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This Stargate trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and spans the whole franchise. It starts with the 1994 film - who directed it, where the desert scenes were shot, why the original gate prop had to be repainted, and how Roger Ebert felt about it - then moves through all ten seasons of Stargate SG-1: the casting of the team, Teal'c and the Jaffa, the Goa'uld, Replicators and Ori, the Cheyenne Mountain in-jokes, the record-breaking run and the two direct-to-DVD films that finished the story. There are questions on Stargate Atlantis (the Wraith, Ronon Dex, the flying city's final landing), Stargate Universe (the Destiny, Dr. Rush, the nine-chevron address), the animated Stargate Infinity, the 2018 prequel Origins, and the meta episodes "Wormhole X-Treme!" and "200". Roughly a third are warm-ups any casual viewer can get; the rest climb toward the detail only a Gater would know. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the production sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who directed the original 1994 Stargate film?
Roland Emmerich
He co-wrote it with producer Dean Devlin, and the pair followed it with Independence Day two years later.
Q 02Which real-life Air National Guard veteran played Colonel Jack O'Neil in the 1994 film?
Kurt Russell
He turned the role down repeatedly until someone realised he had only been sent an early draft; the finished shooting script won him over.
Q 03Which actor, fresh from an Oscar nomination for The Crying Game, played the alien Ra?
Jaye Davidson
He agreed only after his request for a $1 million fee was accepted, then retired from acting altogether, disliking the fame.
Q 04Who played the archaeologist Dr. Daniel Jackson in the 1994 film?
James Spader
He admitted he was intrigued because he found the script "awful", but signed on after meeting the director.
Q 05Which composer, then working in a London video store, wrote the film's score as his first major American picture?
David Arnold
He went on to score five James Bond films, and his Stargate cues became a staple of movie trailers.
Q 06Roughly how much did Stargate gross worldwide, against a production budget of $55M?
$197 million
That warm public reception came despite lukewarm reviews, and the film later topped Billboard's video-rental chart in April 1995.
Q 07Roger Ebert wrote that which 1994 film "was made to prepare us for Stargate"?
Ed Wood
Ebert gave it one star and still had it on his most-hated list a decade later, though audiences graded it B+ on CinemaScore.
Q 08Teacher Omar Zuhdi sued the filmmakers, claiming they lifted the story from his 1984 script titled what?
Egyptscape
The suit was settled out of court, though the debate over who first imagined the ring-shaped portal has never fully gone away.
Q 09Which two writers, then colleagues on The Outer Limits, created Stargate SG-1?
Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner
Each pitched MGM separately without knowing about the other; the studio greenlit the show on condition they work together.
Q 10Who took over the role of Jack O'Neill (now with two L's) for the TV series?
Richard Dean Anderson
He agreed only if his character got far more comedic leeway than in the film and the show was an ensemble rather than a solo star vehicle.
Q 11On which US channel did Stargate SG-1 premiere on July 27, 1997?
Showtime
The two-hour pilot drew the channel's highest-ever ratings for a series premiere; the show moved to Sci Fi in 2002 for its last five seasons.
Q 12Stargate SG-1 was filmed in and around which city?
Vancouver
By 2006 SG-1 and Atlantis were said to have brought half a billion US dollars of production to British Columbia.
Q 13Stargate Command sits beneath which real peak near Colorado Springs?
Cheyenne Mountain
Fan questions got so frequent that the real complex put a mock high-security "Stargate Command" door on a closet holding brooms and detergent.
Q 21In the pilot, Carter jokes it took 'fifteen years and three supercomputers to ___ a system for the gate'. Which word?
MacGyver
The show kept nodding to its cast's past roles, right up to a vignette spoofing the newcomers' old series in the milestone episode "200".
Q 22Before playing General Hammond, Don S. Davis was Major Garland Briggs on which cult series?
Twin Peaks
Davis was a real US Army captain and later a theatre professor; after his death, Stargate named a starship George Hammond in his character's honour.
Q 23Both Ben Browder and Claudia Black joined SG-1 from which earlier sci-fi series?
Farscape
Black's guest turn was so popular that her real pregnancy was written into the plot before she joined full-time in season ten.
Q 14How many episodes of Stargate SG-1 were made across its ten seasons?
214
The first seven seasons had 22 episodes each; the network trimmed the last three to 20.
Q 15With its 202nd episode, SG-1 overtook which show as North America's longest-running sci-fi series?
The X-Files
Doctor Who fans disputed its 2007 Guinness listing, since 695 episodes of the British show were made between 1963 and 1989, just not consecutively.
Q 16Teal'c defected from serving Apophis in what rank, the most senior a Jaffa can hold?
First Prime
He appears in every SG-1 episode except one, more than any other character in the series.
Q 17Which planet, orbiting a binary star, is Teal'c's homeworld?
Chulak
He says he is 101 years old in season four's "The Light", and ages another fifty in the finale.
Q 18Which SG-1 star later became the voice of Kratos in God of War (2018)?
Christopher Judge
He also wrote four SG-1 episodes, including "The Warrior" and "Birthright", and shaved his head at home every day until season eight.
Q 19Which SG-1 regular also provided the voice of the Asgard commander Thor?
Michael Shanks
He did it during season six, when he had left the show over what he saw as the underuse of his character.
Q 20When Daniel Jackson's actor left after season five, Corin Nemec joined SG-1 as which alien scientist?
Jonas Quinn
Casting agents had bumped into Nemec by chance in the courtyard of MGM's Santa Monica offices.
Q 24The Ori, villains of the final two seasons, are best described as what?
Ascended beings fed by worship
Their preachers, the Priors, got face scarification inspired by remote jungle tribes; Japanese and samurai garments shaped their costumes.
Q 25O'Neill's running references to which cartoon reflect his actor's own favourite TV show?
The Simpsons
The Wizard of Oz was the other running gag, seeded in one co-creator's scripts from season one.
Q 26Which British Columbia campus stood in for the capital of the advanced Tollan?
Simon Fraser University
The local rain was a constant headache for the production, though it could be digitally removed from footage.
Q 27Which term did the show's co-creator use for SG-1 fans in 2001, though it never really caught on?
Gaters
The fan site GateWorld became so trusted that its founder was hired to check the comics for continuity errors.
Q 28What is the name of the amnesiac alien behind the TV show in the 100th episode, 'Wormhole X-Treme!'?
Martin Lloyd
Willie Garson played him, and the writers took their cue from the 1999 comedy Galaxy Quest.
Q 29In "Wormhole X-Treme!", Michael DeLuise modelled hammy Colonel Danning on which actor?
William Shatner
The part had first been offered to Survivor host Jeff Probst and then to Airplane! star Robert Hays.
Q 30Which sibling puppeteers, who also made Team America's puppets, built the marionette sequence in the 200th episode?
The Chiodo brothers
The puppets' wires did not show up on camera and had to be re-added digitally in post-production.