Stargate Is Getting Its Own Television Channel
Unstoppable science-fiction franchise Stargate will now be available 24/7 online, but you have to know where to find it.
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Stargate is one of the great modern science fiction success stories. Despite being based on a pretty goofy idea (even for the genre) which basically asks “what if there were aliens and they loved pyramids and big animal masks?” and receiving very tepid critical reviews, it was a decent commercial success. It probably would have just came and went like so many Fifth Elements, but a few years later, two different writers on The Outer Limits heard that MGM was thinking about turning the movie into a series and approached the studio with their own pitches. MGM greenlit both Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner’s idea, as long as they worked together, and an enormously long-running franchise was launched. And as of April 1, 2022, Pluto TV will have a dedicated channel that will show nothing but Stargate content 24/7.
First off, what is Pluto TV? If you are not using it already, you should know that Pluto TV is an internet television platform that operates in 25 countries. Rather than being an on-demand service, it streams constantly, like old-fashioned terrestrial TV. The service has various channels dedicated to anime, reality TV shows, and sports. And as of a few days from now, there’s going to be a channel that is just Stargate. While this might sound a bit ridiculous, it is easy to forget that Stargate as a franchise has literally hundreds of hours of content between entire generations of different series. The Pluto TV Stargate channel will show the original Kurt Russell and James Spader 1994 movie, and various seasons of Stargate SG-1, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate Universe, Stargate: The Ark of Truth, and Stargate: Continuum. If you are a Stargate fan (and if you’re reading this, you definitely are), you have found your new home for Stargate content (unless you own all the DVDs, which again, you definitely do).
It is particularly interesting that Stargate is getting its own dedicated channel, considering the future of the franchise has been pretty up in the air recently. The massive, contentious purchase of MGM by streaming giant Amazon Prime Video was initially priming the franchise for potential reboots or continuations of the series, but potential threats by the Federal Trade Commission to stop the purchase put brakes on that. Although the FTC has (for now) allowed the business move to go through, it made any new shows, movies, or series seem slightly up in the air. Two of the original writers/producers on the show are currently working on a non-Stargate science fiction series, so who knows what the rest of them could be up to.
But if nothing else, we continue to see that Stargate is the franchise that can not be stopped. After such inauspicious beginnings as an action movie co-starring French Stewart, it keeps going. It will continue to shift mediums, go to the internet, turn into new series, go to Atlantis, to other galaxies (or universes), and even end up as brand new episodes written by artificial intelligence. You just can’t stop Stargate.
