built such a rich, complex universe that still has so much room for exploration. I want to see the state of that universe after the public is finally let in on the secret of the Stargates and alien life, something that should've happened during the series; by the time it got to the point that most of the world's major governments, research institutions, and corporations had already been read in, the secrecy had become narratively useless anyway. I want to see how society has been changed by the knowledge and technology brought to Earth by the SGC.
Besides, the other two major "Star + 4-Letter Word" franchises both did revivals rather than reboots. Stargate is probably the biggest North American SF media franchise after Trek and Wars, even if it's a distant third. So if they get to extend their universes even further, why shouldn't Stargate?
Besides, the other two major "Star + 4-Letter Word" franchises both did revivals rather than reboots. Stargate is probably the biggest North American SF media franchise after Trek and Wars, even if it's a distant third. So if they get to extend their universes even further, why shouldn't Stargate?
Reboot. Maybe fewer stargates so we can build on what civilizations do have them, aside from a village or studio-bound city.
And no Ancients. They always felt like an overused element in Stargate, especially when they became nothing much more than the "first humans". If a reboot were to have the Ancients, keep them mysterious and truly alien.
And no Ancients. They always felt like an overused element in Stargate, especially when they became nothing much more than the "first humans". If a reboot were to have the Ancients, keep them mysterious and truly alien.
Reboot, absolutely.
Or take it the direction that Emerich and co. wanted after the first movie.
Or take it the direction that Emerich and co. wanted after the first movie.
I want an resolution to Stargate Universe, but if I can't get that, then a reboot.
I would prefer a reboot because of this aswell. The show went from a thrown-together ship from Go'auld fighter to several huge starships within years. It all went to fast at some point. Humanity got to powerful to fast.
However, having said that.... What @Christopher said is something I was curious about as well. Maybe a show set in the same universe but during the 2070's? How is humanity dealing with the Stargate being common knowledge? That we're out their in the universe, aliens are on Earth. Things like that.
I choose revival,I want to see what everybody is up too in that universe.
I watched all of the Stargate shows with the exception of the animated series and Universe. I was invested in that world and the legacy of those characters so revival works for me. Another reboot is not something I want to put my time into, I'm tired of reboots. If the original Stargate SG1 wasn't a good series then I can understand but it was top notch stuff. Why not add to that, build that world like they do with Star Wars and some of Star Trek.
Revival. Reboots only work if the original was unsuccessful (outside of super-heroes because their original source is not the film/television universe). Stargate built such a rich universe that it deserves to be continued. For the record, I don't want a reboot of B5 either. If someone has a vision that can only be done with a reboot then they should create something original. Humans exploring other worlds with some alien device is a pretty generic idea anyway--that's not what made Stargate special.
Revival.
Earth as a spacegoing entity, it's own ships, cultural development, expanding into the universe and dealing with dangling threads from earler shows. Maybe some issue with the gate network so that travel isn't quite so easy and our protagonists have to work at it a little more.
Boldly go...
Earth as a spacegoing entity, it's own ships, cultural development, expanding into the universe and dealing with dangling threads from earler shows. Maybe some issue with the gate network so that travel isn't quite so easy and our protagonists have to work at it a little more.
Boldly go...
I wouldn't say that. There have been a number of at least moderately successful reboots of successful series, such as Hawaii Five-0, Magnum P.I., MacGyver, Charmed, One Day at a Time, and the Mission: Impossible movies (which may have been a loose revival originally but have been retroactively established as a reboot continuity, and which were always effectively a reboot because they focused on a different lead character and told their stories in a very different way from the series).
I don't agree with that either. Creating new variations on existing ideas is a fundamental part of how creativity works. There can be great value in exploring how different artists tackle the same subject and develop it in different ways. Virtually every one of Shakespeare's plays was a "reboot" of some earlier play, myth, or historical account. And there have been many great "reboots" of Shakespeare, like West Side Story, Forbidden Planet, and Ran.
And it offends me when people start talking about what creators "should" or "shouldn't" do. Only the creator has the right to decide that. Everything is worth trying, at least, even if a lot of it will fail.
However, I do agree that I'd rather see revivals of many SF franchises, because picking up on a rich mythology and developing it further can be worthwhile in different ways than just trying to restart it from scratch. For instance, I'd still love to see a revival of Alien Nation that picked up the same continuity and explored how the world has changed now that the Newcomers have been on Earth for a whole generation. (Although in that case I could see some value to a reboot as well; when I rewatched it last year, I realized that trying to do a racism allegory with aliens played exclusively by white actors and written exclusively by white writers had some major limitations.)
But it shouldn't be seen as a universal, all-or-nothing choice. Either reboots or revivals can be good (or bad, of course), and there's room for both to coexist, even of the same franchise.
At this point it would be nice to have some new Stargate, regardless if it's a reboot or revival.
Let's pretend I used the word rarely.
I would consider most of those examples as a defense of my argument. Mission: Impossible is different because it is adapting an old television show for the big screen, and by the time it was realized there had been decades between the movie and the series. Of course that is the rare example that became successful. There have been many adaptations of older television series whose movies failed creatively and often financially.
These examples are different as well as they essentially do something new and different than the concept which inspired them. The key is if the product is quality (West Side Story, Ran) so original that it becomes something genuinely new (Forbidden Planet) or derivative. An upcoming example is Rebel Moon, originally intended to be a Star Wars movie but reworked to be something original. Star Trek itself was inspired by non-science-fiction sources as well as Forbidden Planet.
Of course, people are free to create whatever they want and I probably could have used a better word than "should".
Well, someone could always see if the Heinlein estate will license "Tunnel in the Sky," for adaptation.
I think the premise and setting could've provided something more exotic and evocative that would have me interested in a reboot that leaned in that direction. SG-1 was a little too comfortable for my tastes though I can see that would have an appeal of its own. The original had 10 full seasons of 20+ episodes, that's like four good runs for many series today, I'd be more interested in seeing another take.
How in the world can they be? Your argument, verbatim and entire, was, "Reboots only work if the original was unsuccessful (outside of super-heroes because their original source is not the film/television universe)." In every example I cited, the original and the reboot were both successful (defined as running at least four seasons), none of them were superheroes, and all of them originated in television.
Yes, that's exactly the point. In any category, a few attempts will succeed and most will fail. That's just how the business works. Which is why it's nonsensical to make absolute blanket statements with words like "only" in them. It's never the category that dictates success, only the execution.
And that, again, is my point -- that countless reinventions throughout history have done exactly that, including many modern reboots.
In the exact same way that George Lucas only created Star Wars because Dino De Laurentiis wouldn't let him direct a Flash Gordon movie. And Flash Gordon was a knockoff of Buck Rogers.
But your examples don't fit what I'm talking about, since there's a difference between basing your story on a single specific work (like West Side Story from Romeo and Juliet, or Battle Beyond the Stars from The Magnificent Seven from Seven Samurai) and being broadly inspired by a genre or by multiple different works. Rebel Moon may be a reworking of a concept that was intended to be in the Star Wars universe, but that's different from retelling the story of a specific single movie.
Interesting. That oddly echoes my feeling about the movie vs. the series. The movie took a concept with endless potential, a portal to another world, and couldn't think of anything to do with it but a lazy rehash of Ancient Egypt and warmed-over ancient-astronaut tropes from the 1960s-70s. I felt the series, conversely, fleshed out the premise far more richly. So I'm curious what you have in mind for a more exotic approach. Like, maybe less transplanted-human stuff, more genuine aliens?
Well, in that case I'd think you'd be more likely to get a fresh take with a new series in the same franchise. A reboot from scratch would probably cover a lot of the same ground SG-1 did. But adding a new series in addition to SG-1, Atlantis, Universe, and Origins (so that's actually 17 seasons of 20 to 22 episodes, plus the feature film, two direct-to-video movies, and a 100-minute webseries) would presumably take the concept somewhere different, in the same way the new Star Trek and Star Wars series have explored new facets of their universes.
I already retracted the absolute in my original statement--so consider it to say that "reboots tend to work better". As for those examples you used, I was just commenting that most of the reboots were pretty awful shows regardless if they lasted multiple seasons.
I don't think there is really much of a distinction here, because that is not really my point. My point is that the examples you mentioned such as Ran and West Side Story are that they retell Romeo and Juliet and King Lear in new and interesting ways. There have been many examples of re-imaginings of Shakespearean plays that do their own thing. (10 Things I Hate About You, The Lion King, Men of Respect, Throne of Blood) However, if you want to relate this back to Stargate, then the Rebel Moon example (without knowing the story) might be better suited to the thread topic.
I have the opposite take, I can still remember seeing the sights and sounds from the theater. The way the ships, guards, weapons, the gate, the ring, the costumes and so on are done were quite memorable from the movie. There was the whole androgynous thing going on with Ra and his charges. A sense of discovery that I suppose is inevitably not going to be in a long running series. I engaged with Stargate Universe more but that's also a different type of story.
I really need to go back at some point and give the series another chance but I just remember a lot of villages with lots of pine trees and finding it dull a lot of the time. Looking at some clips from Youtube it does seem there's a chunk of good stuff that I've dismissed that I'd have to review again before making some final judgment but that was my gut reaction to the question.
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