January 26, 2023: Undiscovered (well, technically “discovered”) Stargate treasure!

Well, this is cool.  Akemi has been obsessively and meticulously cataloguing my immense toy collection over at the newly created instagram account: Toys My Husband Won’t Throw Away.

Today, while going through the endless storehouse of items, she came across THIS –

Back in the Stargate days, the producers would receive their very own copies of the previous day’s dailies, all the the raw footage shot that day.  The editor would use all this footage to assemble an editor’s cut which was forwarded to the director who would use it – and his knowledge of existing footage – to put together his director’s cut.  At that point, the episode’s producer would take over and work off the director’s cut to create their producer’s cut.

Every day, we would sit in the writers’ room, eat lunch, and watch the previous day’s dailies.  When we were done, we would toss the VHS tapes (eventually discs) into a bin for recycling.  For some reason, perhaps old times sake, I ended up holding on to a few of these tapes from some memorable (to me) episodes: Window of Opportunity, Wormhole X-Treme, Revisions, It’s Good to be King – and, for some reason, Small Victories and The Warrior.  I’d forgotten I’d even had them and so they remained, stacked away in deepest storage, until Akemi’s amazing find this morning.

So, the obvious question is Now what?  There must be easily 150-200 hours of unseen footage on those tapes – alternate takes, outtakes, deleted footage, maybe even the occasional blooper.  But there’s no way to know for sure until I check them out.  Of course easier said than done since I haven’t owned a VCR since, oh, 1999.  Fortunately, however, there are video transfer services that can digitize the contents of old cassettes, storing them onto equally obsolete discs and USB’s.  The average cost is about $15/hour of footage.  Since this could all get very expensive, I’ve decided to start with two episodes – Window of Opportunity and Wormhole X-Treme.  Apparently, the quality of video cassettes degrades after 20 years (and it’s been closer to 25) so there’s no telling what we’ll get, but I’m curious to find out.

It’ll probably take me about a week to get organized enough to get over there and drop off the tapes.  Then, the process takes about two weeks.  So tune in late February for an update.  Hopefully I’ll have interesting news for all you Stargate fans.

Maybe more like this?

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