 
GW: What percentage of the items you receive have already been catalogued? Are some studios good about telling you what it is or are some things just not tagged at all?
PB: Oh, no. I would say Stargate [is] very good in terms of tagging. Let's talk about costumes, first of all. The costume department is second to none. They're astounding at how well they document things and how well they bag things and tag things. [There is] never a mystery, unless you're dealing with "extra" costumes. We did receive a very large number of extras costumes, and we didn't quite know what they were. There was a lot of research on those. The main costumes are very well identified.
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Even Rodney McKay's shoes arrived properly labeled. |
Props [are] pretty-much the same thing. Sometimes we do get boxes of miscellaneous props. But in general the props are well identified and usually catalogued, boxed by episode as well. So it's not that difficult. It's a lot of fun actually going [and] watching the episodes, once you've got the props in front of you, to actually try to catalogue them.
To us we have to find out specifically, was it really seen on screen. Was it a hero prop?
GW: Yes, that's important!
PB: Exactly. We can't represent something on our certificates as being seen on screen if it in fact wasn't seen on screen. So we have to be a little bit careful. We can't take anything for granted. Every single prop, whether it was a little, insignificant-seeming item or is a very high-profile prop, they all get the same treatment from us. The same amount of time and research we put into it.
And it's a quality of that kind of intense background which gives value to this very valuable little thing. I say "very valuable," not in terms of dollars, but valuable in terms of emotional value to whoever's going to finally own it.
I think it's incumbent on us to make sure that we do strengthen the value of this by giving them the hard facts as we can find them, as to what they now have, and what they've purchased.
GW: You have items, you said, like miscellaneous boxes of things. Do you have the DVDs on hand or someone with experience who knows where everything is that can say, "I have an idea of where it is and I want to check an episode out."
PB: Pretty well. My staff are pretty well, Angie and Julie -- two of my daughters -- we're a family company. Angie and Julie are two of my daughters, are very, very good on this. Over the years they've seen enough Stargate episodes to have a pretty good idea.
Plus we have a handful of core, really good fans who are friends of ours who are really good. If we do find ourselves stuck we simply take an image of something, send them the image, and usually within a couple of hours we've got a good answer to where it was used. Or "Try this episode." Or "It was used in such and such an episode."
Numerous Stargate replicas, like this zat'ni'katel, underwent costly research and development. | |
There are some of these fans out there who really are walking encyclopedias. They're wonderful. Sometimes they really surprise me. We have some of the most obscure looking things that mean absolutely nothing to us. Haven't got a clue what it is. I'll bang an image off to somebody, one of these fans, and they'll be back, "Oh yeah, that's such and such a thing." And sure enough, they're right on the money. It's great.
GW: Do you ever encounter something, a prop or a costume, where you cannot figure out what it is. "I just don't know what that is."
PB: Yeah. Very rarely. We've got a couple of things from Stargate in which that has happened. In particular, a necklace. There was a particular necklace. It's got all kinds of very ornate alien language. We can't for the life of us find out where it was used. Nor can any of the fans. Yet it came to us in Stargate boxes.
GW: Miscellaneous necklace?
PB: It might have been something that got chucked in there, that "One day this might be good for an episode of Stargate." It could've come from something else.
GW: Ah, OK. Never on screen necessarily.
PB: Possibly. And we did get some things from the movie, "Stargate the movie" as well, which were intermixed. So we have to be careful there. Whether it's something that came from that particular inventory, we don't know. But it's the one mystery nobody's been able to solve.
GW: So you do have items from "Stargate" as well. So when MGM acquired the license they picked up the props?
PB: When they started "Children of the Gods," the TV series, the studio did in fact send up some inventory from Los Angeles from the movie, a residual. It wasn't a lot. But there were several boxes anyway. Over the years we've received a few bits and pieces. Not a lot of material, but some interesting little bits and pieces.
But interestingly enough, they've never really been of significant sales value or never of any great interest to the fans. We've found that the fans are fans of the TV series, not so much the movie.
GW: I heard that the Stargate was rotting in the box in a desert, from the movie, and that they used that for sections of the mold. That would've been something to have.
PB: Well I think they used that to create the mold, and thereby generate a new software program that then allowed them to replicate the full gate again. So yeah, there is a program out there somewhere. In fact, we had access to that program when we manufactured our miniature Stargate. It's an exact replica of the Stargate taken from the very same software that was used to create the full gate.
GW: How many million laser scans were used? Etchings? I have it sitting on my desk at home!
PB: I don't know the numbers but it's huge. We've just done a miniature death glider. That took 72 hours of computer engineering time and 120 hours, approximately, of CNC engineering movements -- scans, if you will. A hundred twenty hours of work. But then the actual number, movements the cutting head took, many, many millions. I won't throw the number out because I'm not sure of it. The staggering number of millions. A hundred and twenty hours of work is incredible.
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" We think the quality of what we have done has been very good."
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GW: What items do you have coming down the pike that you may be able to hint about? I was thrilled when you came out with the eye of Ra amulet. It was the replica from "Moebius," but also looked like the one from the film, because some of them didn't. What do you have coming? Are other replicas in the works?
PB: In a word, nothing. We haven't announced this, but I can tell you that we have relinquished our replica license with MGM. We decided not to renew our license for the replica prop program. We ran it for three years and we made, I think, 26 different items in the line. Zat guns, staff weapons and so forth. And quite frankly it was not an economically viable project for our company.
It was somewhat of a distraction because we spent so much time doing product research, product development, into getting a licensed item onto the marketplace. Unless you're really selling that licensed product in very large quantities, a licensing program is not necessarily a very economic project to do.
We don't sell zat guns by the thousands. In the hundreds, but not in the thousands. And really a licensing program, to recoup the immense costs and royalties that you have to pay, you've got to have numbers, and the numbers weren't there. So we have reluctantly decided that we're going to not renew our license. We're not moving forward with any more replica items from the studio.
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