Stargate Trivia
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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
Roland Emmerich. He and co-writer Dean Devlin planned a trilogy, but MGM made the TV series without them, saying it wanted people who had done television.
Q 02Which real-life Air National Guard veteran played Colonel Jack O'Neil in the 1994 Stargate film?
Kurt Russell
Kurt Russell. The film's producer recalls that he turned the part down several times before signing; it then emerged that he had been sent an early draft, and he found the shooting script not so bad.
Q 03Which actor, fresh from an Oscar nomination for The Crying Game, played the alien Ra in Stargate?
Jaye Davidson
Jaye Davidson. Reluctant to keep acting, he asked for $1 million and was surprised when the producers agreed; Stargate turned out to be his last major film.
Q 04Who played the archaeologist Dr. Daniel Jackson in the 1994 Stargate film?
James Spader
James Spader. He said the script intrigued him because he found it "awful", and he signed on after a meeting with the director convinced him the shoot would be an adventure.
Q 05Which Bond composer wrote the music for the 1994 Stargate film?
David Arnold
David Arnold. The director heard his score for the small British film The Young Americans, was blown away and wrote asking him to do Stargate, his first American feature.
Q 06Stargate's interiors were shot in a Long Beach dome that once housed which aircraft?
Spruce Goose
Spruce Goose. Howard Hughes' giant plane left in 1992 and the film's backers booked the empty dome for a year; the $55 million picture went on to gross about $197 million.
Q 07Roger Ebert wrote that which 1994 film "was made to prepare us for Stargate"?
Ed Wood
Ed Wood. Tim Burton's film is about the man Ebert called the worst director of all time, so the joke puts Stargate in his company; Ebert gave it one star.
Q 08In the 1994 Stargate film, Daniel Jackson works out that the symbols on the gate stand for what?
Constellations
Constellations. Six of them fix a destination in space and a seventh symbol marks the point of origin, which is why the team is stranded until he finds that last symbol for the trip home.
Q 09Which two writers, then colleagues on The Outer Limits, created Stargate SG-1?
Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner
Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner. By their own account each pitched MGM a series without telling the other, and the studio said yes on condition they run it together.
Q 10Who took over the role of Jack O'Neill, now spelled with two L's, in Stargate SG-1?
Richard Dean Anderson
Richard Dean Anderson. He asked for a funnier colonel, and the show joked about the spelling: his O'Neill says the one with a single L "has no sense of humor at all".
Q 11On which US channel did Stargate SG-1 premiere on July 27, 1997?
Showtime
Showtime. The two-hour pilot gave the channel its best-ever ratings for a series premiere, yet after five seasons it let the show go because it no longer drew new subscribers, and Sci Fi took it on.
Q 12Stargate SG-1 was filmed in and around which city?
Vancouver
Vancouver. Local landmarks kept turning into alien worlds: the hilltop campus of nearby Simon Fraser University played the capital city of the advanced Tollan.
Q 13Stargate Command sits beneath which real peak near Colorado Springs?
Cheyenne Mountain
Cheyenne Mountain. So many visitors asked about the gate that the real complex put a high-security door marked "Stargate Command" on a storage room holding brooms and detergent.
Q 21In the original SG-1 pilot, Carter says it took fifteen years to do what to a dialling system for the gate?
MacGyver
MacGyver. The verb is a wink at the show's own leading man, who had spent seven years as the gadget-rigging hero of that name before he took command of SG-1.
Q 22Before playing General Hammond, Don S. Davis was Major Garland Briggs on which cult series?
Twin Peaks
Twin Peaks. Davis had been a real Army captain before he acted, and after he died in 2008 the Atlantis finale named a starship the George Hammond after his general.
Q 23Both Ben Browder and Claudia Black joined SG-1 from which earlier sci-fi series?
Farscape
Farscape. The two had played star-crossed lovers there, so SG-1 kept their new characters apart as a couple, though the episode "200" let the whole cast send the old show up.
Q 14In Stargate SG-1, the Stargates are built from which rare fictional mineral?
Naquadah
Naquadah. The film showed Ra's slaves mining the mineral behind all his technology but never gave it a name; the name arrived with the series.
Q 15Late in its run, Stargate SG-1 overtook which show as North America's longest-running sci-fi series?
The X-Files
The X-Files. SG-1 finished on 214 episodes and held the record until 2011, when Smallville aired its 215th hour in the last weeks of its own ten-year run.
Q 16Teal'c defected from serving Apophis while holding which Jaffa rank?
First Prime
First Prime. The gold emblem on his forehead marks the rank, which he threw away in the pilot by turning on his fellow guards to free the captured SG-1 team.
Q 17Which planet, orbiting a binary star, is Teal'c's homeworld?
Chulak
Chulak. He was not born there: after the Goa'uld Cronus executed his father, the boy and his mother moved to the planet, where he joined a rival's army hoping for revenge.
Q 18Which SG-1 star later became the voice of Kratos in God of War (2018)?
Christopher Judge
Christopher Judge. The 2018 game wanted one performer for both voice and motion capture, so its makers replaced the original Kratos with an actor nearer the character's size.
Q 19Which SG-1 regular also provided the voice of the alien commander Thor?
Michael Shanks
Michael Shanks. He kept voicing Thor through season six, the year he had quit the regular cast because he felt his own character was being underused.
Q 20When Daniel Jackson's actor left after season five, Corin Nemec joined SG-1 as which alien scientist?
Jonas Quinn
Jonas Quinn. Casting agents spotted Nemec rehearsing for another film in the courtyard of MGM's Santa Monica offices and rang his manager that afternoon, though he had never watched the show.
Q 24The Ori, villains of Stargate SG-1's final two seasons, are best described as what?
Ascended beings fed by worship
Ascended beings fed by worship. Belief passes real energy to them, which is why they invented a religion, Origin, promising followers an ascension they never mean to grant.
Q 25In Stargate SG-1, O'Neill's running references to which cartoon reflect his actor's own love of the show?
The Simpsons
The Simpsons. The affection ran both ways: Homer's voice, Dan Castellaneta, guest-starred on SG-1 as a barber who sees O'Neill's missions, and the SG-1 star later played himself in Springfield.
Q 26In Stargate SG-1, what is the metal shield that closes over Earth's Stargate to block unwanted travellers called?
The iris
The iris. It sits so close to the event horizon that anything coming through has no room to re-form, so an uninvited arrival ends as a thud against the metal.
Q 27In Stargate SG-1, which resistance movement of rebel symbiotes shares its hosts' bodies only with their consent?
The Tok'ra
The Tok'ra. Their name means "against Ra": they are the same species as the Goa'uld but refuse the name, because each of them lives in partnership with a willing host.
Q 28In SG-1's 100th episode, "Wormhole X-Treme!", which amnesiac alien sells a TV show based on the team's missions?
Martin Lloyd
Martin Lloyd. Willie Garson's stranded alien keeps losing his memory, and the Air Force lets his show stay on air as plausible deniability in case the real program ever leaks.
Q 29In SG-1's "Wormhole X-Treme!", Michael DeLuise modelled the hammy Colonel Danning on which actor?
William Shatner
William Shatner. DeLuise was sent a tape of the SG-1 star to copy but decided he could not imitate him, so he played the colonel like the young Captain Kirk instead.
Q 30The marionette sequence in SG-1's 200th episode was built by the puppet makers behind which film?
Team America
Team America. The Chiodo brothers built both casts of marionettes, and some of the SG-1 puppets' wires showed up so poorly on camera that they had to be drawn back in digitally.