Shane and Brian of the Podcast Brothers are here to discuss their latest documentary covering the original Stargate feature film and share their feelings on the upcoming fourth series and the industry as a whole!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:32 – Welcome
0:47 – Guest Introduction
1:14 – What is The Podcast Brothers?
2:17 – Star Trek: Voyager Documentary
4:20 – SG-1 Documentary
5:55 – Release of Documentary of the Feature Film
6:51 – Brian’s Contributions
8:50 – Shane’s Background
9:35 – The Idea Behind the Documentary
11:17 – Brian Recreated the Stargate Website
12:43 – Who Did Jaye Davidson Play in the Movie?
15:07 – The Merits of the Movie
20:07 – Animated Stills
24:14 – The Use of AI
30:21 – Art is Designed to Make You Feel Something
33:16 – Brian’s Spreadsheets on the Movie
37:01 – Hardest to Research
39:09 – The Difference Between Content and Art
42:14 – Telling the Whole Story
44:52 – What Do They Want from SG4?
52:05 – Stargate Origins
56:30 – Prequels Changing Storylines
1:01:48 – Save the Gate Campaign
1:03:55 – Concerns about the New Series
1:07:01 – One Word to Define Stargate
1:09:12 – Different Types of Science Fiction
1:16:43 – What’s Next?
1:20:58 – How Can We Support You?
1:22:16 – Stargate Universe
1:23:24 – Martin Gero Will Only Add to the Franchise
1:27:52 – Thank You
1:29:14 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:30:16 – End Credits

***
“Stargate,” “Stargate SG-1,” “Stargate Atlantis,” “Stargate Universe,” and all related materials are owned by Amazon MGM Studios.

#Stargate
#DialtheGate
#TurtleTimeline

TRANSCRIPT
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David Read:
Welcome to Episode to be determined. You’re watching Dial the Gate: The Stargate Oral History Project, my name is David Read. Thanks for being here with me. Shane and Brian from the Podcast Brothers are in the house, if my buttons will work. There we go. There is a God. Guys, how you doing?

Brian:
Not bad.

Shane:
Awesome. Thank you, David.

David Read:
Thrilled to have you guys here. It’s so good to be with you. You guys were just on GateWorld so I feel I’m stealing from Darren a little bit here. Apologies to Darren. Shane, what is the Popcast Brothers? What do you guys talk about? What is it that you do?

Shane:
We’ve been doing this thing for quite a long time on YouTube. Brian and I are brothers, so obviously it would be weird, I guess, if we came up with that and we weren’t brothers. We’re brothers and we decided a while back, “Hey, why don’t we start doing movie reviews?” We were actually doing audio-only ones back in the 2000 teens. One day, Brian’s like, “Hey, we should get on this YouTube thing and do it.” I said, “Dude, we are way too ugly and way too fat to be on YouTube.” Somehow, he convinced me and we’ve been doing this now for over 10 years.

Brian:
I showed him a podcast of Boogie.

Shane:
I think so.

Brian:
Boogie 94 or whatever.

Shane:
I’m like, “OK, if that guy’s doing it, we can do it.”

Brian:
I was like, “Come on, bro.”

Shane:
We got our start doing that and worked our way into documentaries. We’re here, so happy to be so.

David Read:
I appreciate you guys taking the time to be on the show. I have been a fan for quite some time of the various documentaries that you’ve done, particularly Star Trek: Voyager, because we have been waiting for the official documentary to come out since it was announced, I think, in 2020. “It’s for the 25th anniversary.” “It’s for the 30th anniversary.” God. Come on, seriously? We’re taking our sweet time with this thing. You guys put together one that was far more educational and it filled my cup more than the actual documentary did.

Shane:
Wow.

David Read:
As much as I would love to see Garrett Wang weightless, you guys create great content.

Brian:
Thank you, David.

David Read:
It’s a real treat to have you.

Brian:
I always tell Shane, “Look, we’re not gonna get the actors and the writers; we’re not gonna get a bunch of these people on. What we can do is put as much information as possible into a single documentary.” A lot less filler, a lot less talking about Garrett’s weightlessness or whatever and a lot more actual information about the show. I’m sure there’s a place for both types of documentaries, but this is the kind we can make.

Shane:
We thought of documentaries…we always watch them and go, “Those are cool and…” But what’s really missing is a lot of the depth. They’re actually called definitive histories so that’s where we got our start. Stargate was our very first. We did Stargate: The Definitive History, which years later now we realize is not as definitive as we thought it probably was.

David Read:
You could make a V 2.0.

Brian:
That’s what we’re doing.

Shane:
We’re in the process of doing it actually right now. The video we’re gonna talk about today is the first in the set.

David Read:
I watched the one that you just put out. At the end, you said, “That’s for another story.” You already told it. What do you mean? There was an implication that more was coming soon and “what year is this? I think I’ve already watched that one.” That makes a lot of sense now.

Brian:
The next one’s gonna be SG-1.

David Read:
SG-1 specifically? It’s going to give Darren a run for his money.

Brian:
We’re trying to do the whole series, all the way to Origins or whatever.

Shane:
After we did Voyager, we said there’s no reason that Stargate shouldn’t get the exact same treatment. We thought we’d go back and redo them and go deeper. We did tell the story generally of the franchise, but there’s so much more that happened in between the seasons and with the producers and the writers and the actors. I think it would do it so much more justice to actually go where nobody’s really gone before with it.

Brian:
Same as Voyager.

David Read:
Point of phrase.

Brian:
We’re gonna skip Stargate Infinity, though. I don’t think that’s worth taking the time.

David Read:
I would love to speak with someone about Stargate Infinity to get some voices into the archive regarding it. The guys responsible, there were two guys who were and one of them has passed on now and the other one, I can’t get him to respond to me. “Shit.”

Brian:
I wonder why.

David Read:
Probably not interested. It’s part of the legacy of the show. The main reason I wanted you guys on is five days ago you released a documentary on the Stargate feature. There were things that I didn’t know that you guys put into this thing.

Shane:
Wow. High Praise.

David Read:
It was very thorough. It was delightful for me to see myself in it. That was cool.

Shane:
We get a lot of our information from you, David, because you are the archivist. You and Darren do the do the best work for all Stargate fans.

David Read:
I’m one of them. I’m watching: “Are they gonna talk about why there were seven chevrons, eight chevrons, nine chevrons? They didn’t talk about that. OK, I guess it’s not that important.” In hindsight, all the big pieces are there. Brian, what were your contributions to it and how long did it take? Let me start with you on this.

Brian:
I actually go after Shane. Shane writes it, he writes the whole thing in our shared doc and then he voices it per chapter. I take those words and audio voice and then I master the audio. I cut it up and I change the pacing and sort of adjust all that and then create the graphics and motion graphics. The music for this one and for the last one, the Goonies one, were the first time I started walking into custom music. Before it was, “what good music can I sort of license from a good friend of mine?” A good friend of mine, his name is Scott Buckley, gave us a lot of music for our previous docs before Goonies. He gave me a lot of feedback on what we did for Goonies and he taught me how to use certain programs and his stems and all that. Eventually, for Goonies, I was: “I need to create the score from scratch using the original chords and give it the same feeling of wonder and adventure.” I did the same for this and the music takes a long, long time. I create a bunch of music. I could probably create a few hours’ worth of music and that few hours will be whittled down into pieces that are scored throughout the actual different chapters. Then I do all the motion graphics for the chapters, the 3D stuff, the Blender stuff. Like we were talking about earlier, I use a lot of Blender, After Effects. I create the actual video off of the story that Shane wrote and voiced. He writes it and narrates it and I create the actual video portion.

Shane:
He does the hard part.

David Read:
Shane, I love listening to your voice. I don’t know how much I could butter you up, but it’s so silky smooth.

Brian:
It’s so smooth.

David Read:
Do you have a radio background?

Shane:
I was. I was a journalist in the Navy, actually. I spent an entire career doing that before I joined up with Brian to do this. I did radio and TV for the military. We did audio podcasts in the beginning, like I was saying, and it’s morphed into this. I appreciate those kind words; it still embarrasses me a little bit. It’s fun.

David Read:
It’s OK. You can squirm a little bit. Not everyone can do that. Tell me about your share of this. How long have you been wanting to do a documentary on the movie? From soup to nuts, how long did this thing honestly take?

Shane:
We recognized when we did the original Stargate franchise that we focused on the TV shows, we glazed over the movie. We love the movie originally and it definitely is an entry place into the true franchise and the TV shows and everything. It needed its due. We decided, “if we’re gonna tell this story, let’s go back to the beginning and let’s get it right and start that way.” I sit down and basically say, “Let’s tell this everything chronologically. Let’s find out what people may not know about it and see if we can find that.” It’s hard to do because back in the early ’90s, there wasn’t a lot. The internet was still very small. A lot of the information really happens before the internet’s starting to archive information. It’s tough to go back and find that and bring it to current-day audiences, but that’s what we hope to do.

Brian:
We use a lot of archive.net. I’ve even gone to old newspaper websites, like Variety’s archive. We find articles in the archive. Roger Ebert, thankfully for Ebert, he never deletes his website. He’s had the same website for 30 years; you can go back and find a lot of stuff there. I actually recreated the Stargate website. I got help from Reddit. I went to the archive of the wayback friend of mine. Obviously, all the linked images are broken and all that, but the original HTML is there. I was able to strip the HTML out — there’s literally 124 HTML pages — I parsed them all out into individual HTML pages, sort of recreated that site map. The images had no size information. I had to sort of guess the size of the images based on screenshots that people shared with me on Reddit from the website they took years and years ago. I looked at the, “where’s that logo, where’s the…” I sort of guessed on what the sizes were. Then I fixed the HTML to include sizes and then repopulated those images and gave it a black background and a starburst and boom. We recreated the website from scratch for 30 seconds of video.

David Read:
As Ellie Sattler would say, “you can’t think your way through some of this stuff. You have to feel it. But once you know it’s right, you’ve got it.” Wow. That’s a ton of work. I wanna get to the editing in a little bit here ’cause there’s a couple of things that I wanna talk about. On the bit about facts, you guys put a bee in my bonnet for a little bit because if I find out that I’ve gotten something wrong, it really pisses me off because it’s on the oral history that I’m building now. An oral history is almost by definition imperfect. If I get a piece of information wrong, I wanna make sure as soon as I know, for better or for worse, that I set the record straight. Either I got information that was wrong or I misinterpreted what I was hearing, which is often the case. Case in point, to that end, I have been operating under the assumption for the past five years of doing Dial the Gate, at least, that Jay Davidson was playing Ra’s lieutenant. Now, in the documentary, I’m learning that Jay Davidson was playing Ra, but Ra was a demigod of another god. Is that what you guys are trying to define in the documentary?

Shane:
Initially, that character was a representative of the gods. Jay Davidson’s character was initially supposed to be Ra’s representative.

David Read:
So, he wasn’t playing Ra?

Shane:
He wasn’t playing Ra, no. Originally.

David Read:
Ah, OK. So, I was right.

Shane:
Yes.

David Read:
‘Cause I’m listening to the documentary and I’m thinking to myself, “Oh, so he was Ra all along. They made him a god with the voice and the eyes.” OK. So, he wasn’t playing Ra originally?

Shane:
No. They didn’t see him as that character. Because of his awkward performance and the audience reaction, they had to switch it and get something. Which is great. Without that we don’t have the Goa’uld, because he was never supposed to be inhabited by an alien.

David Read:
The whole thing. If you think about it, they never talk about him in the scenes; they never give him a name. If there was any information that was recorded, it was stripped out. They don’t speak of him when they’re among themselves. I’m not crazy about the original movie.

Brian:
Not everyone is.

David Read:
What do you wanna say?

Shane:
I love your honesty.

David Read:
How far do you wanna go? The eyes of Texas are on you.

Shane:
I love your honesty on that. The reality is the movie did extremely well at the time. One of the reasons the movie did so well is because we were hurting for science fiction, especially at the movies. Because Devlin had gone around and pitched his Stargate movie and basically launching a new franchise and people… I think people lined up to go see it. But when you look back at it, it doesn’t feel like a complete movie. It feels like it leaves you off somewhere. Had Jonathan and Brad never come together to make the series, I think we would have always looked back on it as a blip on movie history. But instead, it’s now got this rich origin story, which I think we look back now with more fondness than perhaps we would have had we looked back on it without the series.

David Read:
What came after contextualizes what came before.

Shane:
Stargate, the movie, is one of my favorite all-time movies. In fact, if you look at my thing here, that’s my poster on the wall. It’s one of my favorite all-time movies for a reason. The reason it was one of my favorite movies was because I saw the potential. It almost felt like a long pilot of a movie that could go somewhere. So, one of my favorite all-time movies because of what followed. I remember watching it when I was a kid and thinking, “Oh, my God. What can they do with this technology? It’s a whole new way of traveling.” I was a sci-fi freak and that’s a whole new concept of going through a gate versus a ship or whatever. I think we also say in the documentary, “where else can these gates take us?” That’s, I think, what rested on people’s minds and why SG-1 became so popular.

Brian:
Agreed.

David Read:
The film is, in my opinion, trying to do too much. As a result of pulling from this direction and pulling from this direction and this direction, the most interesting stuff, in my opinion, is on Earth, that’s saying something. Then they go to Abydos or Nagada or whatever you wanna call it and they do their thing there. I think because of its broadness, it’s diluted from honing in on some of the big ideas. No one sits down and says, “This thing, there’s all these combinations. Where else could this thing go?” They don’t posit the idea. Partly because they don’t have time. They’re so focused on the situation that they don’t even open that idea up.

Shane:
They also thought they were gonna do prequels.

David Read:
That’s true too. All the more reason to plant that seed in this film. If you’re doing more movies, do not put the end at the end of it.

Shane:
That’s so right.

Brian:
You’re right. They did put the end at the end of this.

David Read:
It was his only movie to do that.

Brian:
I remember watching it and being like, “Why does it say ‘The End’?”

Shane:
They defeated Ra. I think Emmerich, the way he looked at it, they wanted to tell this big story. I think he got caught up so much in the moviemaking process of it that even you got the actors saying, “Why am I saying this? Why am I doing this?” I think you can go back and look at it as a visual masterpiece, but perhaps more could’ve been done with the story.

David Read:
I don’t mean this to be a bashing of the film for an hour and a half, but I’m making these observations up front because what you’ve just released is the documentary on this.

Shane:
It’s safe space David.

Brian:
One thing I disliked about it, I remember being a teen and watching the movie and them saying, “Thousands of light-years away or whatever, millions of light-years away. A galaxy away.” I’m thinking, “That’s too far.”

David Read:
Missing one chevron.

Shane:
This is something Brian didn’t know when we started this, was that in the movie they actually go to another universe. They actually go to a different galaxy and in SG-1 we stay in the same galaxy. That’s one part.

Brian:
How are they tracking the M.A.L.P.? That’s too far away.

David Read:
The beam is locked onto the Kaliem galaxy. Our vision of the galaxy is for some reason rectangular rather than circular. Shouldn’t we be dead center on this thing? Anyway, I could pull it apart. As a documentary lover and as an editor myself, I’m always looking for the quality of the edits and the transitions and everything else. Especially I’m looking for when you’re using footage, when you’re editing and then when you render, sometimes a frame will jump in there. I watched the 1:07:11 Stargate documentary and I found one and that was it. There was one blip in the entire thing. Well done, bravo. On top of that, this is something controversial. I’m interested in your take on this. You hid it well and people who are not paying attention will not probably know. Do you know what I’m about to refer to?

Brian:
No. There’s so many things I hide.

David Read:
He’s nervous.

Brian:
Yes. I hid that well. Yes, you’re right.

David Read:
These are stills and you animated them.

Brian:
I’m not sure if you know this, but it’s not showing on my screen.

David Read:
Hang on just a second here. Hang on.

Brian:
I can see the preview, but I don’t know if it’s… There you go. Yes, those are stills. I animated those stills. I animated them based on three frames. It’s very interesting the way I did it. I took the original shot and I upscaled it to add detail. Then I took that shot and I did something – it’s a parallax trick where you basically turn the frame. You cut out the characters. Let’s go back to the Godzilla one, that’s the easiest one I did. You cut out Dean, you cut out the camera, you cut out the various elements, the cab, whatever. You cut all those elements out, you put them back on the frame, then you give them a depth ratio that is slightly off from each other and then you rotate it. That gives you your third frame. The second, the in-between frame, I let AI sort of figure out. AI is trying to go from frame one to the final frame and it finds its way in the center. I approve that second frame. Once I approve the second frame, then I let the entire thing run and it creates eight seconds or whatever of footage based on those three frames.

David Read:
This is an AI of an image?

Brian:
Yes. It’s not pure AI, though. You take the individual elements out of the shot. You basically create a layered image. You have the background, the camera, the character. Let’s say those three characters, those three main elements. Everything that’s blurred out or has depth of field, you leave as background. Then you take those things and you offset them depth-wise on top of a Blender map and you turn the camera ever so slightly so that it’s a little off. That gives you your final frame. So, you have the first frame, which is the original upscaled image, your final frame, which is the weird depth-mapped image, and then you have it generate a middle frame. Once I get a middle frame that I think looks good, ’cause about one of every ten look good, the other nine look horrible. Once I see one look good, then that becomes my middle frame and then I let AI sort of determine the other frames.

David Read:
Wow. I apologize to anyone who might be put Snoozeville by this, but I think it’s fascinating.

Brian:
I’m sorry.

David Read:
No, it’s OK. I think it’s fascinating. I assumed you put the photo into the AI and said, “OK, contextualize this image and give me a presentation of what it might be like if it were moving.”

Brian:
I used to try to do that, but it would be all messed up. A hand would be ruined.

Shane:
It’s a really great question, David, because we do get comments on these documentaries and videos sometimes. This is a new technology where people think that that’s what happens. Where you put in a prompt and now you’ve given us this footage. The reality is what Brian’s doing is actually almost harder than recreating it sometimes. While you’re using AI tools, it’s not completely AI. I think people who are still on the “don’t like AI” tend to go against that. So, it’s nice to be able to explain it even though it’s a little complicated.

Brian:
I used to do something called parallax where I would do the depth-of-frame thing and then sort of zoom in and let the various elements zoom in at different rates. Almost like a dolly zoom. You know what I’m talking about, a dolly zoom?

David Read:
Mm-hmm.

Brian:
So, same concept where I would let the different elements zoom at slightly different rates and that would give me my moving image based on a still. But I was never 100% happy with that. Instead, I used that same dolly zoom effect to create my third frame.

David Read:
From a journalist perspective, the scenes that you guys imagine would’ve taken place, you put a blurb underneath that’s saying that “this is a dramatization.” That’s exactly right.

Shane:
It’s important.

David Read:
So, you’re not hitting anybody over the head, trying to pull a fast one.

Brian:
We’re not trying to fool anyone. This is very important, actually. Thank you for bringing this up, David. We are trying to visualize the story. It’s boring if you have a guy looking at the camera telling you the story. It’s more interesting if you can actually visualize that story. We’ve tried animation, we’ve done animation. We’ve tried slideshows which are super boring and there’s very limited content. You only have so much content. It’s been done a million times. Billions of times. The thing is, how many images are there of Dean and Kassar? I’ll tell you how many. One. There’s one image. How much can you pull from one image? Not much. Not to tell a 10-minute story. So, you have to fill it in with something.

David Read:
Version 1.0 of the Holodeck is here. It’s a couple of years old. It ain’t going nowhere. We’re a pretty long way away from, “Computer, give me a rectangular office table,” to generating a subspace domain with clicks and lights and a person on the table and everything else, going through that process. But we’re here.

Brian:
AI is not going anywhere. Although it does scare me that the fathers of AI all left ’cause they were like, “Oh, yeah, this is dangerous. Let’s not do this anymore.”

David Read:
They’re building their underground bunkers. It’s like, really, really great job, guys. We’re filling with confidence.

Brian:
When Ford invented the car, he didn’t leave to an underground bunker and start screaming about how cars are gonna take over the world. I get that, but AI is here. We can’t stop it. If you really think that not utilizing this tool is gonna somehow better you, I would rather utilize the tools, any tool that I can get my hands on, to create the absolute best presentation I can give you. Some people aren’t gonna like that.

Shane:
They don’t like it, Brian, because they think it’s a shortcut. People recognize how much effort and work goes into making something like this. If you could just push a button and have it go voila, there it is, they don’t respect it as much as they probably would. We get comments like, “Wow, guys, what a great thing. Too bad you had to use AI, because you guys are really good at this and it’s a shame that you had to take the easy way out.” It’s like, “Well, it’s not really the easy way out.”

Brian:
It’s harder. It’s way harder.

David Read:
You’re creating something that couldn’t exist any other way. You’re not making music on this thing and depriving it from an artist who might be willing to do it for even a couple hundred dollars. That’s not what’s happening in this particular situation. I’m cutting this off now, but you guys are exploring what is possible and you are documenting it as such, which, as far as I am concerned, is the key detail. You are saying that you are doing it.

Brian:
Thank you. I appreciate that

David Read:
Not everyone who is watching is gonna realize that. So, if you are saying that you are doing it, that’s the case. There is a project that I’m working on right now that I am hoping to resurrect an actor’s voice. If I cannot get the permission from his family and a payment to a charity that the actor would’ve appreciated, I will not be doing it. If it doesn’t sound perfect, I will not be doing it. I can tell you right now, it sounds perfect.

Brian:
Wow.

David Read:
It is him. “Oh, my God. I’ve brought this guy back. I’ve Tarkin’d him. I’ve Cushing’d him.” I’m waiting for scheduling to have that conversation with that family member and say, “What would Val Kilmer have wanted?” in terms of his likeness again and approach it from that.

Brian:
It takes a lot of work. Often it does not sound good. You have to really dial it in and the trick is training data. It takes a long time to produce the kind of results that scare people.

David Read:
Three sentences is all it’s gonna be, but I wanted him to be in it. It’s of a much longer presentation. These tools are extraordinary. What else are you guys proud of about the documentary?

Shane:
Me personally, once I hand it off to Brian, I’ve done my work and I hand it off to him. When I’m watching it, a lot of times I’m watching it along with everybody else for the first time. I like to watch it that way. Sometimes I’ll see clips and stuff like that, but when he presents it, I gotta tell you, I was so impressed and Brian’s done such great work with visually representing our story so well. But this time, my eyes were watered through most of it. I recently went and saw Michael at the theater with my family. I recognized, “man, I’m having an emotional response to this movie! It’s reminding me of my childhood.” What I found watching this documentary that Brian has visually put together for us is I felt like I was going back to my childhood or my young adult time. It was making me emotional. That’s, I think, what I appreciate most about it.

David Read:
You’re having a visceral reaction. Art is designed to make you feel something. I would argue that if it doesn’t…there’s a great movie quote: “It’s art when someone says that it is,” which I can certainly understand. I think if you’re not feeling something from it, it’s not art to you. All this post-modernist architectural stuff, these metal pieces that are leaning against each other, you drive by them on the road and it’s, “It was designed by such and such for $200 million.” I’m looking at this: “It’s fascinating, but I don’t feel anything from it.” This is me speaking as an editor here, Brian. What I am always looking for as an editor is: I wanna see if this editor is doing this to me [nudge nudge] and saying, “For all of you, the three of you out there who know exactly what this is that I’m doing here, this is a nod to you.”

Brian:
I do that often.

David Read:
It’s demonstrated repeatedly through this documentary in that Shane has a line of dialogue and you’re pulling the B-roll from the movie or from whatever and you’re using shots of actors that are reacting to Shane’s dialogue as if they could hear it. You’re looking for pieces: “that reaction matches what he’s saying,” as if the clip from the movie was listening right when Shane speaks right along with everyone else.

Brian:
I appreciate that, man. I’m glad you noticed that.

David Read:
That’s sitting down and listening and watching and really grokking the material. You really have to know it backwards and forwards to do that, to get it exactly right and that’s what makes an excellent documentary.

Brian:
I was telling Shane; I watched the movie over 30 times.

David Read:
I’m sorry.

Brian:
Literally, I have notes.

David Read:
What? Did I say that?

Brian:
You did. I have a spreadsheet.

David Read:
It’s a fun film.

Brian:
I have a spreadsheet of timing for reactions, for words that I thought were important. I had to read the script multiple times while watching the movie, trying to find every spot that makes the most sense. One of my favorite spots was right before we go into the Tombstone explainer and you have that moment where Jack O’Neill, Kurt Russell, is sort of looking off in the distance and the camera pans as if it came from the same sky, but into the Tombstone universe. He has the exact reaction that I wanted when Shane was telling me how tired he was working on Tombstone and then it goes into the Tombstone explainer. I think a lot of editors will notice that kind of stuff, but regular people, they see a reaction, like Hammond reacting or something like that. I did that a couple times. “That’s the one.” You have to understand, I had to color-correct the sky in both those shots to make them look the same and normal people would not even understand that that’s a thing that happens.

David Read:
Normal people are gonna tune out in this conversation and I don’t care.

Brian:
But that few seconds color-correcting those two scenes to match were really important to me and I don’t think it matters to everybody.

David Read:
You didn’t have to do that part of it.

Brian:
No.

David Read:
You wouldn’t have had to, but you wanted it to be perfect. Steve Jobs: “We’re gonna write our signatures on the inside of this Apple, too, even if no one ever fricking sees it.” That’s why.

Brian:
That’s how I feel.

David Read:
‘Cause it’s for us.

Brian:
I have to watch this thing a million times. I have to parse out every single scene and there’s some scenes where I need a couple extra frames and they’re not there. I need to create that and I might have to go to another scene that has a similar composition, upscale it to the extreme so I can get that one little piece out so I can add a couple more frames so that it finishes on a note that is somber or exciting or whatever. ‘Cause if it cuts off in the middle of what Shane’s saying, then the entire emotional resonance is lost.

David Read:
That’s it. What you’re talking about is fundamentally filmmaking. Why in this context? Because the internet is forever and you’re wanting to create something, we are all wanting to create something, to leave something behind that will last. We all know some form of YouTube will exist until the heat death of the frigging universe.

Brian:
That’s 100% true and the music for me is the most important for that reason. Scott Buckley’s an amazing guy. I love him. He’s a great guy, he really helped us and he has amazing music. But for a long time, even with using his amazing music and even with him helping us score some of the pieces, it didn’t feel like that.

Shane:
Your score on this one is definitely the best we’ve ever done. It’s so close, it gets to the heart of Stargate.

David Read:
It’s the flavor of the film. You could put them on top of one another. It’s like how one of Williams’ Star Wars themes fits into the other in terms of two characters’ motifs; they’re designed to go together. You could put this music, if you adjusted the tempo, against David Arnold’s music and pitch, and it would fit. This is a reflection of the film.

Shane:
Exactly.

David Read:
It’s actually the reason why the Dial the Gate theme, I used Neal Acree. The Dial the Gate theme is a Stargate theme. It’s by the guy who did it, so it’s the same thing. Shane, what was the hardest thing to write or research for this? In terms of studying and getting the information right. Or perhaps because “this part of it’s a bit of a drag for me. I wanna get onto the good stuff.” I’m curious.

Shane:
The hardest part is always bringing it all together because there’s these little pieces of information all over the internet or in books or in interviews and it’s trying to figure out how to tell the story completely, but also not go so far that it gets boring. It’s very easy to go off on a tangent somewhere and the viewer doesn’t wanna follow you.

David Read:
Like we’re doing.

Shane:
Brian and I, when we’re having conversations, are constantly reeling each other back in all the time.

David Read:
Exactly. Where’s the story? Where’s the story?

Shane:
Exactly. Try to stay with the story.

Brian:
Where’s the story?

Shane:
My favorite part is connecting them. I think what I love most about doing these is taking the fact that we all know the story about Kurt Russell got overpaid to do the Stargate movie and he was reluctant and everything, but most people don’t know why. It’s fun to go back and find out, “OK, what was Kurt doing before that?” OK, he was doing Tombstone. “OK, what was happening in his personal life? Who was he talking to? What were the events that were occurring? How close were they in filming and why would he have decided to do these things?” I ask myself all these questions and then I sit down to tell a story. I’m not just trying to tell you a factual story. I want to tell you a story.

David Read:
You wanna contextualize it.

Shane:
I think that’s my favorite part, is connecting all the pieces. When they come together nicely, and they don’t always do it, sometimes I can spend a week trying to make a connection and then sometimes I find out that they don’t connect and I gotta let it go. It’s so frustrating.

David Read:
That’s why you sit with it for a while. You have to stew in it and then come back to it. I have nine hours of footage that I’m working on, one of the three or four docs that I’ve got going right now. I’m gonna be on break for about three weeks. I was like, “This is the perfect time to release that thing.” I’ve got two weeks to go through nine hours of footage and I’ve gotten through one in about five or six days and I was like, “No. No, this is not happening.” I could do it. I could kick this thing out, but it would be “OK” and that is not acceptable. What I’m working on, it was three years of my life, this particular documentary. This is gonna be exactly right because I’m telling a story of about 13 people, all who contributed to it, and I gotta do exactly what Brian did; I have to go through it piece by piece. I feel so much like Ken Burns when he was doing the Vietnam War documentary, which is like 19, 20 hours long. Regardless of what you feel about the events or history or his interpretation of it, you cannot argue that he’s pulling hundreds of threads together from a piece of information that was over here to a piece of information that’s down here and you’re emotionally tethered to it because of the information that came before. If you are a good filmmaker, you are pulling those things into focus. If you are crappy one, you say, “It’s good enough. It’s fine.”

Shane:
Well said, man. That is perfect.

Brian:
There’s a lot of documentaries that are “good enough.”

David Read:
“That’s fine.” It’s the difference between content and perhaps art. The problem with documentaries largely is, and this is the dirty little secret, they’re very largely propagandistic. They’re telling a specific narrative because they want you to come away with something specific. Whereas the nice thing about this, entertainment journalism, is we don’t really have that problem. At the end of the day, it’s not gonna change how much your electricity bill is, or it’s not gonna change how you feel about orcas in captivity or all these other things.

Shane:
Blackfish.

David Read:
Or Chernobyl. Exactly.

Shane:
Although Blackfish did change for me. I actually remember going, “Holy cow. I know things I didn’t know.”

Brian:
That ruined my day.

David Read:
I have a friend who has a very, very large animal business who raised holy hell about the film. He’s like, “There is so much about this that they’re not giving SeaWorld due credit for.” He also agreed with what the movie’s premise was, but he’s like, “You guys are not disclosing…”

Shane:
Getting the full story.

David Read:
…That’s right. You can steel man your competitors and still be correct. That is the thing. Do either of you guys have journalism degrees?

Shane:
I went to school for journalism, but mostly for the military.

Brian:
I went to school for film. Film and computer science.

David Read:
There we go. They teach you certain things. They teach you journalism ethics and certain things to consider. It’s not like you have to have those. It’s important to explore that and contextualize. All you’re doing is strengthening your end product.

Brian:
I agree.

David Read:
Such as it is.

Shane:
It’s incredible. I do think that when we do these things, we don’t wanna tell our version of it. Like you said, we wanna tell the whole story. We really wanna capture the emotional feeling that we think a franchise or a movie gives us, or a TV show, but also what we think it gives the entire community. When you look back at Stargate, you might ask yourself, “Why are these guys all doing Stargate?” “Why do we do so much Stargate?” It’s because when MGM went bankrupt and we lost Stargate, it affected us. We waited just like everyone else did for years and years and years. Then when Brad mentioned all those years ago that he was talking with MGM, we were hook, line and sinker inside of it. We’ve been right there with the story since. It’s why it’s so important to us.

Brian:
Stargate, it’s my favorite thing.

David Read:
There you go.

Brian:
Simple as that. A lot of people go like, “I like Star Trek, then Star Wars, then Stargate.” I go, “I like Stargate, then everything else.” That’s my thing. I like Stargate, then everything else. I’ve liked Star Trek and Star Wars, but Stargate is forever my first love.

Shane:
We’re excited about the new series coming up. By the way, inspired that Martin came on with Joe and announced it through you guys for our entire community, which was so exciting to see that happen for you guys.

David Read:
So awesome.

Shane:
We loved it, so thank you for that.

Brian:
That’s the coolest thing. That’s the best way to announce a new series; go to the guys who have been keeping the torch alive, dude.

David Read:
It took over a month for me to come down from that high, let me tell you. I was levitating.

Shane:
I bet.

David Read:
What a privilege beyond words, for sure. What, Shane, are you looking forward to about Stargate 4? What do you hope it gets right?

Shane:
We’ve talked about this a lot and I think the most important thing is that it really maintains the heartbeat of what Stargate is. Luckily, with Brad sitting on Martin’s shoulder a bit, and Joe there, I think Martin wants to do the right thing by it. But also, he has to bring in a new audience and he has to meet Amazon’s expectations.

Brian:
Hard to do.

Shane:
I think he’s probably the most perfect person to do it. I really want him to keep the heart of Stargate. I wanna see some of my old characters come back. I wanna see some of the old actors come back. But ultimately, I want him to tell a story moving forward and expanding the franchise in a way that we love. That’s what’s most important to me.

Brian:
I’m similar. I want the story to move forward. One of the biggest pet peeves I have about recent science fiction is that they never move the story forward. They’re always going back in time.

David Read:
No, they’re terrified. They’re objectively terrified.

Brian:
100%. So, they keep going back in time and they don’t have the intestinal fortitude, the balls to tell the story going forward. That’s really important that we do that because if you don’t have the courage to tell the story in a way that adds to it, then you shouldn’t be doing the franchise. You shouldn’t be writing for that franchise.

David Read:
You risk subtracting from it.

Brian:
That’s right, you risk subtracting from it. I want them to go forward. I would like to see some of the characters that we already love, absolutely. The most important thing is I want the story to be good and I want it to be continuing the lore of Stargate. In a perfect world, it would make the previous Stargate even better because it would add context and more details to things that I didn’t understand before or weren’t really touched upon or expanded upon. If the lore can expand in a way that tells an emotional, interesting, fascinating story, then that’s perfect for me. If you can also sprinkle in some of my favorite people, can I get some Dr. McKay in there? That’d be great. I won’t be mad if there’s no previous characters. I’ll be fine.

David Read:
There’s a few people who will agree with you. Considering what Gero attempted to do with Quantum Leap and what he was going to do with Quantum Leap, it suggests to me that there will be some sprinkling that will feed into the larger narrative of what he wants to tell. I don’t know that for a fact, but I do know this: the people who are creating science fiction – and I think that I’m obviously gonna measure my speech because I have my personal opinions about things – but you can read between the lines on this: if you’re creating science fiction for an audience, I think it’s criminal to allow someone who doesn’t believe in humanity to do it. If you don’t believe that people deserve agency, or if you hate any portion of your IP’s audience, you have no business writing for that IP. None.

Shane:
100%. We’re finding it in Star Trek.

David Read:
It will obstruct what it is that you are trying to do. What you are effectively saying is that you are morally superior to those people’s thoughts and ideas and you’re gonna attempt to educate them, which is one of the reasons that I tune in to sci-fi very specifically: to be educated on other ideas. I know when it’s sincere and I know when it’s insincere because we feel it. We feel it in the dialogue and we read it online afterwards in the tweets.

Shane:
You can tell how much someone, when they’re creating something, loves what they’re creating and who they’re creating it for. I think especially science fiction fans, we have this BS meter inside of us. It’s not easy. If you wanna preach to us, it’s not gonna come across well. I think he’s gonna be able to masterfully weave his way through it. Amazon gives its creators enough room to do what they need to do and he has the right people in the room. I have such a good feeling about this.

Brian:
I think it’s the perfect situation. Amazon famously allows the creatives to do what they wanna do; they don’t get in the way. Sometimes that helps, like with Reacher and other shows.

David Read:
Fallout.

Brian:
Sometimes it hurts…like Fallout.

Shane:
Fallout.

Brian:
Sometimes it also hurts, like with…

Shane:
Rings of Power.

Brian:
… Rings of Power.

David Read:
Look, they ship and sell TVs and diapers and now they’re creating Stargate. I was texting Martin a couple of weeks ago. I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing this, but I said, “If you told that 19-year-old Starbucks barista that he would be creating a series for a company that sells TVs and diapers, you probably would’ve laughed in your own face.” He LOL’d real big. “What a world we live in, man.”

Brian:
But it’s so right. Because they have that history of allowing creatives to do what they want, and we have Martin Gero, who’s one of the originals, and he’s consulting with other originals, we have a sort of a perfect storm. The worst-case scenario in my opinion, would’ve been what they were working on previously when it was…there’s no knock on The Expanse guys, the Penguin and Parker guys, but when they were like, “We’re gonna have the team from The Expanse, the Penguin and Parker, they’re gonna write a series. It’s gonna be exclusive to MGM+. It’s gonna be low-budget sci-fi,” and you’re like, “No, that’s a horrible idea.”

David Read:
At best it would’ve been serviceable.

Brian:
It would’ve been serviceable at best.

Shane:
It’s better than other ideas, but it’s not as good as Martin doing it.

Brian:
So, when the writers and actors strike and all that sort of put all that on hold, sort of perfect storm that got us to where we are now. We got the right studio in charge of it and they have the right team creating it. It’s sort of perfect.

David Read:
I remember when Origins came out…

Brian:
Stargate: Catherine?

David Read:
Yeah. I worked on it. The Harcesis and the DHD and a few other details that are threaded in from “The Tomb” and obviously Season Two with Shifu when he was born. Those were my and a few others’ contributions to get those in. But it was all copyright, ’cause Brad owns those elements. How much can you use before he rightfully says, “Hey, come on? You have to bring us in somehow.” This is not my story to tell, so I won’t give the detail, but I found out how much they actually spent on it. The takeaway was, long of the short, if you’re not gonna make a full effort, if you’re only gonna go in half measure, don’t try. Some fans really articulated that well. They were like, “I’d rather have nothing than this.” For those people who – I will say this – saw the webisodes and didn’t see the movie, I think they really should go and have a look at the movie because it is a substantially better cut, but you’re gonna love it or you’re gonna…

Brian:
Stargate: Catherine is better. You know what I like about Stargate: Catherine? It actually didn’t mess with the established lore.

David Read:
It doesn’t. We made certain of that.

Brian:
That was so good. Of course, you guys had something to do with that. I love the fact the ending buttons it all up and it doesn’t subtract from what we love.

Shane:
It adds.

Brian:
It adds a little more context. Even if you don’t like it, you can tell this: it did not take away from what we already love.

David Read:
No. Catherine never went through the gate. How do we know? The internal consistency of a 354-hour epic is pretty remarkable for Stargate.

Brian:
100%.

David Read:
They did far better than Trek. Voyager was notorious for switching details around later on and drizzling past the graveyard.

Brian:
It’s true.

David Read:
Which is another show that I love, but “OK, where was this Lyndsay Ballard person for years and years if she was so close to Harry?” Apologies for anyone who’s not seen Voyager. Little things like that the whole way through. The franchise is remarkably consistent and so long as they have the right people who are looking for those cones in the road, they’re gonna move from strength to strength.

Brian:
I have a lot of respect for Origins for that reason. It managed to sort of add. It was like, here’s a little bit of cinnamon on top of your latte. Is it good on its own? Maybe not. Maybe not.

David Read:
But with the context, it’s interesting.

Brian:
With the context, it’s interesting. It’s a good spice.

David Read:
It is. If nothing else, it is interesting to watch. My favorite line from that is in German when the – I forget who it is – looks at the DHD and he says, “It’s just like the one in Berlin.” That’s from “The Tomb.” That’s from the line of dialogue that establishes where the DHD, the Egyptian DHD, was and when. That’s all on purpose. There were pages of the notebook that didn’t make it on screen that, if you flip through it, there’s a Goa’uld in there.

Shane:
That’s cool.

David Read:
It is a Goa’uld. They were putting all these things together as they went along. You can’t do it for the memberberries; you have to tell an interesting story. As far as I was concerned, knowing that detail from “The Tomb,” the Germans could have come into the story at some point anyway to tell that piece of the story from the past and Origins did that. So, that’s where we’re at. What else do we wanna talk about?

Brian:
By the way, as far as prequels go in sci-fi series, Stargate Origins – and I’m not saying this ’cause I’m biased with Stargate – is the best one. Other prequels take away from what comes after it in the story, but before it canonically. This did not. It added a little spice to what we already love. I really, really dislike Star Trek Discovery. I’ve made that very clear. The reason I dislike it is because it modifies canon. It changes lore and stuff that we’ve watched for 40 years and it changes what we already know, and not little details. Huge, massive details like wars and relationships and what the Federation was doing and how and whatever. It completely changes it. Meanwhile, you can go back to its predecessor, which was Enterprise, and Enterprise sort of did what Origins did, where it added to it.

David Read:
I really enjoyed Enterprise. Bryan Fuller, if he had not been ousted, I’m pretty convinced we would’ve had ’60s-style sets for Discovery.

Shane:
That would’ve been amazing.

David Read:
It would’ve been that nuanced in terms of accuracy that they would’ve fit that story in there.

Brian:
It’s funny, man. I wasn’t even worried about the set design. For me, it was about changing this. “OK, if you wanna update the set design and the ships and all that, I get it, dude. It’s been 75 years.” But you changed story beats. You changed entire wars that never existed. People existed that never existed. Is this another timeline? Because that’s what it feels like. We’re in the mirror universe? What’s going on here? Enterprise didn’t do that. Enterprise added to what was already there. They never take away from it.

David Read:
If I may insert. Have you seen Strange New Worlds, Brian?

Brian:
Yeah. I liked the first season.

David Read:
There’s a scene in Toronto in an alternate timeline where someone speaks to another character about Khan and they hang a lantern on it and basically say, “We’re from the future. We’re observing things.” The timeline is being monkeyed with. Khan should not be here this late. He should not be a child in the 2020s or whatever it is. I think that they’re trying to acknowledge that the flow of time is liquid. As far as I’m concerned, Discovery is an alternate timeline.

Brian:
David, we did a whole video on that. We did a super-long presentation called The Triple Timeline Theory or something like that, where we explain with that scene and others, how there are literally three separate timelines that we’re witnessing at the same time, whether they admit it or not. Canonically, on screen, black and white. This is what is happening. There are three timelines happening at the same time. They all come from Enterprise and it all happens after Enterprise finds the Borg from First Contact in the Arctic. That’s when everything gets all musked up, canonically. Do I know what’s going on with the studio? No. But story-wise, there are three timelines.

Shane:
I think the point of it all, what David was saying earlier, which makes sense, is Bryan Fuller coming in to do Star Trek and taking this guy who was a part of the original vision, similar to Martin doing that for Stargate.

David Read:
Terry Matalas.

Shane:
Terry Matalas doing it for Picard Season Three.

David Read:
Terry was pulled out. It’s the same thing with Bryan Fuller. I think it would’ve been nearly as good as Picard Season Three.

Shane:
I believe that it definitely would’ve been way better if he had stuck around. He went off and did a great series, American Gods.

David Read:
It’s very different. He’s talented, but he was a Star Trek fan. He loved it. The guy who’s taking it over did not love Star Wars first and that’s a big deal.

Shane:
True. JJ?

David Read:
No.

Shane:
Kurtzman?

David Read:
Kurtzman.

Brian:
Kurtzman.

David Read:
That matters.

Brian:
Kurtzman’s a Star Wars fan, not a Trekkie.

David Read:
There’s nothing wrong with that.

Brian:
Nothing wrong with that.

David Read:
But you need to bet on your horses better. Who was it that said that the Star Trek 4 script was rejected for being too Star Trekkie? I was like, that was the biggest affront, I can’t remember who said that.

Brian:
It’s too much like Star Trek? Wait.

David Read:
That’s right.

Brian:
Aren’t we making Star Trek? What even are we talking about?

David Read:
No, they don’t want it to be cerebral. They want it to be pop.

Brian:
Lasers.

Shane:
They wanna be Star Wars.

David Read:
Star Trek is not mainstream. You wanna have the best conversation about this, listen to what Armin Shimerman has to say. He hits it on the head. Enough about Star Trek.

Shane:
I know. We’re not even here for this topic, but we can talk sci-fi with you all day long, whatever you wanna talk about.

David Read:
Do you guys wanna talk about the Save the Gate campaign? You’re wearing it right now, Shane.

Shane:
Woo. Like I said, we love this franchise so much that we felt we wanted to do anything. When they started doing the Twitter storms back in the day, we said, “This is an opportunity for us to do whatever we can to help.” We jumped on board with Joe Mallozzi and everybody who was pushing it, you guys.

David Read:
I did not. I feel bad about that.

Shane:
You were there in spirit, I’m sure. The thing is, we wanted to do whatever we could. We were in this interesting position where we were these YouTube voices where we could help fandoms. We had already done a thing to try to save the Orville and to a degree we helped, through fan campaigns, do that.

David Read:
Season Three?

Brian:
According to producers, they told us that we definitely helped. And they told us to get our fans to stop sending pickles to their studio.

David Read:
They think it was bad? Come on.

Brian:
Apparently, they were getting jars of pickles in their studio.

Shane:
We had encouraged people to do that. So, we said, “What can we do with Stargate? Let’s save the gate.” We started to do that fan campaign and got a lot of help from a lot of other people and started making videos. While I don’t believe that we had any direct help with that, I do think that us, along with a lot of other people, helped add on to this growing trend to go to where it’s going today.

David Read:
That’s it, it takes a village for sure. The thing that I am, if anything, concerned about, and it’s 3%, genuinely 3% – this is how confident I am in Martin – is that two years from now, the thing that I’m most concerned about is that, again at 3%, they create this thing and it’s pretty flawless, but no one watched it. We’ve seen that happen where things are discovered later and people fall in love with them, but there wasn’t enough of a marketing push behind it for it to catch fire. That is the only thing that I fear of. Again, 3%. I don’t see it happening because when SG-1 was restored to Netflix, within the first three weeks it cracked the Top 10 on demand. That is a sign. Amazon is chiefly doing this because they know the streaming numbers. They have that much data globally, so they have the ability to calculate, “OK, this will proportionally behave like this if the quality of the stories are consistently like this.” People are responding to from that, then, now. It’s a matter of sitting back and waiting. But competing with all of us here as we’re clicking up the roller coaster. Hearing that chain underneath us like, “Oh, my God.”

Shane:
No, you’re right.

Brian:
My biggest concern, because of streaming, is that the most we can get is three seasons. I don’t think we’re gonna get more than three seasons. That’s my biggest concern.

Shane:
That’s fair. Here’s what I think is gonna happen. Stargate, unlike any other science fiction franchise that was pretty long-running, has had the longest break. It has, I would argue, almost as many fans as other science fiction franchises. I do believe that if Martin comes in here and nails the first few episodes, I think everybody’s gonna be pouring in. That’s it. I think 3% is the perfect amount to worry about it because I do think, knowing how these guys work together, that he’s not gonna produce something that Brad’s not going, “Yep, yep.” Brad is a mastermind when it comes to this style of writing and knowing his audience.

David Read:
He’s a playwright in his heart. He feels it before he sees it.

Shane:
That’s the best way to put it.

David Read:
The takeaway, and I keep coming back to this word, of Stargate, if you could define Stargate by any single word in terms of its personality, I would use whimsy. It’s not campy. I would consider Doctor Who to be fairly campy, even though there are two or three episodes, four or five, that are absolutely brilliant science fiction. Stargate straddles that in-between region between Doctor Who and Star Trek where it does not seek to inspire and educate first. It does that maybe third or fourth, but it seeks to entertain first. I finally figured out why folks like Rob Cooper would come on and bristle at that when I was talking about “you guys were creating stories that mattered.” That’s not why they were doing it. If it’s a byproduct of them watching the actors react to these characters and them writing to that, that’s what that is. But it’s not what they were setting out to do. Whereas when I talk with a number of the Star Trek actors, they know first and foremost that they’re going in to create a show that is about the message first, a message, an idea which sci-fi. It’s what sets sci-fi apart from Star Wars. You can go on his James Cameron Story of Science Fiction, George Lucas says, “Star Wars is not science fiction. It’s space opera.” Star Trek is science fiction because it is designed to make us look at something about ourselves, about the human condition, that is not good versus evil. It’s multilayered and it’s telling it through the lens of extraordinary technology. If nothing else, being the vehicle to get us to other planets.

Shane:
Stargate wasn’t that. I think I like that word. I like the whimsical idea because what happens when you watch Stargate SG-1, when you start from the beginning, is you kind of know loosely who the characters are if you remember the movie. Of course everybody loves RDA, but then you start to realize that the Samantha character’s pretty cool. The chemistry developed through the series as each episode grows, and I think I told this story last time, but where it all hammered home to me was the episode where Jack and Sam end up alone in Antarctica on the secondary gate. That episode punched me right in the face, man.

David Read:
It’s good drama.

Shane:
I was like, “Brad Wright is a freaking genius.” I remember locking into it and going, “This is different. This is a different type of science fiction that…” ‘Cause I was a huge Trekkie since I was a kid. Huge, huge. Stargate cracked into that love portion. Where Star Wars, I love Star Wars, but it never got there. It was, like you said, a science opera. It’s beautiful. It’s a fantasy.

David Read:
But it’s over here.

Shane:
It’s not the same thing as Star Trek or Stargate for me.

David Read:
Rick and Brad have been on the record saying this. You look at “Children of the Gods,” and I didn’t notice it at the time. I appreciated it, but I didn’t really think about it. You go back in “Children of the Gods” and you look at O’Neill’s line, “For this? You can stay at my place. Let’s go.” That’s the show in one, two sentences; that’s the nature of it. They’re gonna put us in these extraordinary situations and we’re gonna have characters that are gonna have the balls to comment on how outrageous those situations are and how important their friendship is in spite of the circumstances and because of the circumstances.

Shane:
That’s the glue of Stargate to me; the friendship between the characters. That’s the glue. That’s what keeps us loving them, I think. We get these wonderful, wonderful stories. I think the other thing that’s gonna make the Stargate series more easily able to succeed is Star Trek was really built on the freak of the week, the episodic television. I think Stargate is more able to transition into one long story over a season, as they did with Atlantis, as opposed to Star Trek, who never really did that until Discovery came out.

David Read:
The Xindi arc.

Shane:
Maybe a little bit at the end of Enterprise.

David Read:
The Xindi arc is my favorite season of the franchise.

Brian:
Xindi arc is great.

David Read:
So good.

Shane:
I think there’s that too and I think the fans are ready for it.

David Read:
No. I completely agree. Brian, anything else?

Brian:
No, I got nothing to add. You guys said it all. I agree with that.

David Read:
An hour and 12 minutes, that’s all? Come on. Get in the ring.

Brian:
I do love the Xindi arc, man, of Enterprise.

David Read:
So good. “I have to cross a line I never thought I’d cross.” Man.

Brian:
It’s so good. Especially the episode, I’m sorry, getting in my weeds here. The episode where he has a brain problem and it’s going through time and T’Pol has stayed with him that entire time.

David Read:
Twilight’s regularly voted the best.

Brian:
Such a good episode, man.

David Read:
That’s, let’s go balls to the wall, let’s see what we can do if we throw everything to hell. Let’s open with the Earth blowing up and us losing. We’re gonna put them on a planet where the solar system will make that planet be destroyed in a few hundred years anyway. It’s like, this is perfect. Perfect.

Brian:
It’s brilliant. SG-1 did that a lot for me. There are so many good episodes of SG-1, but my favorite episodes are not the big, “I destroyed Apophis,” or whatever. It’s more the character pieces and seeing their development over time – which is actually one thing that sort of worries me about the new series. I’m not trying to be a pessimist here. In the streaming era, we don’t have 22 episodes to tell a story. We have 10, we have 10 episodes to tell a story. You’re gonna introduce new characters. Of course you’re gonna introduce new characters, you can’t stick with the old ones. You’re gonna have to get us to love and appreciate and understand the chemistry of these new characters in less than half the time.

Shane:
They’re gonna have to grab us by Episode Three or Four. That’s it. If you look at when SG-1 grabbed me, it was about a third into the season.

David Read:
Of Season One?

Shane:
Yeah, of Season One.

David Read:
“The Torment of Tantalus” for me.

Shane:
Yes. Great.

Brian:
That’s a great episode.

David Read:
Meaning of life stuff.

Brian:
That’s what I am concerned about, especially if it’s an ensemble cast. When you only have one main character, let’s say Quantum Leap, where it’s an ensemble cast, but really the main character in the new Quantum Leap is Ben. So, really what you need to do is get us to love Ben, and the ancillary characters, they’ll fall into place. They’ll grow on us. That’s your best-case scenario. A lot of them make this mistake where they go, “Here’s your main character. Here’s your Colonel Jackson.” I’m sorry, Colonel Jackson. Colonel O’Neill. We’re gonna spend these two episodes, though, talking about these two scientist guys that have nothing to do with the main part of the story. It’s an interesting story to tell, and you’re like, “you’re right, it is an interesting story, but we’re in 2026, where you don’t have time to tell those stories. You don’t have time to tell the filler stories about the SG cafeteria guys that make the sandwiches. I’m sorry. I’m sure they’re great characters and there are great stories there, but we don’t have time. You need to get us to love and understand and appreciate at least four characters. The characters around them have to fall into place and you have less than half the time to do that than you usually do.” That is concerning to me and if anyone could do it, it’s Gero and Wright and Mallozzi.

David Read:
That’s the thing. To be fair, they have much more runway. If they’re gonna do 10, 12 episodes and each writer has one or two and they have months to fine-tune them, they will be airtight. Which means that when this thing comes out, they have no business not being airtight. The sentiment that you shared is the sentiment that I’ve shared. He has one shot to stick this landing, or take off. Everything lives or dies by that, so we’ll find out together.

Shane:
He knows it, too. You can see it on Martin’s face. He knows it, too. There’s so much on his shoulders right now; I have so much empathy for him and what he’s doing. We have a lot of faith in you, Martin. You got this, man.

Brian:
You got it, buddy. We believe in you. You’re the 8-mile music; you only got one shot.

David Read:
What is next on your guys’ plate? We’re gonna do an SG-1 documentary next?

Shane:
Next, we’re gonna go into SG-1 and flesh that out. Right now, I’m going through the process of putting together information, reaching out and talking to Joe about some things. Might reach out to Brad as well if he’s got a little bit of time to talk, or at least to maybe go over some notes or something like that. It’s very important to us that we get it all right. The internet wasn’t really big yet when SG-1 was taking off, so there’s only so much information out there and so many things about it that we can get. It’s nice to be able to bounce stuff off the creators a little bit. So, we’re doing that next. Hopefully we’ll do it quickly. It took us about three months to do the Stargate movie, but hopefully SG-1 will move more quickly.

Brian:
There was stuff we came up with while we were making the movie one and two, though.

Shane:
That helps with SG-1.

Brian:
I do believe this one will go faster.

David Read:
I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you’re joking. The swath of information that you have to cover, unless you are planning on not telling a comprehensive piece, then I can understand. If you are, good luck. Based on what I’ve been hearing so far, you won’t settle for less.

Brian:
No, we won’t.

David Read:
It’ll be like me with my documentary. It’s like, “this is not happening right now. I’m gonna set this to the side and accept the fact that it’s going to take however long it’s gonna take.” Even if it takes a hamster’s freaking lifetime, it’s gonna take that long.

Brian:
You shoot for the stars and pray you hit the moon, dude.

Shane:
To be fair, I think I’ve said this on every video we’ve done and it always ends up taking longer. We’re optimistic in our approach. We know people are excited about it. Also, on Saturdays at 10:00 AM, we do have a live show that we do every Saturday morning. We talk about everything going on in Hollywood and current pop culture and recent movies and TV shows. If anybody’s interested in that, we also have that as well.

David Read:
All right. Is that Members Epilogue? Is that what that is?

Shane:
We will do a Members Epilogue and I think we’re supposed to do it… Actually, we’re supposed to do it today, but I think we’ll end up doing it in the next couple days. Similar to what we did with you here, we’ll go through and talk about the making of the documentary and we’ll show it and show what we were thinking. Those are for our members, which are fun. But actually, on another channel, we do our live show.

David Read:
What’s that one called?

Shane:
It’s called The Popcast Presents: The Brane Show. So, Brian and Shane. B-R-A-N-E.

David Read:
That explains what I was seeing in the background there.

Shane:
There it is right there.

David Read:
This one here?

Shane:
Yeah.

Brian:
Yeah, that’s the one.

David Read:
The Popcast.

Shane:
And of course, Brane we came up with ’cause Brian and Shane.

David Read:
I understand now. I was so confused earlier why I was like, “Why do you wanna have The Popcast when it’s The Popcast…” So, now I understand. I got it. OK. That’s awesome

Shane:
We picked The Popcast originally, and this is a funny story because people always go, “Oh, the Podcast Brothers,” and we’re like, “Oh, God.” We picked The Popcast because back when podcasts were so popular, we thought, “Let’s be cute. The pop culture and casting. Popcast.” We embraced that, but now that’s basically who we are.

Brian:
Now we’re stuck with it.

Shane:
Now we’re stuck with it.

Brian:
Even my wife gets it wrong still. It can never go away.

Shane:
Not like Dial the Gate, which is perfect.

Brian:
Dial the Gate is perfect.

David Read:
That is not true. That is so not true.

Brian:
Dude, our own family members cannot recall that it’s P-O-P and not P-O-D.

Shane:
It’s hilarious.

David Read:
How can we support you guys?

Shane:
Watch the content.

Brian:
Come watch us.

Shane:
If you guys get a chance and you wanna check out this documentary, we would really appreciate it. That’s probably the best way to do it. If you have time on Saturday mornings at 10:00 AM and you’re sitting around and you wanna watch The Brane Show, you get more from us. We love your eyeballs and we appreciate you giving us the time to share this, David. Really appreciate it.

Brian:
If you wanna become a member of the main channel, that is a great way to support us because then we actually know how much we can spend on stuff because it’s a set amount. We don’t know if the Stargate movie doc is gonna do well ad-wise.

David Read:
But this is the main channel here, The Popcast? Or is there another one?

Brian:
Yeah, that’s our main channel, The Popcast.

David Read:
This is the main channel here?

Brian:
Yes, sir.

David Read:
I just join?

Brian:
Yeah. That’s the best way.

David Read:
All right. There we go.

Brian:
He just gave you guys a clinic on how to do it, guys.

Shane:
Hey. Thank you, David. We appreciate you.

David Read:
Are you kidding me? Absolutely. All right.

Brian:
Hopefully we’re gonna do the epilogue in the next few days, right, Shane?

Shane:
Yes. We were supposed to do it today, but this is more important.

David Read:
My favorite episode of SGU right there. I feel SGU very similarly to how you, Brian, look at the Stargate feature film. I look at it for what it was ultimately gonna be – not necessarily for what it was.

Brian:
I see it the same exact way. What was possible with SGU was so, so clever. It would’ve been great, but it didn’t happen.

David Read:
The ending of SGU has been a scar that’s never really healed for me. It’s hard to watch. Except now it’s not anymore. I go back and I watch it and I know that one way or another, contextually, this ending will have more meaning. Even if they don’t bring a single one of them in, I know that Martin will add to the universe rather than take away from it by what he’s gonna create.

Brian:
Do you think that they’re gonna touch on that whatsoever?

David Read:
Probably not. But I know that what he is adding to the universe will fill my cup even more for Stargate Universe.

Brian:
That’s a good point.

David Read:
When I say probably not, I say for Season One of whatever it is that he’s creating.

Shane:
I think at some point…

David Read:
If this thing is successful, they can do anything. Those anythings that come out of the success of Season One will… I feel at peace about SGU and the end of Atlantis, frankly, because the door is open again. It’s one of those things that I feel that I can’t articulate very well at all, man.

Brian:
I’m so happy that we’re gonna find out what happened to the city, to Atlantis. No matter what they do they’re gonna have to address that.

David Read:
Maybe.

Brian:
‘Cause it’s on Earth.

David Read:
Or they could cover DS9 in Lower Decks and in…

Brian:
You’re right. It could be like an Alpha site somewhere or something.

David Read:
…Starfleet Academy and tease Sisko and not ever explain Sisko. I’m giving myself a lot of rope to hang from, but there are always possibilities, as Spock said.

Shane:
I like how you put. I think I can feel the pitches. What I know and what we know about Hollywood and how things work, I can feel what’s going through their heads and how they’re gonna have to launch a new series. I know they’re saying, “how dangerous is it to be back inside Cheyenne Mountain and trying to start from there?” I already know how that’s gonna be difficult and I can see them wanting to do an alpha site. They almost have to do something different. So, expect that, I think, everybody probably.

David Read:
He said that. This is not any insider information. This is what he said publicly, “It’s its own thing.” So, accept that for what it is. Be prepared to go on a ride that, if nothing else, sits over here in 2026 from what’s here that we know that would now be in 2026. If that’s another galaxy…every show has introduced a new Stargate network. Martin revealed the last time that he came on that he asked me and Darren for any resources on the original gate. I took the Stargate blueprints from the film to Staples and had them flatbed scan them for him. They’re with Christopher Nolan’s production designer; they’re with the production designer now. Whether they’re going to recreate the Milky Way gate or design a new one for whatever circumstances they find themselves in – and to be honest, every show has introduced a new Stargate, a new network.

Brian:
Can we back up really quick? You had the film? Hold up. Wait a minute. We glossed over this way too quick. My brain caught up. You had the blueprints to the original film gate? He left. He’s gone.

Shane:
He’s never gonna answer your question.

Brian:
He’s sitting down. He does have them. What the hell? That’s awesome.

Shane:
Right now, David, you have a very jealous human being on the third planet here.

Brian:
I’m very jealous of you. He has the blueprints to the Stargate.

David Read:
There are a few others here. The thing about blueprints, guys, is that they’re replicable.

Brian:
How did you get them?

David Read:
Auction sales. Lots and lots of auction sales and lots and lots of credit card debt.

Brian:
I need to make more money, Shane, so I can troll these auction sites, bro.

Shane:
Ask David to come by and see them.

Brian:
I could do that. Can you tell me where you live?

Shane:
Not on here.

David Read:
I’m in Nashville.

Brian:
Dave, we’re gonna have to set something up where I can make a trip out there and check out your collection.

David Read:
Absolutely. Guys, this has been a great time. Thank you for being so forthcoming and articulate and thoughtful and sharing a piece of yourselves with us. I thank you for the quality of the work that you create. Shane, you are someone whom I would not mind at all narrating one of my pieces at some point here in the future.

Shane:
Anytime. [narrator voice]

David Read:
That’s exactly right. [narrator voice]

Shane:
Whatever you need David. [narrator voice]

David Read:
Be careful. It’s like, “Ooh, OK.” I know how to have a good time. This is great stuff. Thank you so much for coming on. Anything you guys wanna leave us with?

Brian:
Live long and prosper.

Shane:
Thank you. We appreciate you. Thank you for what you bring to our community. I don’t think we could do what we do if you didn’t do what you do. Like we’ve told Darren before, you guys are the pillars that we stand upon, so thank you. We look forward to doing stuff with you in the future.

David Read:
I’m thrilled to have you guys. It’s been a treat and we’ll hopefully have you back here very soon.

Shane:
Sounds great. Love it.

Brian:
Sounds good to me.

David Read:
That was Shane and Brian with the Popcast. My name is David Read, you’re watching The Stargate Oral History Project. If you enjoy the show and you wanna see more content like this on YouTube, do us a favor and click the Subscribe button. It does make a difference with the show and will continue to help us grow our audience. If you wanna share this video with a Stargate friend, you can do that as well. 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 to everyone who helps make this show possible. Thank you to my Patreons. Thank you to the Popcast, they are members as well. I’m in a much different place now than I was a few weeks ago, let’s leave it at that. I’m so thankful for everyone’s support. We’ve got more episodes coming your way. I am out of town as this one airs, so there’ll be more prerecorded shows, hope you enjoy. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate. I appreciate you tuning in and I will see you on the other side.