With production on the Stargate Atlantis series slated to wrap in the coming weeks, it was time for a little house-cleaning, so the producers took a trip down to the various lock-ups the other day to decide what should stay and could should go. After twelve years of television, you tend to amass a fair share of curios and, as we walked through the various warehouses and storerooms filled with everything from brass pseudo-Egyptian statuettes to unwieldy anti-replicator guns, I couldn’t help but feel a little melancholy – partly because Atlantis but mainly due to the oppressive nature of the storage facilities crammed floor to ceiling with…well, I wouldn‘t call it “junk” but I would say “it bears an uncanny resemblance to junk”. If one of those crazy cat ladies ever turned out to be a Stargate fan, I’m pretty sure this is what her place would look like.
We’d taken a similar tour two years ago when SG-1 wrapped, winding our way past Jaffa armor, goa’uld braziers, and the remnants of Dakara, trying to decide what we could get rid of in order to free up some space. The canoe from A Hundred Days? No, no. There’s no telling when a future episode might require a canoe. The Ma’chello device? Chances are we won’t need it again but we could certainly remodel it and use it as a base for some future alien tech. Seth’s throne? Nope, that one’s going up in my office! We faced some tough choices but Producer John Smith was on hand to offer his advice: “Just go from right to left and toss out every second thing, then go back from left to right and throw out every second thing again.” In the end, after much consideration, I think we ended up turfing six of twelve phone booths and called it a day.
This time around was just as difficult. We knew that we’d be making Atlantis and SG-1 movies so we would want to keep a lot of the items specific to each series. On the other hand, it made sense to keep a lot of the more generic items like village wear and weaponry for the new series.
Ultimately, when all was said and done, we ended up getting rid of three of the remaining six phone booths.
Today’s video: Carl leads us on a tour of Stage 6, Part II.
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