Customer Reviews

Stargate SG-1 Seasons 1-10: The Complete Series

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a former Star Trek nerd, I'm kicking myself for taking so long to get into the world of Stargate. In three words, I love it! But you don't want to hear about that, you want to hear about this product, which is the entire series box set.

I was very disappointed with this box set. It is frustrating that such a fantastic series is ruined by poorly thought out packaging.

The problem? Scratched discs! The sleeves holding the DVDs are simply cardboard, and offer no protection. I first discovered a problem when I was trying to view an episode and the disc started to skip. I looked at the surface and found scratch marks, S-shaped, which correspond to the path the disc would take when you push it back into its sleeve. I pulled out a bunch of other discs at random and sure enough, every one of them had similar S-shaped marks. A few other discs failed to play too.

I ended up returning the entire set. I was originally going to exchange it for another but decided I'll just keep buying the individual seasons separately. Why? Because this box set contains 55 DVDs, and if one or two of them is scratched, you're stuck! And unless you plan to sit down and watch everything in one shot, it could be years later before you discover an unplayable disc...

As a bonus, buying the individual sets makes it easier to find specific episodes you want to watch. Quick, where's that one in Season 7, on disc 4? Good luck trying to find it in the big accordian-fold packaging.

In short: 5 stars for an excellent TV series. 1 star for the awful packaging.

(Don't believe me? Check out the reviews on Amazon.com, you'll see many other complaints about disc scratches. Normally I'd forgive a scratched disc or two -- hey, it happens -- but the sheer number of DVDs in this set means it is going to be a Big Problem.)

I am extremely disappointed in the quality of the product I have several disks that are so badly scratched that they will not play and other disks that there are spots that have to be skipped an there are stutters. I was happy that the product was delivered in good time but when you can't view half of it, it does not really matter.

Most TV shows spun off from movies are uninvolving and uninteresting ("Blade," anyone?), but such wasn't the case with "Stargate SG-1." Starting as a simple exploration series, the series expanded into a brilliant tangle of politics, aliens, and Earth's spirit and guts -- excellent writing, acting, and a sense of humor about itself and its characters.

The Stargate has been inactive for a year. Then a bunch of Egyptian-styled warriors come through and kidnap an officer. General Hammond (Don S. Davis) pulls Jack O'Neill (Richard Dean Anderson) out of retirement, and sends him to Abydos to find out what happened. O'Neill is reunited with Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) -- only to have Daniel's wife and brother-in-law abducted by the evil Apophis. A rescue attempt sparks off a war with the Goa'uld -- aliens who have been impersonating human gods for many centuries.

So the team SG-1 -- made up of O'Neill, Jackson, scientist/pilot Sam Carter (Amanda Tapping) and Apophis' ex-slave Teal'c (Christopher Judge) -- explore through the Stargate, finding plenty of hostile aliens, strange allies (the Unas, the Asgard), and humans scattered all over. Not to mention the gate-builders, who have ascended to another plane.

Frst they battle the arrogant Apophis, then the devil-imitating So'kar, and the malignant half-energy Anubis and his army of undead warriors. The Goa'uld power structure starts to splinter, and new secret organizations make power plays on Earth, as SG-1 uncovers the hidden legacies of humanity's ancestors.

Even after the Goa'uld storyline ends, things haven't ended for SG-1. Cameron Mitchell (Ben Browder) is given command of SG-1, and manages to gather the disbanded team back together, with the help of a quirky alien mercenary, Vala Mal Doran (Claudia Black). Together, they find that the Milky Way faces its most deadly threat ever -- the Ori, evil ascended beings who demand that everyone worship them... or else.

Previously all "exploration" sci-fi focused on people on ships. "Stargate" avoids the usual space opera approach -- even when ships are introduced, the main focus is on walking through a big stone ring. It's also full of real military, political battles (both on and off Earth), and a very plausible reason why everybody in the galaxy (more or less) looks just like us.

It's graced with elaborate, opulant sets, solid special effects, shoot-'em-up action from Marines and Air Force, and some truly kinetic space battles (including one that resembles the climax of "Star Wars IV"). The storyline stumbles somewhat in the last two seasons, with the sudden switch in villains and cast. But all ten seasons are sprinkled with very warm human moments -- Daniel's farewell to his wife, Sam bonding with a doomed little girl, and Teal'c's struggle for freedom.

Best of all is the snappy script. Some of it comes from Teal'c ("Undomesticated equines could not remove me"), but mostly from the tart-tongued O'Neill ("Well, I guess we all start shooting. There's blood, death, hard feelings... it'd suck"). Other characters get great lines too (" I think the circle means 'the place of our legacy'...or it could be 'a piece of our leg', but the first seems to make more sense").

The cast is nothing short of brilliant -- Anderson does a quirky, disrespectful, pop culture-lovin' guy with a hidden tragic past, while Tapping and Shanks are great as an enthusiastic geek and a smart, capable military woman. And Judge is absolutely astounding as Teal'c, who slowly turns from a stoic, tragic warrior to a warm legendary hero.

Corin Nemec had a one-season stint as Daniel's "replacement," and he makes a nice, eager young newbie, and Ben Browder channels much of O'Neill's quirkiness when Anderson left. Black is kind of annoying at times, but she's admittedly quite funny and quirky, with a tragic past of her own.

"Stargate SG-1" is undeniably the best TV spinoff, and one of the best "exploration" shows to make it onto the air... and stay there for a whole decade. Definitely worth seeing, from beginning to end.

I recently purchased this box set with over 200 episodes to watch. It will be many months before I will watch them all. What I've seen so far was very good. Where this set was a big disappointment was the way the disks were packaged. The disks were pushed into a hard cardboard sleeve, which scuffs the DVDs every time you put them in. The set arrived with many of the disks damaged. You are forced to grab the DVD by the recorded surface to put them in or out of the hard cardboard sleeves, which adds your finger prints to the damage. A few disks were unplayable they were so bad. I got a replacement box set, which were not much better. Between the two sets, I now have a set that all the disks are playable, but still have lots of scratches. I have repackaged the DVDs into 4-in-1 DVD cases to prevent further damage. If you buy this set, the shows are very good, but the packaging is very poor. The lower rating is because of the BOX.

I just bought this at Costco for a third of Amazon's price. Sorry Amazon, this time you're not competitive at all.

If the price drops, the item is well worth buying. The show is incredibly good. I've been watching it for more than a decade now. I must have seen each episode at least 5 times.

A beautiful boxset for a fantastic show. I had previously purchased up to Season 3 when I found out about this set, so I gladly bought it and gave my 3 individual seasons to a friend. Even after buying the 3 seasons previously, this was still very much worth the money. I'm now onto season 6 and am loving every episode so far. The packaging looks awesome, and I like the way the DVDs are arranged internally. My only issue is the same as everyone else's, which is Disc damage. Since the packaging is essentially cardboard half sleeves staggered one above the other, even removing the discs for the first time caused scratches to appear. This was fixed with DVD sleeves, which I found locally for about 1 cent per. Easy fix, and now the discs are protected, and they STILL fit inside of the box, even in the sleeves. All in all, great product. Should've been 5 stars, but I had to deduct something for the lousy, but pretty! packaging.

Funny how this works. I wouldn't consider myself a Sci-Fi fan, but I started watching Stargate Atlantis on tv and enjoyed the characters so much that I got hooked on the Stargate SG-1 reruns. I'm glad I bought both box set series and am enjoying them alot, from the beginning! This series has off beat humor with great characters and adventure. The only disappointment I have was the packaging! You'd think each Stargate SG-1 disc would've had its own protective case instead of a slot in a cardboard box.

I love this show and I have probably watched the entire series 10 times. This complete set was great! None of the discs were scratched, unlike all of the other reviews I have read about it. And it was very practical to have all the discs together. There was still a book with a list of episodes and 6 extra bonus discs with lots of features on them. This is was a great set and well worth the money. I have had it for a couple years now and I have had NO problems with it whatsoever.

Why does this deserve one star? The series itself is excellent, but considering it's available on so many different digital distribution services like Netflix and iTunes, the real reason anyone would buy this is to have a physical copy. Well let me tell you, this box set was designed by idiots.

The box itself is beautiful, modelled after the Stargate and Egyptian art. The inside has a big accordion of cardboard sleeves that hold the discs. These sleeves have rough edges and barely enough room to hold the discs. This makes for a VERY tight fit of the 55 discs which leads to most of the set being incredibly scratched. I had to return two box sets to amazon while mixing and matching sets to ensure I kept the discs which were least scratched. I now keep the discs in a CD binder I purchased to avoid further scratches. I bought this set a few months ago and now I am on season 8 only to find that one disc freezes during the last 10 minutes of a very important episode. I have tried cleaning and buffing the disc but nothing changed. Now I have to find the episode digitally in order to avoid having to buy season 8 separately just to see how that episode ends.

Avoid this set. Acquire the series by any other means.

I love Stargate, it is really hard to say anything bad about the show. Not so true for the collects edition box set. The packaging for the discs is the most ridiculous and senseless I've ever seen. I can't even describe the process of locating one disc out of 10 seasons plus 4 special features discs, it's unbelievable, all the folding! There are no individual cases to protect the discs, just slots to slip them in and eventually scratch the hell out of them. But the outside appearance of the set is fantastic, it just looks great. And for the money I saved by getting the show in one shot instead of season by season makes the frustration worth while, just make sure you have a large surface before unraveling it.