Creeva’s World 2.0

Star­gate Sea­son 1, I’ll be going over all of my box sets so with the Star­gate fran­chise there is going to be alot of redun­dancy.   When I first heard they were going to a series on Star­gate I thought it was a stu­pid idea.  Mac­gyver has the team lead, HA — I love Mac­gyver and all but I didn’t think Richard Dean Ander­son could have pulled it off.  I was wrong.

Star­gate is one of my favorite TV fran­chises of all time now.

Now since I have 10 of these to write — I’ll give you Amazon’s review:

Hollywood’s film archives over­flow with the car­casses of dis­mal movies based on lame ‘60s and ‘70s tele­vi­sion shows, a syn­drome that shows no sign of abat­ing. But here’s evi­dence that the reverse effect, turn­ing a movie into a TV series, can have sur­pris­ingly pos­i­tive results. Indeed, based on the 21 episodes pro­duced for the first sea­son of Star­gate SG-1, it could be argued that this show is sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter than the 1994 fea­ture it’s derived from.

The cen­tral con­ceit of the orig­i­nal Star­gate–the exis­tence of an arti­fi­cially cre­ated “worm­hole” through which one can travel to dif­fer­ent worlds light years away from Earth–was an intrigu­ing one. In seiz­ing on the obvi­ous pos­si­bil­i­ties for expand­ing on that premise, series exec­u­tive producers-writers Jonathan Glass­ner and Brad Wright have smartly retained some of the film’s basic ele­ments (its amal­gam of myth and the­o­ret­i­cal hokum, or the ongo­ing clash of wills between sci­en­tists and sol­diers), while adding a vari­ety of fresh ideas (includ­ing new char­ac­ters, new loca­tions, and a wel­come dose of humor, much of it sup­plied by Richard Dean Ander­son, Mac­Gyver him­self, who replaces Kurt Rus­sell in the cen­tral role of Colonel Jack O’Neill). The result is a show with mul­ti­di­men­sional heroes and vil­lains and con­sis­tently com­pelling story lines (many of them intro­duced in the pilot and car­ried for­ward through sub­se­quent episodes) bal­anc­ing excel­lent spe­cial effects and pro­duc­tion val­ues. All this and full frontal nudity, too (at least in the afore­men­tioned pilot). Who can resist?

The first sea­son is spread out over five DVDs; the 100-minute pilot shares the first vol­ume with two other episodes, while discs 2 to 5 con­tain any­where from three to five shows each. Sound and visu­als (in widescreen for­mat) alike will take full advan­tage of any home system’s capa­bil­i­ties. But aside from lan­guage and sub­ti­tle options, bonus fea­tures are lim­ited to brief fea­turettes that play like com­mer­cials and pro­vide lit­tle in the way of back­ground infor­ma­tion or insight (there are no fea­tures at all on the first disc). Then again, if you really want to know what that sym­bol on Teal’c’s fore­head means, or why the nasty, par­a­sitic Goa’ulds look a lot like the fledg­ling stom­ach mon­sters in the Alien series, there is no doubt a Web site out there just for you.