Dial the Gate is pleased to welcome Rittenhouse Archives president Steve Charendoff to discuss creating beautiful Stargate trading card collectibles!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:26 – Welcome
2:02 – Welcoming Steve Charendoff, Collector
2:44 – A Love of Collecting
4:31 – Steve’s First Collection
7:21 – Classic Cards
11:03 – David’s First Trading Cards
11:48 – A Brief History of the Memorabilia
16:03 – An Illicit Star Trek Trading Card Set
19:10 – There’s So Much to Collect
20:53 – Collecting on Your Own Terms
22:55 – Missing SG-1 Cards (Thank God for eBay)
24:10 – Starting Rittenhouse Archives
30:11 – Rittenhouse’s First Card Release
32:54 – Getting into Stargate
35:37 – Rittenhouse’s First Stargate Set (Seasons 1-3)
38:08 – When Entertainment Cards Are Really Needed
39:27 – Making the Stargate Cards Worth It
40:54 – What Made Stargate Stand Out
42:01 – Different Stargate Trading Card Types
44:20 – Studio and Cast Approval
45:50 – Autograph Cards
47:04 – Richard Dean Anderson
48:33 – The Ease of Canadian Actors
52:17 – Autograph Card Quantities Per Actor
54:28 – Autograph Card Printing Process (No Sticker Autographs)
58:08 – Planning Out Years of Autograph Cards
1:01:05 – Tracking Down Actors for Autographs
1:03:17 – Picking Good Talent for Autographs
1:07:08 – Michael Ironside and Ernie Hudson
1:09:37 – Canadian Actors
1:12:23 – Josh Malina
1:14:57 – Mel Harris
1:15:45 – Costume Cards
1:19:48 – Keeping Track of Card Values
1:21:22 – Clients Seeking Specific Cards
1:22:37 – The Future of Stargate at Rittenhouse
1:24:39 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:25:53 – End Credits

***

“Stargate” and all related materials are owned by MGM Studios and MGM Television.

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TRANSCRIPT
Find an error? Submit it here.

David Read:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read. I appreciate you being with me here in Destin, Florida, actually against a back wall with a beautiful painting. I’ll let you see it really quick there. I have absolutely no idea where that is. I appreciate you being with me while I’m on the road and getting some episodes up while we wind down Season Four of Dial the Gate. Steve Charendoff, president of Rittenhouse Archives, who is responsible for all of the Stargate trading cards that you’ve seen over the years from SG-1, Atlantis, Universe, has agreed to come on and talk about Rittenhouse and the Stargate trading cards in particular. We’re gonna talk about some specific sets of cards, but also the history of the trading cards. This whole industry, we’re going to discuss. I hope you find it as interesting as I did, especially if you are collectors of these cards. Just before this episode, I did a complete review of Seasons 1 through 10 of Stargate SG-1’s trading cards. I really recommend you go see that first so you can get an idea of specifically what I’m talking about with this interview with Steve. This was recorded in two parts; the first part was recorded while I was back in Nashville and the second part was while I’m down here in Destin on vacation. We didn’t get to everything that I wanted to get to last week so a lot of the meat and potatoes are in part two in this set. I hope you enjoy, let’s bring in Steve. Steve Charendoff, president of Rittenhouse Archives. Welcome to Dial the Gate, sir. How you doing?

Steve Charendoff:
I’m doing great. Thanks for having me.

David Read:
I really appreciate you being here. Have you been a collector all your life?

Steve Charendoff:
I have. There’s nothing else I can say about that. It’s in my DNA and I bring that to work with me every day.

David Read:
Gosh. We don’t often see sports fans and sci-fi fans together. There is some crossover, but there’s not a ton.

Steve Charendoff:
I’m one of those guys.

David Read:
Absolutely. Where did your love of collecting come from? Is it something that you saw your folks do? Everyone who has a collection has some kind of a story.

Steve Charendoff:
My mother was an antiques dealer so that may have had something to do with it. She took me with her to a lot of antique shows and flea markets and other kinds of places like that when I was younger, although my desire to collect things began before I was really aware of what she did. That was only a part-time gig for her, she was not a full-time antiques dealer. My dad used to buy us baseball card packs when we were little kids and it was a treat. After dinner, he would do this magic show with us. I was five years old or something, about five, and he would tell us to close our eyes. When you’re five years old, you’ll believe just about anything, I suppose, especially if there’s a treat at the end of it. He would buy a box of baseball cards or something along those lines, usually it was baseball. He would tell us to close our eyes and he would put the packs of cards down in front of us and then, “Open your eyes.” It was like, “Oh, the packs magically appeared.” Sounds ridiculous.

David Read:
For a five-year-old, it’s that’s pretty cool.

Steve Charendoff:
What did I know? I was getting trading cards and bubble gum.

David Read:
There’s something about collecting, where you see something and it’s like, “Oh, I want that.” Then you get the randomization of trading cards because you don’t know exactly what it is that you’re going to get. I am a habitual completist and it has emptied my pocketbook many an occasion. As you can see behind me here, there’s a few sci-fi pieces. When you see something and it’s like, “Oh, I’ve gotta have that.” Then it’s like, “I’ve gotta have all of it.” What was the first collection that you completed? I would very much like to know.

Steve Charendoff:
Boy. First collection that I completed? I don’t have these cards anymore. I have a vague recollection, in the summertime, collecting Horrible Horoscopes cards. Probably the least valuable cards that you could’ve ever collected in the late ’60s or early ’70s, goofy cards. I think Fleer may have made them or it might not even have been Fleer. I don’t think it was Topps. I forget now off the top of my head, but I remember going to the store with my cousins in the summertime and that was the only thing they sold in packs. I would buy those ’cause I was sort of addicted to collecting stuff and that was the thing to collect. As I got a little bit older, that was when I was still five, six, seven years old maybe, when those cards came out, the Horrible Horoscopes. I was collecting baseball cards in the early ’70s. I remember vividly the 1971 Topps cards that you’d get in those fat… I forget what they call them now. They were like fat packs, you get them in grocery stores, then there’s the ones that came in the trays in the grocery stores too. I remember bugging my mom to, we’d be shopping and I’d find the baseball cards nestled among all the other candies and things that Topps produced, the Bazooka bubble gum boxes and all that. They’d have those trays of three packs of baseball cards, so I remember doing that. Really, where I got the bug… I don’t know how much time you want to spend on this, but…

David Read:
I wanna get to know you a little bit before I dig into the Stargate stuff first.

Steve Charendoff:
OK, when I was in second grade, a classmate of mine brought what at the time seemed like ancient baseball cards; they were old cards. Looking back on it, those cards were probably from the mid-’60s, I’d never seen them before. My earliest recollections are when my dad would do those goofy magic tricks with us, I think that was 1968, 1969. This kid brought in these cards that I had never seen before from, I think, 1965. I’d never seen those cards, never seen the design, never seen some of the players. All of a sudden, it was like this light bulb went off in my head, in that there was old stuff to collect and, “How do I do that?” That segued into my mother taking me to antique shows and flea markets where all of a sudden, I was finding all of this kind of stuff and much older. I was finding cards from the turn of the century and some even in the 1880s.

David Read:
Wow.

Steve Charendoff:
The bug kinda kept biting me, I guess you could say.

David Read:
I didn’t know trading cards went that far back. I knew playing cards went back to the 1400s, but that’s wild.

Steve Charendoff:
It was a revelation to me to discover a lot of this stuff. Then, of course, there were some price guides that were published that I found out about and then I had sort of a roadmap. The earliest baseball card price guides, I think the first one that I remember was published in around 1975 maybe. Bert Randolph Sugar, I think, was the guy who wrote the first one that I can recall anyway. I think Jefferson Burdick, if you know that name. He was really the founding father of check listing and cataloguing trading cards of all types, not just baseball and sports, he did everything.

David Read:
A king of completism.

Steve Charendoff:
His collection is in the museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. You have to make an appointment to see that and there’s, I think, just about everything that was ever made to date until he died. I think he literally was working till the last day of his life, accumulating trading cards to put them into the Metropolitan Museum of Art and to catalog everything. To this day, a lot of the designations for various sets are from his cataloging. There’s a pretty cool history to that. Maybe not a topic for today, but certainly anybody who’s interested in the history of collecting cards and how they’ve been cataloged and how that all came to be, Jefferson Burdick is the name that resonates. He was always a mythical figure to me when I was a kid and he died a long time ago. His collection is there in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Anyone, as far as I know, can go see it as long as you make an appointment to do so.

David Read:
Wow. That’s so cool. I’ve been, I did not know that was there though. I was seven, eight years old when I first saw… I think it was SkyBox that put out Star Trek: The Next Generation trading cards. I remember being like, “This is ordinarily a baseball thing. Why Star Trek? I’m buying all of it right now,” but I wondered why that was and maybe you have the answer to that as to why genre television and film have found a niche in a sports merchandise industry.

Steve Charendoff:
I think it’s always existed. That’s my take on it, at least. You go back to the very earliest years of trading cards, to the tobacco cards, for example, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, before bubble gum became a phenomenon as a way of selling. The cards were an add-on to the bubble gum packs as opposed to what it later became.

David Read:
Did not know that.

Steve Charendoff:
Later it became bubble gum added into the card packs. In the earliest days, there were sets of all sorts of different odd themes that were not necessarily sports related. You’d have flags of the world, Indian chiefs, actresses and college logos, all sorts of odd things that would help to sell. Usually, in the beginning, it was tobacco products. That sort of changed around the early ’30s, maybe a little bit into the ’20s. In the ’20s I think it sort of morphed from being a tobacco-related phenomenon to being sort of a candy-related phenomenon. In the ’30s, with the Goudey Gum Company out of Boston, they started putting baseball cards and other kinds of cards in with the bubble gum. Then in 1940, just to give you a little bit more history on this, obviously in the middle of World War II. It was in 1938 that Superman was introduced to the world. 1939 was Batman, but in 1940, Superman was much bigger than Batman at the time. Maybe not so much today, but back then, Superman was really a phenomenal character. In 1940, Gum Inc. issued a set of Superman gum cards which is a set that I personally love. I think it’s one of the very first, maybe the first important, what I call non-sport trading card set. There’s plenty of other sets that pre-dated the 1940 Superman gum, but the fact that this was a fictional comic book character – prior to that, there was the 1935 Mickey Mouse set but that set really doesn’t engender the same level of broad collectability, I guess you might say. At least that’s my opinion. Other people who collect Disney stuff might think differently. Superman was a huge figure, maybe the first important fictional character in American history, I think more than Mickey Mouse. I love that set of cards. That’s one that I’ve collected over the years and I have one of the complete sets on the PSA registry. I loved putting that set together; phenomenal set of cards. Since then, we’ve had all different kinds of card sets based on TV shows, movies, comic book characters throughout the ages, especially in the ’50s and ’60s. You had Zorro and Davy Crockett and certainly there were, during the space age, different kinds of space-related cards. In the ’60s, with the explosion of the TV series that Topps took advantage of back then. You had Gilligan’s Island, Lost in Space, Leaf did Star Trek, even though that was sort of an ill-fated card set, I guess. It was sort of produced somewhat illicitly, I guess.

David Read:
Oooo, I did not know that.

Steve Charendoff:
There’s a little weird history with that set. The 1967 Leaf set, still very collectable and fans of Star Trek love that set and it’s quite a valuable set, but I don’t think it had the full authorization of the studio at the time.

David Read:
Not officially licensed, they say.

Steve Charendoff:
It was one of those things. Moving forward into the early ’70s, Brady Bunch, Partridge Family, and then of course, in the later ’70s all the Star Wars card sets which have continued on and then Star Trek and more of the comic book related products. Comic Images did a lot back in the day. They’re not really doing that anymore, if they even still exist, I’m not sure. There’s a rich history to this that is every bit as robust as what’s been happening in the sports market, it’s just not as big a phenomenon. The market for baseball cards and others, maybe not so much the other sports early on, today it’s a different story. The market for basketball, football, and hockey has grown so much, but the market for baseball cards historically that Topps would produce, through the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s anyway, and maybe to some degree into the ’80s, it made everything else look like peanuts in terms of volume. That’s changed obviously; today it’s a different story. There’s so much more to collect, there’s so many more themes. We also now have collectable card games that, depending on what you’re interested in, sometimes those games are highly desirable for their playing value, their card game playing value. Sometimes they’re just desirable because of the fact that they’re cards.

David Read:
Like magic, magic is huge.

Steve Charendoff:
All of this has contributed to what I think is an incredibly robust and compelling marketplace. For someone like me who’s a collector, and I’m sure lots of other people watching this interview feel likewise, there’s so much to collect. The fun part is picking and choosing what you wanna collect. Me, personally, I don’t collect everything. When I was a kid, I collected everything, but then that was manageable. I’d go to the corner store and if there was a new product, a new set of cards, Topps would put out another set of Star Wars cards or another set of Mork & Mindy or whatever it might be, I’d buy it just because I was collecting everything. It was manageable and it wasn’t draining me financially at that age to collect a 66-card set with some stickers for the next TV show or movie card set that came out. There’s so much to collect and I pick and choose what I like the most. I’m a completist, but I’m also very patient. You had mentioned early on how you wanted everything; I do too. Obviously, in the position that I’m in here owning a trading card company, I meet a lot of people who are of like mind, they have that sort of obsessive-compulsive nature that comes with being a lifelong collector. I have that gene. It’s like you have it or you don’t. I do and lots of people do and thankfully they do ’cause that’s what makes this business viable and so much fun to meet other people who have that same kind of passion and interest. For me, personally, there’s always stuff that I’m collecting and I like to collect things more or less on my own terms. Even if I have the money – and this happened to me actually over the weekend. I was in Toronto at a show and there was a card that I was looking to get as part of a set that I’m building. I’m talking to the dealer and I’m negotiating with him and he wanted too much. It wasn’t like it was even that much more than I was willing to spend, but I didn’t feel good about it. I’ll wait. There are some things that I’ve been collecting for over a decade. Honestly, when I finish collecting some of those sets, I might not be too happy at that point.

David Read:
From a financial perspective or is it the drive to do it is done?

Steve Charendoff:
It’s the journey, it’s not the destination. When I complete something, I’m sort of left feeling, “Hmm. Now what?” I’m satisfied and I’m happy and that part of it is fun, but there’s a certain amount of sadness that comes with-

David Read:
Where’s the next dopamine hit?

Steve Charendoff:
I buy stuff all the time. It could even be a $2 card that comes in the mail and I’m a happy guy when that envelope shows up. I think most of us are that way. There’s nothing like adding another card to your set and knocking it off the want list.

David Read:
That’s it. You had Kate Ritter do the copy for the base cards for Stargate SG-1 and I had her on a few weeks ago because she runs rdanderson.com. We were talking about the Rittenhouse Archive and I didn’t really collect the Stargate cards. After an exchange of a dollar amount, she sent me one of her complete sets which I now own. I went through SG-1 and it was missing two somehow. Of course, I was incomplete.

Steve Charendoff:
The pain, the pain.

David Read:
Thank God for eBay. The prices weren’t awful and I went and got them and this morning I did a review of the complete set. Now they’re sitting there in the box and it’s like, “I’ve done my thing with them. Now what?” I completely register what it is that you’re talking about because my journey has been completed in getting to showcase the product.

Steve Charendoff:
You just gotta start another journey, that’s all.

David Read:
Atlantis and Universe.

Steve Charendoff:
You just start another journey.

David Read:
When did the idea for Rittenhouse come about, when did you say, “You know what, I’m gonna start doing this. I’m a big enough collector, I know what I’m doing, I know about quality, I know what it is that I want, let me take a stab at this?” Tell me about Rittenhouse Archives.

Steve Charendoff:
I had been working previously for Scoreboard Classic Games, which many people might remember. It was a publicly held company that basically pioneered the mass marketing of autographed memorabilia on QVC and Home Shopping Network.

David Read:
No, my family knows QVC well.

Steve Charendoff:
That was back in the early ’90s, late ’80s, I guess, the company started. I joined them in the early ’90s. I started making trading cards with them and then I got hired away by Fleer in 1994 because they were ramping up their entertainment division. They had taken the Marvel business in a totally different direction that was incredibly successful. Bill Jemas had hired me to go work at Fleer and we expanded into other areas besides Marvel; other TV shows, movies. Shortly after I joined we bought SkyBox, so the Disney and DC licenses, those franchises came to us.

David Read:
You took it over, OK.

Steve Charendoff:
We took that over and part of that was taking over Star Trek. That was my baby, more or less.

David Read:
Me too.

Steve Charendoff:
I always loved Star Trek.

David Read:
Me too.

Steve Charendoff:
I always loved science fiction. I’ve told this in other interviews, but I’ll repeat it here in case anyone hasn’t heard it.

David Read:
Please.

Steve Charendoff:
Ken Beroff was the guy at SkyBox who was sort of the gatekeeper for Star Trek, he was my counterpart at SkyBox. When we merged the two companies, not everyone was gonna stay and we were bringing the SkyBox operation up to New Jersey. Ken had decided he wasn’t gonna move. A really good guy, I liked Ken a lot, wish that we could’ve worked together longer. He and I sat down because he knew that I was gonna be taking over Star Trek from him since he was leaving and he said to me, in all sincerity, and I’ll remember this forever. He said, “Steve, I honestly think I’ve done as much with Star Trek as I could possibly do.” All I could think of in the back of my head was, “You gotta be kidding me. This is where it all begins for me.” As much as I liked Ken, great guy, he didn’t have, I guess, the vision to see what I saw as being a whole litany of products and projects and different creative and artistic ways of presenting Star Trek in trading card format, including, especially, the original Star Trek. For those collectors who go back that far, the TOS, Star Trek Original Series cards that we did at Fleer, the Season One, Season Two and Season Three sets, they still to this day rank among my most enjoyable projects. I’m really proud of what we did as a team to make those products. Those included the first autograph cards of any of the actors from the original show. That was so incredible that we had all of this running room, so to speak, to create products for the original show, to go back and make products for TNG, to make products for the movies up to that point. I left Fleer to start Rittenhouse in January of 1999 and at that time Fleer was getting out of the entertainment business. That’s a whole other story; it would take too long to talk about. The long and the short of it is that for the last year or two that I was at Fleer, I ended up becoming the only guy left at the end who was fully dedicated to the entertainment card division. Everybody else who was involved was doing sports and other things so to a lot of people, it was an annoyance.

David Read:
You were the odd one out.

Steve Charendoff:
The message that they gave to me was, “Look, we have the rights to make these cards. Let’s make something of it still while we have to.” They had financial obligations to the studios, they weren’t just gonna pay those fees and not get something back for it. Until those license agreements expired, there was still a desire at least to recoup what money had to be paid out. The message to me was, “Look, keep doing what you’re doing, don’t screw it up and we’ll leave you alone.” I knew that there wasn’t a commitment at Fleer to continue on and there were other projects like The Twilight Zone where I just couldn’t get them to pick up a new project. It was like, “just deal with the existing licensing agreements, make those products. We’re not gonna add anything more.” I could not convince them to do Twilight Zone, which I knew was gonna be a money maker, and that ended up being the first traditional set of trading cards that I made at Rittenhouse. I left in January of 1999 and because I had good relationships with these studios, in particular for Star Trek, they trusted me; they knew the commitment that I had to these franchises. They knew the creative energy that I was bringing to this and the passion I had for it, they entrusted me with these franchises under my own corporate banner, so to speak. Shortly after, the first two deals that we got done were with, right now, I guess you’d say it’s CBS Paramount, or CBS Viacom. Back then it was Paramount.

David Read:
Paramount Pictures.

Steve Charendoff:
Controlled Star Trek. There’s been several iterations over the years as to what that controlling entity is. CBS Paramount, Viacom.

David Read:
I’ve followed it every step of the way. It’s been a pain in the butt.

Steve Charendoff:
Think about it for me too. The changes have not always been easy, but we’ve persevered and survived and the people that we’ve worked with there have always been good to us. The Twilight Zone product line was hugely successful out of the gate. That first product that we did was a dream come true, really, because no one had ever made Twilight Zone cards before. Obviously there had been plenty of Star Trek cards made before I got involved. I took it to a different level with the autographs and all the other bells and whistles that have come since then. For Twilight Zone, no one had ever made trading cards before. To me, when you’re the first in, you have that idea that you believe in, that maybe other people don’t believe in, but you know that it’s gonna work and then it does work. Man, that’s…

David Read:
Vindication.

Steve Charendoff:
That is a happy day.

David Read:
Were you watching Stargate yet, at this point?

Steve Charendoff:
At that point? Yeah, a little bit. I don’t think I got too into Stargate until it became more of a real trading card opportunity for us. I would go back and watch more of the episodes with a different kind of eye. It does become a different kind of deal when you’re doing this for work.

David Read:
So, the license for Stargate, in some ways, came before your true fandom for it, before you completely fell head over heels for it?

Steve Charendoff:
Wow, that is a good question.

David Read:
I was curious to know how often you create content for something that you yourself are only tangentially interested in. Or do you only create stuff that you yourself like?

Steve Charendoff:
It’s more the latter. It’s more that we glom onto franchises that we like. It’s not usually the case that we pick something up that we’re not interested in some way. It’s not always me that’s the driving force for that, although most of the time it is. Sometimes it’s someone else in the office, someone who says, “Oh, you need to look at this show. This is really something special.” I think back to most things that we’ve done over time and it’s hard not to be a fan of Star Trek. It’s hard not to be a fan of Stargate and Xena and James Bond and all the Marvel movies and the Marvel comic books and the DC comic books. I think of all the franchises that we’ve worked with, I honestly can’t think of one that I wasn’t really into at some level. There are varying degrees of it, of course, but I can sit down and watch an episode of the original Star Trek almost any day of the week, at any time, and I’m a happy guy.

David Read:
That’s what’s nice about them. You can just pick one up and grab it and go.

Steve Charendoff:
I don’t know that I would do that with everything that we’ve ever made trading cards for, but by and large, it’s a labor of love. That’s the nice thing about what we do. For Stargate, I know that’s really where this whole discussion started, was with the interest in Stargate.

David Read:
Was there anything unique about getting the license with MGM or anything that they requested? I believe you started in 2001 with SG-1 Seasons One through Three, with that initial set.

Steve Charendoff:
Was it One through Three or One through Four?

David Read:
It’s One through Three.

Steve Charendoff:
One through Three?

David Read:
Season Four is its own set. I just checked thoroughly, earlier this morning.

Steve Charendoff:
OK, thank you. After 25, almost 26 years, I honestly don’t remember all the details anymore. It’s frightening to me sometimes even when I see cards that we’ve made and I think, “We made those cards?”

David Read:
You have enough now and a certain thing of age, too, comes into play there.

Steve Charendoff:
Unfortunately. I can attest to that and it’s not just with trading cards.

David Read:
They are beautiful cards.

Steve Charendoff:
We had fun with that. It was a really interesting time if you look back at the history, the context of when I started Rittenhouse. At the same time that I started my company, Fleer SkyBox was getting out of the entertainment segment. They were focusing on sports and eventually they would screw that up and go out of business. They went bankrupt and out of business, which was unfortunate. Great company, by the way, in terms of the history and unfortunately there were people who got involved in owning the business and running the business who really didn’t understand what was at stake and the quirks and nuances of the trading card business. This is not a typical business; we’re not making toilet seat covers or widgets. People buy trading cards because it makes them happy. Back at that time, in 1999, early 2000s, Comic Images had sort of drifted away from this part of the business, Topps had never really been that committed to it. Over the years, other than Star Wars, which has been a big moneymaker for them, the other sports card companies sort of dabbled in it from time to time and usually the way it would go is like this. If the sports card market was robust, if, let’s say, there were hot rookies in baseball or hot rookies in basketball or something, then those companies didn’t need to worry about bringing in entertainment products because they were making enough money off of sports. If it was a year where there weren’t hot rookies and the market was down, all of a sudden, the powers that be would start looking around, “Well, how do we bring revenues up to make up for the lost market share in sports?” They’d go looking for entertainment properties but they were never really into it. The problem was that by the time you could get a license agreement signed for a new TV show or movie, actually make the product, so much time would’ve gone by that the sports card business has typically come back up again. We were really the only company that was fully committed to non-sports or entertainment cards back at that time. When we started looking around at other opportunities, there really was so much available to us. Something like Stargate, there wasn’t another company out there that was really gonna be interested in it because they couldn’t make enough money from it to make it worth their while. For me, when I started Rittenhouse, it was just me. For the first two years, it was just me in my office with a fax machine, my computer and my telephone, that was it. The time that I spent at Scoreboard and at Fleer, I did my job doing the things that I was hired to do. At the same time, I spent my time learning everyone else’s job too. I knew how to manufacture, I knew how to sell, I knew how to write card backs, I knew how to pull photos and crop photos and do pre-press and design. Everything that went into making this business run, I knew how to do on some level. When I started Rittenhouse, I could be my own one-man show and get these products made. As we started to grow, we took on Farscape which was a turning point for us. That was the first new show that we had taken on and then we got Stargate and Xena and then shortly after that, we got James Bond.

David Read:
Was there anything in particular about Stargate that stands out to you?

Steve Charendoff:
Stargate was a lot of fun; there’s a couple of aspects of it that were interesting to me. One is that the studio was really good to work with. Back then, it’s funny, a lot of the people who were there then are actually still there today, which is very unusual. Usually, these companies have so much turnover. They were really good to work with, really enthusiastic. It’s not easy making these trading card projects and when you have a production company or a cast that isn’t enthusiastic about what we’re doing, that can be really hard. That was not the case with Stargate and it wasn’t the case with Stargate Atlantis and Stargate Universe. It was fun to work on and we got great cooperation from everybody from top to bottom.

David Read:
I wanna get into some of the nuts and bolts of the cards. I went through and cataloged 15 different types of cards that you did, in addition to the base sets for each season. From signature and costume and sketch effects and authentic relic to little cards that unfold, like, book of Origin and confidential files. Did you design all of the cards for Stargate specifically or did you hand that off to someone else? How directly involved were you in the creation of these? Were they created stateside? Were they manufactured in Asia?

Steve Charendoff:
No, we produce everything in the US. I don’t know that I can give you a firm, succinct answer to that question about designs and all of that. It’s really a collaborative process among everyone here on our team. Back then, it was basically three of us and we were all into the show. At that point, we didn’t have 20 different product lines. We just had a few things and Stargate was a big part of all that, very important to us. Not only did we love the franchise, but we loved making the products. We all kinda contributed to what those cards should look like, what the set compositions would be about. Sometimes there are themes that sort of come together organically, if you will. There are some obvious ones that build within the show and it isn’t that difficult to figure out what to do in terms of taking those themes and translating them into trading cards. The design part of it, we’ve had different designers working for us at times. We give them direction, they give us their ideas, we critique them, tweak them, until ultimately everyone’s happy and, of course, the studio has to be happy too ’cause we don’t operate in a vacuum.

David Read:
They have to approve it.

Steve Charendoff:
They have to approve it and sometimes the actors, Richard Dean Anderson I think has a certain amount of approval.

David Read:
Yes, anything that has his face on it has to have his approval per his contract.

Steve Charendoff:
He wasn’t a difficult guy to deal with. Once we get the ball rolling with a franchise like that and there’s multiple products coming over time and somebody like Richard Dean Anderson, when he sees the next round of cards to look at or images to approve or what have you, there’s a rhythm that builds with that. I think we can anticipate what he likes and I think that he’s probably anticipating a little bit more or understanding a little bit more about what it is that we’re doing. It becomes a little easier to get to the finish line on each successive product.

David Read:
Steve, I appreciate you being with me once again for the second half of our conversation here. I wanted to get into the nitty-gritty with you of the specific cards in the Stargate series that I fell in love with. Any specific designs that you really liked and what some of the more complicated ones were to achieve. I think the big one that everyone loves in terms of the specialty cards, and I may be speaking out of turn here because I’m sure there are gonna be people who have their own favorites, were the autograph cards. There’s so much content out there that is so easily scammed now with the precision of a lot of these devices that we have available, with these auto pens, but with the autograph cards, you’re guaranteed an authentic piece of memorabilia. That’s, I think, one of the things that I love about them so much. Can you speak to the autograph cards a little bit? Are they more of the more popular pieces in the collections that you’ve put out? Where do they fall in this?

Steve Charendoff:
Autograph cards for all of our collections, with maybe some rare exceptions, typically are among the most desirable, most collectible and most valuable features of any particular product and I think that was true for Stargate. I was especially excited when we got Richard Dean Anderson to agree to sign cards for us. Anytime you take on a project like this you wanna get as many of the starring cast as you possibly can. In some cases, when there’s an ensemble cast, there’s not always that one person that is sort of the main lead actor. In Stargate, of course, that was the case with RDA, Richard Dean Anderson.

David Read:
For SG-1, I’m sure.

Steve Charendoff:
I remember when we got him on board, I thought, “Oh man, we’re off and running now.” Once you get a guy like that on board it makes it so much easier to get the other actors on board because a lot of times they’ll say, “Who else is signing?” “Richard Dean Anderson’s signing ’em.” “OK. I guess if he’s doing it, I should do it.” That sort of is where it begins with a lot of our projects and that was a great cast. Michael Shanks and Amanda Tapping and Chris Judge, they were all really cool about participating from the very beginning. I think some of that, at times, comes down to the fact that a show like SG-1 is filmed in Vancouver, Canada. We’ve had a lot of our shows that we worked on filmed in Canada instead of in Hollywood. I think a lot of times there’s more of a sense of, camaraderie, may be a word to describe it. It’s a hard thing to put a single adjective to.

David Read:
Less dog-eat-dog competition?

Steve Charendoff:
Especially with a TV series like this as opposed to a movie. When we’ve done movie projects, it sometimes can be hard to get the talent on board because usually we’re making movie card sets after the fact, after the movie comes out. In those instances, you have the talent that’s moved on to other projects. Whereas with a TV series like Stargate, and not by coincidence, we didn’t start making the Stargate cards at the end of Season One, we started a few seasons in. At that point the show was pretty well-established, which was good on many levels. At that point the cast is really invested in the show, in the longevity of the show. We were certainly one of the very first companies to make any sort of officially licensed merchandise, any kind of product built around the show. You talk about the early 2000s, as opposed to today, where even smaller productions, things that aren’t nearly as popular, the actors from everything today are being, I wouldn’t say inundated necessarily, but they’re being approached to sign items, whatever they may be. They’re approached to appear at conventions and they’re approached sometimes to do private signings. 20 years ago or more, when we were in our infancy as Rittenhouse Archives, we only started in 1999 and Stargate, I think, our first product came out in 2002?

David Read:
That’s pretty early on.

Steve Charendoff:
At that point, most of these actors had never been approached to sign anything. Approached by the fans here and there, but not on any organized basis where they’re actually gonna be part of something like this, where they’re asked to sign a quantity of cards or just quantity of autographs for anything, whether it’s cards or something else. This was the first experience for them and we were among the very first companies to make a licensed product built around Stargate SG-1. I think, for them, there’s a level of enthusiasm and excitement and feeling like, “Wow, we really made it. We’re on trading cards now. We’re not just a TV show on the Syfy Channel.” I forget where Stargate was.

David Read:
Showtime for the first 5 seasons and then Syfy Channel for 6 to 10.

Steve Charendoff:
That’s right now that you mention it. Showtime, good memory there. I’ve done this for so long I can’t remember half of.

David Read:
Can I ask the Wizard to pull back his curtain just a little bit?

Steve Charendoff:
Sure.

David Read:
For the autograph cards, are they all a set number or does each talent agree to do a set number? Are there 500 of these things? Are there 1000? How many typically were there?

Steve Charendoff:
It varies.

David Read:
It did vary?

Steve Charendoff:
Back then I wanna say that probably Richard Dean Anderson signed 500 cards, just to guess.

David Read:
For his first release? OK.

Steve Charendoff:
For the first release. It could be less. I’d have to go back and look at my files and that goes back a long way.

David Read:
So, for instance, for the Seasons One through Three SG-1 sets you have nine actors. They didn’t all do the exact same number; you contract with them to do an X number?

Steve Charendoff:
No. With somebody like Richard Dean Anderson, it becomes more a function of, “Hey, what are you comfortable with?” We want him involved; we don’t wanna press the issue necessarily. If he’s willing to do more, great, and if he wants to do less, we’re OK with that too. In most cases, we go into it with the expectation that if the actor will participate with us once, they’ll have a good experience and they’ll wanna do it again. The process is really easy and non-intrusive and they know that it’s officially blessed by their studio.

David Read:
That’s nice.

Steve Charendoff:
What we’re doing supports what they’re doing to promote and market the show. It’s not quite the same as if some guy shows up with a bunch of photos in the back of his trunk and says, “Hey, here’s 100 bucks in cash, sign these.” That kind of stuff happens, I guess, from time to time.

David Read:
One of the things that always shocked me, maybe it’s just a very simple procedure of printing, God forbid they get printed wrong. A lot of these I would think were done, and tell me if I’m wrong, with the actor while they were there shooting the show if it was going to be a relatively big person. Could you bring them up during the show or were these all done after their appearance?

Steve Charendoff:
That’s a good question.

David Read:
I asked Peter DeLuise about this once and he said there was a lot of merchandise coming in, or things coming in that had to get done, so things had to get autographed. What I assumed was, and maybe you can maybe correct me, is that the cards were blank, they could sign their name and then you would take those off to be printed with the…

Steve Charendoff:
No, no, no.

David Read:
So that was already done?

Steve Charendoff:
Yes. I will say this about what we do that’s different, in a lot of ways, than what other companies might do. First of all, all the autographs are signed on card. There are no sticker autographs, per se. Certainly, we never did anything like that for Stargate, that I can assure you. I can’t think of a situation where we ever did sticker autographs for any project.

David Read:
I didn’t even know that was a thing.

Steve Charendoff:
Yeah, that’s a thing.

David Read:
I just assumed that the card was signed on and then printed later.

Steve Charendoff:
No, no, no. That would be a real difficult process. This is true for a lot of the Star Wars cards, for example, that Topps has produced. If they get Harrison Ford or Mark Hamill, they may have done some things in more recent years to have autographs signed on card. Most of the time, what Topps will do, and sometimes what Upper Deck and Panini will do – those are certainly the bigger sports card companies – they’ll have the talent sign stickers, just generic stickers, and then they’ll keep those until they know they need to use them. They’ll print the cards and then layer the sticker down on top of the card in the appropriate space.

David Read:
It’s not as fun.

Steve Charendoff:
No, I agree with you, but you’d be surprised how many people do go along with that. Some of it is a matter of there’s no alternative if you wanted to get a Harrison Ford Star Wars autograph. Sometimes it may be a function of availability. They don’t have time to print the card and so stickers are the next best thing and the only thing. We’ve been able to get around that and I gotta believe that there’s always a way of getting around that. The point I was trying to make is that they’ll print some of the cards that they need and use some of the stickers for the current, whatever the current project is, and then they’ve got other stickers that are sitting in a warehouse someplace or in a vault. A year later, maybe they figure, “Now we wanna make a different card of that person and put the sticker down.” You don’t have to necessarily print everything upfront the way we do. My feeling about that is that with the franchises that we work with, we always have a sense of longevity with it and plotting out what are all the different autograph card versions or variations or designs that we wanna use. It’s not a perfect science but we can plot out years’ worth of autograph cards. If I know that I’m gonna get someone to sign cards for me at a certain time, I don’t wanna necessarily use all those autographs in the product that’s coming up most immediately. I’ll print five different variations of autographs and get those signed and they’re all on card, so no stickers. We can put them, the ones that we’re not using right away, we can just put those away and we’ll use them when the time comes and that seems to have served us well. I think most of our collectors would agree, and the dealers would agree, that’s far more satisfying than having a sticker on an autograph. The analogy that I would use for that, I think this is really what resonates with people who may not have thought this through completely when you think about the virtues of sticker autographs. Let’s say you’re a football fan, OK? Let’s say you’re a Tom Brady fan. Would you want a football that’s signed by Tom Brady right on the football? Or do you want a football that has a sticker affixed to it with his autograph on it?

David Read:
One feels like a piece of merchandise and the other one feels like a piece of him.

Steve Charendoff:
I’d go even further than that. I would say that nobody ever does that. Nobody ever puts a sticker on a football.

David Read:
It wouldn’t work.

Steve Charendoff:
That seems stupid. When you sort of take that logic and apply it to trading cards, why should it be any different? Don’t you wanna feel like the card that you’re collecting, the Richard Dean Anderson card, the Amanda Tapping card signed by her…

David Read:
Spent time with them.

Steve Charendoff:
Don’t you wanna feel like, “Hey, she actually held this card and signed it?” That whole thing was in her possession and she touched it and put the pen down to it. As opposed to signing stickers in a hotel room in Chicago and then months or years later that sticker’s being applied to the card that has nothing to do with her really other than the picture being on it.

David Read:
Was that the way that you guys approach that? There’s a fair bit of tracking people down after the fact then and getting these things, I’m assuming, mailed to them, or have someone there with them? Do you have someone there with them helping them autograph faster or do you just mail them off to them and hope for the best?

Steve Charendoff:
It’s a combination of things. It depends on the circumstances and where the actor is and how they wanna go about it and all that. I will say that it’s pretty much all after the fact for TV series. It’s pretty much after the fact for everything. If it’s a movie it’s almost always after the fact because the movie studios don’t typically release the photos to put on the cards until after the movie is out or close to it. If it’s before the movie you’re always sworn to double top-secret probation, lest you lose your firstborn child.

David Read:
Or a finger.

Steve Charendoff:
Or a finger, that too. When we made cards for Stargate, for example, Stargate Season Five, we didn’t begin to make those cards until Season Five had already aired all of its episodes. At that point we know what the product is that we need to build. If the episodes haven’t aired and we don’t know what they’re about and we don’t know who all the actors are, who are guest stars, and we don’t know what all the plot lines are, we just have to put it together after the fact. Season Five cards will come out usually in lockstep with when Season Six airs, when fans have now reengaged with the show.

David Read:
That’s strategic because the interest in the show has peaked again?

Steve Charendoff:
Pretty straightforward as far as that goes.

David Read:
Makes sense.

Steve Charendoff:
There’s no magic to that, just common sense. You want your Tom Brady autograph actually on the football and not on a sticker on the football.

David Read:
The thing that I’m amazed at now, with that information, going through all the autograph cards in particular, is how many of the cards are of characters that I would really want to have. Only one or two are in there where, like, “That’s an obscure character. I’m glad I got the autograph, but it’s a pretty obscure character.” Do you have someone on your team who picks who you’re going to go after? Does publicity at the studio have recommendations for who you should go after? Who feels that out?

Steve Charendoff:
That would be me.

David Read:
You would be the fan.

Steve Charendoff:
I have people that work with me that will provide some guidance. Sometimes if I have a question like, “What do you think about this person versus that person?” Sometimes it does come down to a matter of opinion: what do you think?

David Read:
You have a budget for every season, I’m guessing?

Steve Charendoff:
Yeah. The nice thing about a series like Stargate, any TV series where there’s some longevity to it, we know that we’re gonna be making card sets over time, once we establish a bit of a track record. After the first set of Stargate cards that we put out, that premier edition set, we sort of established a benchmark of, “OK, this is sort of where the demand is for Stargate and we can work to that.” Sometimes it fluctuates a little bit, but the nice thing about a show like Stargate, and it’s true for the Star Trek shows and it’s true for most shows that we work with where there’s multiple seasons, it gets to be a little predictable in terms of the volume. We can budget accordingly and we know roughly speaking how many different signers we wanna get on board. It always includes a certain number of starring cast members. You always want to have the heavy hitters. Richard Dean Anderson isn’t in every one of the projects, but there’s always gonna be probably two out of the four major, or five if you include… Oh gosh, what’s the general? Don S.?

David Read:
Don S. Davis. He had two.

Steve Charendoff:
Don S. Davis, thank you.

David Read:
Rick bookends the series in One through Three and then the one that I didn’t even know existed, which was after the show was done, it’s in this completely separate set that I don’t actually have. I don’t know if these were remaining autograph cards or one last lap around the diamonds, but they’re the one set that I’m missing from SG-1. I was like, “Oh no, I’m missing one.” Rick did another one for those.

Steve Charendoff:
It’s sort of a little bit formulaic in a way. It’s part science, part art in terms of how this all gets put together. You always wanna have a certain number of the starring cast members, a certain number of the non-starring but meaningful recurring guest stars. You wanna get the meaningful guest actors who might have appeared in one episode and then you sort of round things out with a handful of actors who play maybe lesser, one-episode roles or they could be multiple episodes, but maybe very minor characters. I’m trying to think of the name of somebody who fits that bill, like Gary…

David Read:
Chalk?

Steve Charendoff:
Carter? Chalk. [sic]

David Read:
Correct.

Steve Charendoff:
He was sort of in the background for a lot of episodes. He was in the control room or whatever and it was in the first season that you see him…

David Read:
He’s in one scene at the end of an episode, in Season 5, Episode 2.

Steve Charendoff:
It’s like, “OK. Maybe we don’t do him.” Then, over time, you start seeing him over and over again and then you start thinking, “he’s meaningful.” In Star Trek there are some of those people too who just become fan favorites in a lot of ways. They’re so quirky because they’re in the background and they’re recurring, even though they don’t have a lot of meaningful action or plot points to connect to, but it’s still fun.

David Read:
Especially when Stargate got a number of really top-notch guest stars like Michael Ironside and Ernie Hudson. I’m going through the sets, I’m like, “We’ve got them. They’ve made sure to get those who are bigger, more known for other things.”

Steve Charendoff:
Those guys are always real fun to get because in a lot of instances they have never been involved in something that translated to trading cards. They have a level of popularity that speaks to the Stargate fan, but it also speaks to the broader fan of whatever else they’re known for. It’s cool sometimes to get an autograph of a guy like that and to get an official autograph, even if it’s for Stargate that’s not maybe what they’re best known for. Ernie Hudson, he was in Ghostbusters and more people are gonna remember him from that than they ever will from Stargate. It’s still pretty cool, especially if you are a Stargate fan, to get him to sign for that particular role.

David Read:
Or Dom DeLuise and Tony Todd. We’ve recently lost Tony and I’m going through these and it’s like, “Here’s a piece of them forever” that the fan has.

Steve Charendoff:
Tony was a good dude; he signed for us a few times over the years. He did Star Trek and I wanna say he did some other things too, not just one or two things. There are people like that. A lot of the folks from Stargate in particular, who play these guest starring roles, are Canadian actors. It may be hard to sort of understand this fully unless you sort of have the experience that I have with some of these actors, but in Canada it’s more of a working-class kind of profession. The Canadian actors, even if they have a recurring role on a show like Stargate or on one of the Star Trek shows. Strange New Worlds is filmed in Toronto and Star Trek: Discovery was also filmed in Toronto. X-Files was filmed in Vancouver and in the surrounding areas in British Columbia. A lot of those actors are more what I call working-class actors. They’re making a good living acting. They’re not necessarily only doing television, sometimes they’re doing local theater, sometimes they’re doing movies.

David Read:
They’re not so much part of the L.A. Hollywood machine.

Steve Charendoff:
They’re happy to pick up opportunities like signing cards for one of these programs. For a lot of them, it’s sort of a cool thing. This may also sort of speak to the Canadian sensibility about trading cards, because most Canadians understand collecting hockey cards.

David Read:
It’s their national pastime.

Steve Charendoff:
I know it’s a little bit of a leap from hockey to Stargate, but follow this because I get this sometimes even with big Hollywood stars too. Don’t get me wrong, but the idea that, “Hey, I’m gonna be on a hockey card?” They’re really saying Stargate card, but they think of it in terms of a hockey card, like, “I’m gonna be like Wayne Gretzky or Bobby Orr” and “Oh, that is so cool.” There’s a sort of Canadian thing about that that’s sort of funny and cool. I’m a dual citizen. I’m a Canadian and an American and I identify very much with a lot of the Canadian mentality that way, so I get it.

David Read:
I do too. I’ve talked with a lot of them. There’s no BS; they’re here to do a job.

Steve Charendoff:
You know Who really sticks out actually? He’s not Canadian. I don’t think he’s Canadian. The guy from The West Wing. Shoot, what’s his name?

David Read:
That was a huge cast.

Steve Charendoff:
He played… Josh Malina. Am I correct? Am I misremembering this?

David Read:
I’ve not seen it.

Steve Charendoff:
Wait a sec. Josh Malina had a role on Stargate.

David Read:
Josh Malina did?

Steve Charendoff:
He signed cards for us for Stargate. I don’t know if you can look that up while we’re talking.

David Read:
I can.

Steve Charendoff:
I could swear that this is the person I’m thinking of.

David Read:
Ah, yes. He did “Bad Guys” in Season 10. This fella right here. He was the curator of the museum and he did do an autograph card.

Steve Charendoff:
This is a very memorable moment. My wife loves this story, mainly because she’s a West Wing fan. We, I think, originally contacted his agent about signing cards. His agent, I think, just said, “Josh, if you wanna do this, go ahead and contact these guys. They’re good people and you can deal directly with them.” It wasn’t like it was such a big deal, not every agent would do that. So, Josh Malina calls up and I tell him what the deal is with the Stargate cards and he’s like, “I’m gonna be on a baseball card?”

David Read:
Aw. What a nice guy.

Steve Charendoff:
“This is the greatest day of my life.” This is a guy who’s been on the West Wing and he’s telling me that being on a Stargate card…I forget exactly how he put it, but it was something like, “I feel like Mickey Mantle. I’m gonna be on…”

David Read:
How nice.

Steve Charendoff:
… I’m gonna be…” That was such a moment. I’m sure if you ever get the chance to talk to him and ask him about that…

David Read:
I will hit him up. I loved his role.

Steve Charendoff:
It was a great moment. I’ve had a few of those over the years where the actor contacts me directly and it turns some people into a 12-year-old kid.

David Read:
They can teleport in.

Steve Charendoff:
It’s the coolest thing. Most people who collect are like that. “Oh, I got the Richard Dean Anderson card.” It’s the holy grail of Stargate but for the actor to feel that way about being on the card!

David Read:
Mel Harris, I had her in Season One of Dial the Gate and her one piece of Stargate memorabilia, and she showed it off in her episode, is her autograph card, she has one. I’m sure some of your folks, probably putting the contract aside, are like, “Can I keep one of mine?” They probably do that.

Steve Charendoff:
Usually, they want one. There are a few people who don’t want one and usually it’s like, “Oh, I gotta give one to my mother or my father.” Or, “My kids, they need to see that I’m important, that I’m on a trading card.” It’s very cute.

David Read:
They get it. You can tell the collectors who respond that way, even if that’s not what they collect. I’ve got a couple more types of cards I’d like to ask, if that’s OK. The costume cards, how is that done? Do you make sure that you’ve got a photograph to match it up? I imagine you’ve got the assistants, costume folks, working overtime at the studios to make sure that they match up certain things. I would love to know if you know how those kinds of cards are even created.

Steve Charendoff:
It’s not as complicated as you might think. Generally speaking, the way the process works from start to finish, more or less, is that the studio, in the case of Stargate, provided us with the costumes. We’ll just say to them, “Look, we wanna take the costumes. We wanna embed pieces of them into trading cards. Fans love them.” Sometimes the people at the studio get it. Sometimes they think, “That seems like the nuttiest idea ever” if they’re not collectors and they don’t understand. We explain it to them and then eventually they do get it. When they see the finished product, especially if we’re able to communicate in some way directly with the people who are in charge of the costumes and props, we’ll send them finished samples of those cards. They see what it is that they provided to us that ends up in trading card form and then they feel like, “Oh my God, this is awesome.”

David Read:
They’re beautiful. They’re beautiful. They’re not taped on, there’s layers of card.

Steve Charendoff:
To some people, it may seem somewhat sacrilegious, I suppose, to cut up a costume. There are occasionally those criticisms that come our way.

David Read:
That’s true.

Steve Charendoff:
Look, I understand that. On the other hand, it’s not like we’re cutting up Babe Ruth’s bat from 1917. In most cases, we’re getting items that have been distressed, no longer gonna be used. Sometimes people don’t understand that. For Richard Dean Anderson, for example, any outfit that he wore on any episode of the show was probably, with rare exceptions, there’s many multiples of those items. If it’s a piece that’s gonna get distressed in some way, if it’s an action scene where, let’s just say, he gets phaser blasted or something and then all of a sudden there’s a hole in the shirt with residue from whatever he’s gotten shot with or there’s blood on it or whatever that may be. I don’t know how many times that happens to him in the show, maybe never, but you get the point. There’s gonna be multiple takes so if they don’t get it right the first time, it’s like, “Oh, OK. Take it off and put on a clean one.” It’s not like we’re ever cutting up a one-of-a-kind item so it’s hard to get too excited about something like that. On the other hand, we’re also talking about a fictional TV show. It’s not like it’s…

David Read:
You’re not cutting up Gutenberg Bibles.

Steve Charendoff:
It’s not a real person. It’s not to take anything away from the importance of Stargate or anything else that’s fictional, but it’s not the Gutenberg Bible, it’s not Babe Ruth’s bat, it’s not Tom Brady’s lap.

David Read:
It’s something fun. In my review we had Teal’c’s outfit from 1969, that garish outfit that he wore. Peter Williams in Season Six’s “The Changeling,” when he came in all bloody, I actually have a card with some of the blood on it.

Steve Charendoff:
Cool.

David Read:
That’s really cool. Do you keep track of the cards once they’re out in the environment? Do you keep tabs on how well they’re doing or which cards are more valuable.

Steve Charendoff:
Yeah. I don’t keep extremely close tabs on that. I take greater pride in the fact that people are collecting the cards. I take notice if something unusual occurs or if something in particular sells for a lot of money or if there’s something very rare that we’ve produced. I remember there were cards that we made that were a little fatter inside the little plastic case, the pieces of the gate. I pay attention to what that kind of thing would sell for in the secondary market. I get a kick outta that for sure. More often than not, what I get a kick out of is going to a show, a card show, and seeing a dealer who has one of these cards in his or her display case. That sort of brings it to a level of reality that sometimes is hard to feel in the moment when I’m making these products. I’m so busy in the office doing all the things that are necessary to get the product finished and shipped out that I can’t spend too much time on all that and I don’t get to see a lot of what happens to the product after the fact.

David Read:
Do you have stalkers begging you for cards that you no longer have? Do you have anyone calling you saying, “I need this. Please.” “Please don’t call me back. Look on eBay.”

Steve Charendoff:
I think most people know not to call me for that. I’m a pretty open book and I’m pretty accessible by most standards. I think most people know that I’m not sitting on the Indiana Jones warehouse of Rittenhouse cards waiting for someone to hit me up for something. We make what we make, we sell it out usually pretty quick. The goal is to move on to the next product. That’s the happiest kind of dynamic for us; we sell it out, sell out today’s product, have nothing left and we start immediately working on the next series of cards for whatever it is, if it’s Stargate or something else. That’s always sort of my primary focus; what’s immediately in front of me, not what’s in the past. Occasionally I do see and pay attention to that stuff.

David Read:
Steve, this has been terrific. I really appreciate you taking the time and I really wish Rittenhouse all the best. Are you slowing down anytime soon? Are you continuing to explore new IPs? What’s your plan?

Steve Charendoff:
It’s a good question. We just keep rolling along. We’re having a lot of fun doing what we do. We haven’t done Stargate in quite a while.

David Read:
Neither have we. Just doing the old stuff.

Steve Charendoff:
We think about it though every once in a while. Maybe enough time goes by and maybe there’s enough interest in pulling out a retrospective concept that covers a lot of ground and revisits old characters.

David Read:
Sign me up!

Steve Charendoff:
We might do that at some point. I don’t rule that out. I’d certainly enjoy doing that, I have a great fondness for Stargate. It’s part of the formative years of Rittenhouse and very meaningful to us and I think very fondly, too. I remember my interactions with those cast members and I feel really good about that. Michael Shanks, Amanda Tapping and Christopher Judge.

David Read:
Atlantis and Universe; you guys did the whole nine yards.

Steve Charendoff:
Jason Momoa, the first autographed cards that he ever did, that was from Atlantis. That’s a cool thing. A lot of stuff has come out, a lot of real firsts for us have been borne out of the Stargate franchise, so it’s cool. We look fondly upon it.

David Read:
Any way that I can help, if you decide to proceed in that direction, count me in because I’ve always considered myself an avid collector. When I got my hands on these cards, I was very impressed with their quality and the care that you put into them. You guys are true fans and I really appreciate you taking the time here.

Steve Charendoff:
Thanks. I appreciate that thought, I do.

David Read:
That was Steve Charendoff, President of Rittenhouse Archives, responsible for the Stargate SG-1, Atlantis and Universe trading cards. I appreciate you tuning in. Before we let you go, if you enjoy Stargate and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, please click Like. It does make a difference with the show and will continue to help us grow our audience. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you want to get notified about future episodes, click Subscribe. Giving the Bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last-minute guest changes. These guests are working and things do occasionally get rescheduled. Clips from this episode will be released over the course of the next few weeks on the Dial the Gate YouTube channel. My tremendous thanks go out to my staff of moderators; Tracy, Antony, Jeremy, Marcia, Sommer. You guys make the show possible week after week. Frederick Marcoux over at ConceptsWeb, he’s my web developer on Dial the Gate, keeps everything up and running. My producer, Linda “GateGabber” Furey, who keeps me on my toes. We got a few more episodes for you before I wind down Season Four for the year and then we go on a bit of a hiatus until about March. Some really cool episodes heading your way. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate and I’ll see you on the other side.