We recently rediscovered a lost audio interview with Ken Rabehl, one of Stargate SG-1’s very first illustrators, and are proud to be be able to share both it and his art in this very special episode.

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
My name is David Read. You’re watching Dial the Gate: the Stargate Oral History Project. Ken Rabehl was an illustrator on the first seasons of Stargate SG-1, and he created so much of the iconic designs that we are so accustomed to seeing, with a pencil. He went on to work on Battlestar Galactica with Richard Hudolin, Eureka, Arrow, and his work speaks across time. In this episode, you’re gonna see a lot of that imagery. I had completely forgotten that when I was at Propworx in 2010 and 2011, I had interviewed Ken for this book. This is the first of two books, Stargate Artifacts. They were catalogs for what we were selling in the auction. Full-color photographs from everything from props, costumes, set pieces, and yes, some of Ken’s artwork. And I was going through this, and in the front of it, I found, among other interviews that I did, one with Ken. And I was like, “Well, it’s a shame I don’t have the audio for it.” And then I went looking, and I found it, 15 minutes of a phone conversation I had with him in 2010, eight years before we lost him to ALS. So, I’ve been hanging onto this one for a few months now, waiting for the right time to release it, organizing his collection of art, and we’re gonna do that in this episode. Yes, it is only 15 minutes, but it is packed with information, and I’m thrilled to be able to present it to you. In addition, Richard Hudolin, Bridget McGuire, and Douglas McLean, whom we rounded up last December for Dial the Gate and GateWorld, will share their thoughts and their feelings on Ken’s work and discuss their friend at the end. So, after you hear from Ken, you will hear from the three of them talking about what it was like to work with the man in the office, the good and the not-so-good. Artists. Extraordinary, and you will hear a couple of those stories. He designed, among many things, the Touchstone, which is one of my favorite, absolute favorite pieces from all of the content that he created, and I’m hoping to get this full size one day and in the color scheme. Martin McClean did an excellent job with this. The artists inspire so many people on the show, and they also inspire us as fans. So let’s hear what Ken Rabehl has to say as he talks to us across time.

David Read:
Tell us about your background and how you became involved in the show.

Ken Rabehl:
Working in the film business now for over 20 years, and I first started out on a movie called Earthstar Voyager for Disney. That was my very first film. And then I got onto the TV series MacGyver back in the ’80s, late ’80s, and then I was working on that for a couple of years. I met Richard Hudolin, a production designer, on a show called Little Women. I think I knew him before that, but I can’t remember how far back. He was production designer for Stargate, and he and I got along really well, and he hired me to come onto Stargate. And then I worked there as an illustrator for a couple years, and it was very good. That’s how I started out there.

David Read:
We’re talking with Richard later today. I’ve been looking… He’s a pretty cool dude.

Ken Rabehl:
I gotta tell you something about Richard. He’s probably the best production designer in Vancouver right now. I can tell you that right now, easily. He is really good at… He’s a really good people person. He’s a really good production designer. He knows how to utilize the people in his department, gives them freedom, and he gets what he wants because he gives people plenty of latitude, and he’s really good to deal with. So, no, I got nothing but high praise for Richard Hudolin.

David Read:
You say you’ve worked on MacGyver and some Disney stuff. Stargate obviously is very sci-fi oriented, even though it’s in the here and now. What did that show allow you to do that MacGyver couldn’t and other modern-day based shows?

Ken Rabehl:
MacGyver was very contemporary. We did some high-tech stuff because he was a spy or whatever, I can’t remember. He was working for an agency, and we did some high-tech stuff but on Stargate, the whole world was high tech. Very futuristic. I guess as we were going to different planets, it was still contemporary, but we were going to different planets, so we were recreating alien worlds. And we couldn’t do that on MacGyver, and to me, that’s pretty fun because it takes you away from the sort of the standard lines of what humans consider to be technology and humans consider to be the latest sort of… technology, I guess. It was that whole idea of going through stargates to different planets. That was another thing about it, is that we were creating something new every time we went to another planet. It wouldn’t always be the same existing world. So, that made it interesting and fresh all the time. I found myself designing and drawing all sorts of different things, and it went from the primitive, sticks and stones and grass huts, to castles to high-tech sort of installations and things like that.

David Read:
I think that’s why Stargate is still on right now. 16 seasons going strong is ’cause the tapestry is so huge.

Ken Rabehl:
The franchise has a very popular theme to it. It really works, and I think people relate to it quite a bit, and when they switched over to Stargate Universe, I think that was the next step for them, ’cause they might have sort of exhausted a lot of the ideas for just ordinary Stargate, and the universe was the next step, I think, for them. It’s been a very popular show and went strong for a long time.

David Read:
Ken, was it ever daunting creating a new world every single week? Did you, “Oh, man,” at, at some point, go, “What can I possibly design now? We’ve done it already!”

Ken Rabehl:
No, not really, because I found that I would read the scripts and have my discussion with Richard and the art director. I found that things sort of spontaneously generated from those discussions and from the reading of the script. I get impressions right away from scripts. I get images almost immediately about where I think it could go, and then I take the production designer’s ideas and go with where he wants to go and align my thoughts with his thoughts. So, we come up with a product, but I never really found myself stumped. Not really. There always seemed… The only thing that was a problem is because it’s episodic television and there’s budgetary constraints, so sometimes I would be drawing stuff where the art director would say to the production designer, “Well, no, we really can’t go there,” or construction would say, “No. That’s not gonna be possible in the limited time that we have.” So, I found that a little bit frustrating sometimes.

David Read:
Looking at the concept art, I’ve seen some of your stuff, and it’s clear when you see those designs on paper, even 12 years after that episode has aired, I’m looking at this, and I’m saying, “Wow, it would have been so much more awesome had they gone with Ken’s original design for this.” But you’re right. For budgetary constraints, you can’t always do everything that’s up in your head.

Ken Rabehl:
No, you can’t, because your mind can design something for a particular item that would cost millions of dollars when the price tag that they have may only be 100,000. So, you have to cut and splice your original idea down to something that’s gonna be workable, because the mind has no budget limit. It can do whatever it wants. But I would have to continually sort of break down my ideas to fit within the budget and try to keep some of the flavor of the original idea.

David Read:
Keep something of it intact.

Ken Rabehl:
Keep something of it. Keep the flavor of where it was, and that usually worked. That usually worked fine with everybody. Richard’s a great designer. Richard really knows how to take ideas that are really big and expensive, break them down into ideas that are doable, but still attractive and still desirable to people. He’s very good at that. I can to a certain extent, but I have a sort of a rich sort of outlook on ideas. So, sometimes, with Richard’s help, we would break ideas down to stuff that would really work…

David Read:
It’s like, “Ken, I know you wanna do that, but you gotta come down.”

Ken Rabehl:
That’s exactly right.

David Read:
What were some of the things that you des– I know it’s a number of years now, but what were some of the things that you designed from the show that you’re most proud of, that stick out in your mind?

Ken Rabehl:
Some of the things that come to mind are, it’s a small thing, but it’s something that ended up being used throughout the show, and that was the… What was it called? The gate?

David Read:
The GDO?

Ken Rabehl:
The dial-home device.

David Read:
Oh, the DHD!

Ken Rabehl:
Yes. That was my design, and I’m quite proud of that. And I can’t think of all the other things, but there were many things. I did a totem one time, a totem pole that was for a race of people that were mining a kind of a silver metal.

David Read:
“Spirits.” The Salish.

Ken Rabehl:
The Salish. I did a neat totem pole for them, and I can also remember this needle device I designed that sort of jabs needles into the side of your head. That was quite interesting. That was an example where I got too intricate with the design, and we ended up having to break it down quite a bit because it was like a two or three million dollar design that I did when it really couldn’t be. That got broken down.

David Read:
I think that was the Season Two finale with the memory device for “Out of Mind.”

Ken Rabehl:
That’s right. It was.

David Read:
Man, oh, man. The DHD, it’s not in the feature film. So, how did you come up with that design? Did you look at the Stargate and then have to think, “OK, what would be the perfect offshoot of this that’s still clearly part of the same piece of technology?”

Ken Rabehl:
I think what happened was looking at the Stargate, mostly looking at the design of the symbols and sort of the lines in the metal of the Stargate and how that represented the type of material it was, and incorporating those into a design. Now, the design itself, it was a number of sketches, doing one sketch after another, until I got something that I was comfortable with and that Richard was comfortable with. But I don’t recall it being heavily influenced by any particular thing. I might have looked at some architectural references, but ultimately it was sketching ideas and seeing what worked. Also, the fact that it has two prongs on the front of it sticking out, I think I was influenced or inspired by the Horus symbol, or one of the Egyptian… I remember an Egyptian symbol, but I can’t remember the name of it, and I think that those two prongs were influenced by that. And I was trying–

David Read:
Hathor’s symbol of the bull, or the cow, has those prongs.

Ken Rabehl:
That’s… OK, that was it. That’s what I think was the major influence in that design.

David Read:
I’ll be darned.

Ken Rabehl:
Looking at that, that’s how that came about.

David Read:
Very cool. I can’t imagine designing that. You don’t wanna make it a phone. But you have to make it… I’m sure you were aware at this point that this thing was gonna be carted all over Vancouver for all of these different shows.

Ken Rabehl:
Also, it had to be a good design and a long-lasting one because it was gonna be throughout the show. There was emphasis put on the design on this thing ’cause it really had to look like something for a long time ’cause people were gonna be looking at it all the time. It was something that needed to be portable and carted around, and all that kind of thing.

David Read:
How did the show allow you to grow as an artist?

Ken Rabehl:
I think when I first started on Stargate, I was not as technically proficient. I sort of was. I was pretty good at perspective and that kind of thing. But I think doing the kinds of designs we did really sort of pushed my ability to sort of look at ideas that I’d never looked at before and to conceptualize them. Because we had done so much of that, I think I became much better at that than I was before I started the show. And what I mean by that is to properly conceptualize an idea in its full rich detail and be able to execute that on paper. Because at that time, we were doing everything on vellum. Of course, now I do all my color paintings in the computer. I use Corel Painter. So I paint all my work now. But back then, we were doing everything in pencil, so that’s another thing. I learned a lot about pencil shading, as well as design, learning how to really utilize pencil really well for getting the most out of a drawing.

David Read:
A lot of these artists now, young kids… I worked at the Stargate Worlds video game for a number of years before it crashed, and they all know how to work in the computer. They don’t necessarily… A lot of them did, but some of them didn’t know how to put pencil to paper. And I really think that that’s where it starts. It’s good to have that core skill set.

Ken Rabehl:
You got a lot of kids out there doing 3D and they’re very good at that, but you’re right, not very many of them can draw on paper and quickly conceive of an idea. I don’t know a lot of 3D. I know a little bit of SketchUp, but it would seem to me that you need to sort of sketch something out to show your boss, your creative director or production designer, whoever, before you start making a 3D model. You need to be able to communicate quickly ideas on paper, and that’s how I communicate. I can come up with a sketch in minutes to convey the idea that I wanna convey and I think that’s something that a lot of these artists are going to studios where they learn a lot of… schools, but these schools don’t teach drawing skills. They take you right into doing the software. And there isn’t that stage where you draw or anything like that because they’re simply not learning that.

David Read:
That’s not where the money is right now. That’s one of the disappointing things to me. I know that the computer allows people to share information better and the software like Corel allows those ideas to come out quicker and more efficiently and you’re not wasting trees. But how do you feel about not having… We’re so lucky to have so much of the early concept art from Stargate being original pencil-drawn sketches. You just don’t find that anymore on shows. It’s really…

Ken Rabehl:
No, you don’t.

David Read:
… something to be treasured.

Ken Rabehl:
We all were doing that years ago. Say, 10 years ago, you could find all the shows sort of doing pencil drawings, but it all disappeared now and everybody shifted over to… Art departments want you to have 3D skills and people are painting in Photoshop, and a lot of what’s happening is, a big trend I’ve noticed in art, in film, and it’s a striking trend, is the shift from even painting concepts, whether you’re painting in the computer or painting it by hand, is the shift over to Photoshopping photographic elements together to make the painting look as real as possible.

David Read:
Isn’t that something?

Ken Rabehl:
And that’s what the big features want. They want you to do photo composition now and make it look as real as possible. I’ve done it myself. I don’t enjoy it as much because it’s not as much fun to look for photographs and cut and splice pieces together. But that is the trend, and nobody pencil sketches anymore. It is too bad really because you’re right, pencil sketches are a lost art form. They really are and they’re beautiful in their own sense.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
Ken, he had…

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
He had a different process.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
Such an amazing talent for just– He’d just see stuff in his head, and it would be on paper.

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
But in later years with us, he was working on a computer.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
He was starting to, because everyone had to.

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
He did. His work always started by hand. And then he would take that into the computer, do Photoshop work with it. Everything he did started as a pencil sketch or a pencil perspective. He had this system of working out perspectives. It would take up half of the art department with his lines and stuff like that. He was really obsessive about his art. My frustration as the art director was to get it off his desk and hand it off to the person …

Douglas McLean [clip]:
All of us.

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
… who needed it. And he was like, “No, I’m not… I’m just…” And you look, and he’s shading the stars and you’re like, “OK. That’s enough shading on the stars. I think we can hand this off to the visual effects people now.” And he’s like, “Not done yet. Just not done.”

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
Bridget, I remember I had a flight booked to fly to LA to make a presentation to the executives at the studio. Could have been a presentation for Battlestar, I’m not sure. There’s Ken, finishing off one of our concept drawings. And tick-tock, the limo’s gonna pick me up, Ken. If I’m not on that flight, I’m gonna kill somebody in this… I’m gonna kill you. And he kept at it and at it. And I said, “Ken, I’m gonna rip that goddamn thing right off of your table. I want it now.” The limo was outside, motor’s running. And he’s still trying… “You don’t understand, Ken.”

Douglas McLean [clip]:
The amazing thing is, though, he could also do the most amazing sketches about this big, in seconds. Literally, he would be– I remember him going on a bus or it could have been a limo to the airport with a director and a script. And they would be storyboarding a sequence. And on the script page, he would draw these little squares about this big and they would talk. Director would say, “I’m gonna do this kind of shot over here. We’re gonna push you to do this.” Ken would scribble and do this, and then he would come back to the art department …

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
And storyboard it.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
… and then he would storyboard it. But his little sketches were the best. It was sort of like, “Ken, blow ’em up. Print them 8 by 10.”

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
You’re good.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
“Send them out. You don’t need to do any more.” He would then work them because he was—

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
He really did. I talked towards the end of his life there. We talked about it. When I say he was obsessive, it really was, he had to do– He would picture what he wanted. The picture would be in his head.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
He wanted this—

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
And he had to keep working on it until what he had in his head was what he saw on the page. And if they didn’t match up, he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy to let it go.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
The people that he modeled himself after, and I think he even went to LA and …

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
We met Sidney.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
… trained under him.

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
Another great illustrator for you guys.

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
Sidney and Ralph McQuarrie, who did a lot of the …

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
Star Wars.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
… Star Wars stuff. And you could see it. That’s what Ken was looking for, because he went down there, talked to the guys, saw their work. He went, “Ah, that’s what I wanna do.” So, that’s what he wanted.

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
And that’s what he did.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
And that’s what he did. Because when you’ve got a finished sketch, Ken, pencil sketches were really nice. His finished paintings, when he got to paint, which wasn’t often enough, were stunning. And then, to me, his tiny little thumbnails. I would kill to be able to do that. Wow, you’ve got the whole thing there.

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
I ruined his hands, I think. Because I asked him to do original paintings. It was for …

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
For the Afghanistan–

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
… an Afghan series of paintings or whatever. Ever after that, he always had to wear a support on his hands.

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
That was the beginning of the ALS.

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
Was that the beginning of the ALS?

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
Yeah. Those were the first symptoms. And he put it off to his shoulders or strain or whatever. He developed ALS, and it affected his shoulders first.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
Ultimately, all of us age.

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
Those were probably his last paintings that he ever did.

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
They were, yes.

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
They were. Hopefully they’re around somewhere.

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
Gary York had ALS too.

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
He did.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
Oh really? I didn’t know that.

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
How are you feeling?

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
Lucky to be here.

Richard Hudolin [clip]:
It’s a black humor.

Douglas McLean [clip]:
I haven’t hit any of those yet.

Bridget McGuire [clip]:
No.