A prop on a television show can be anything handled by an actor. For a show like Stargate, that can mean anything from an ancient parchment to an Ancient palm scanner. Property Master Dean Goodine joins Dial the Gate to educate us on his world and share memories from working on Stargate and beyond!

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Timecodes
0:00 – Opening Credits
0:25 – Welcome and Episode Outline
2:20 – Welcome, Dean and Linda!
2:46 – Sci-Fi: The Hardest Genre
6:58 – Agreeing to Stargate
10:35 – Creating a Content Catalog
14:36 – “They Don’t Pay Me to Say No”
15:30 – “Plot-Forwarding Device”
20:23 – The Stargate Lexicon
21:13 – Leaning on the Props Team
23:02 – The Property Master’s Role in Stargate
26:48 – Hiring the Armorers
28:30 – Study Case: Ronon’s Gun
30:40 – Working with Jason Momoa on “See”
33:44 – Securing the Props
36:32 – Scripts Piling Up
39:07 – Repurposing Props
41:30 – Lights in Weapons VS VFX Control
44:26 – Frustrations with Electronic Props
46:08 – Long-Lasting Batteries
47:20 – Revolutionary Technical Equipment
49:45 – Benefits of Working on Stargate
51:11 – MacGyver
53:20 – Amanda Tapping
57:45 – “Eat the Crew”
58:37 – A Nice Working Environment
1:01:25 – Isaac Hayes, Stargate Fan
1:02:15 – Air Force Access
1:04:22 – Rebooting Stargate
1:05:15 – Dean’s Favorite Props
1:08:04 – Excalibur Sword
1:11:38 – Prop Craftsmanship
1:14:54 – Reuniting the Old Stargate Crew
1:16:20 – Getting into the Property Department
1:19:44 – Picking Up Dean’s Book
1:24:07 – Fan Shout-Out
1:24:53 – Thank You, Dean!
1:26:16 – Post-Interview Housekeeping
1:27:18 – End Credits

***

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TRANSCRIPT
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David Read
Hello everyone, welcome to episode 217 of Dial the Gate, the Stargate Oral History Project. My name is David Read, thank you so much for joining me this weekend. Dean Goodine is a property master for Stargate SG-1 seasons eight and nine and Stargate Atlantis seasons one and three, if I’m correct about this, I’m pretty positive. He’s going to be joining us in a pre-recorded episode alongside my Producer Linda “GateGabber” Furey. Before we bring him in, if you enjoy Stargate, that’s the wrong button. If you enjoy Stargate and you want to see more content like this on YouTube, please click the Like button. It makes a difference with the show and the reach of our audience so we can continue to grow. Please also consider sharing this video with a Stargate friend and if you want to get notified about future episodes click the Subscribe icon. Giving the bell icon a click will notify you the moment a new video drops and you’ll get my notifications of any last minute guests changes. Clips from this episode will be released over the course of the next few weeks on both the Dial the Gate and GateWorld.net YouTube channels. As this is a pre-recorded episode our conversation with Dean has already been recorded. Linda Furey, my producer, joined me for this episode because she is a) an amazingly fast reader and b) just wonderful to have around and c) she’s a librarian so she knows how to do the books stuff. I have her to come in because I read extremely slowly. Dean wrote “They Don’t Pay Me To Say No: My Life In Film and Television Props and it includes some of his Stargate stories as well. I recommend that you check that out on Amazon, there’s going to be a link for that in the description below this episode so you can go ahead and get your own copy. It’s also available on Kindle as well and in paperback and hardcover. Let’s bring in Dean Goodine and share some Stargate stories with you. Dean Doodine, property master for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis and my producer, Linda “GateGabber” Furey, thank you both for being here. Dean, it’s a privilege to have you on the show, thank you for being with us.

Dean Goodine
Well, it’s a real joy to revisit such a wonderful time in my career, which were the few years I was on both Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. I look back on those years with great fondness of the people.

David Read
What are some of your memories, in broad strokes, of working on this property?

Dean Goodine
Well, I think in broad strokes was how I got talked into doing it. My career prior to Stargate was doing historical films like Westerns, World War One, Samurai films. I was doing a film in Vancouver. I finally moved to British Columbia and I was doing a film in Vancouver and Andy Makita and I had known each other since the 80s. We worked on a big samurai film together and were really good friends in Calgary, Alberta where we both were working at the beginning of our career. We had a mutual friend named Bill Bannerman who also was in Calgary for a short period of time, he was a producer on a film called Walking Tall in Vancouver with The Rock. At the end of the film we said “we gotta get Andy out for dinner.” We grabbed Andy and we went downtown for dinner. I was staying in a hotel in Richmond somewhere, Andy agreed to drive me home which was completely opposite of where he lived. On the way down to the hotel he said, “Hey, we need a prop master for our show, Stargate. You should come and do it.” I was like, “yeah, no, I don’t do sci-fi.” I’ve only done some low budget sci-fi before and anybody will tell you the hardest genre to do is sci-fi, especially if you have no money, because it’s a real challenge. Andy was asking me this, I was laughing at him going, “there’s no way.” I left him back at Calgary to do a film and the phone rings, it’s John Smith, the line producer. I’d met John Smith on a film in 1988 in Calgary. He always said to me, “you move to BC you have to call me because I want to give you a job.” So he phones me and he goes, “hey, Andy tells me you want to come and do our show.” I’m like, “well, clearly Andy wasn’t listening to me because I don’t do sci-fi. I just haven’t done it well.” John goes, “well, we take four day long weekends and we take the month of July off and we don’t work late on Fridays.” I really like John, John was such a nice man, Andy also is great. John talked me into it, he said “just pretend they’re cowboys in space.” I got to Stargate and I think for about the first week I kept looking at Kenny and I would call the gate room “the saloon.” I was just really trying to get my head wrapped around doing Stargate. Getting into Stargate was the most memorable thing and then two weeks into prepping SG-1 John calls me up to his office and I thought, “oh, they finally figured out I have no idea what I’m doing.”

David Read
Classic imposter syndrome, right?

Dean Goodine
John sits me down and goes “so listen, we’ve just got a green light on Stargate Atlantis and Bridget’s going to oversee, Bridget McGuire the production designer, and some department heads are going to oversee both, we want you to oversee both shows.” My reaction was, “wow, I don’t even know how to do one show and now I’m going to do two.” I thought, “well, if you’re going to fail, you might as well do it spectacularly.” So I agreed to do Atlantis and SG-1 at the same time while I was learning the whole Stargate universe at the same time.

David Read
So you were catching up. Seven seasons of SG-1 had already been shot so season eight and season one of SG-1 and Atlantis respectfully were spinning up.

Dean Goodine
Yeah, spinning up at the same time. I just remember going home and phoning my wife and saying, “yeah, I’m going to do two shows at the same time” and she she just started laughing like, “what are you doing?” It was the best education. I will say the crew, the writers, Martin Gero, Martin Wood, of course, Brad and Robert and Andy, we all were in the same boat, we were all trying to figure it out at the same time. It was really a good group of people to be in that with and I think I learned more in a month than I learned in about 18 years of my career on that show.

David Read
Wow. And 40 episodes simultaneously, in one season. That’s crazy.

Dean Goodine
I sat down with John Lenic, John Lenic was overseeing SG-1 and George Horie was overseeing Atlantis, great, great production managers. I said to them, I said, “look, I’m gonna give this a go but you have to let me tell you when it’s not working.” What happened was with Stargate, because we had so many in house staff directors they didn’t have to wait for someone to come in from out of town, Will Waring, Andy, Pete DeLuise and Martin, to name a few. We suddenly got to episode 15 of each show and second units were appearing because they were trying to do the visual effects and do all the inserts that were needed to be able to do the final edits on these shows. I remember one day I was standing in my office and I had 11 scripts open.

David Read
Oh my god!

Dean Goodine
I am trying to track all the props, 11 scripts, and trying not to have something go off the rails. Before I finish the story I should say that I did approach it because I came from a feature background, feature films. I did approach it like I was doing a big feature film and you have to have the ability to hire people to empower them to do their jobs and let them make decisions. I was lucky because I had future Stargate property master Kenny Gibbs running my SG-1 set and I had future Atlantis prop master Pat O’Brien, who also was the prop master on MacGyver, prior to that, running Atlantis for me. Basically, I just had to make sure that I fed them all the things they needed to succeed, from the build shop, from the purchases, weapons to anything that they required. I was just making sure that everything was landing where it was supposed to land when it was supposed to be there. That’s how I sort of processed getting both shows up and running. I remember I went up at episode 30. I call it episode 30 because it’s 15 and 15. I went “I am worried I’m going to drop the ball here.” What happened was I walked into the gate room and Kenny saw the look on my face because Will Waring was directing RDA in the gate room. I had all the call sheets for that day, there was no Will Waring directing RDA in the gate room. I’m standing there with this look and Kenny comes over and pats me on the back because he knows I’m going to and he goes “this wasn’t scheduled. Basically Brad or Coop realized that they needed a shot for a future episode so they thought they would grab it while RDA is here.”

David Read
Right, because he wasn’t there all the time.

Dean Goodine
Yeah, at that point in time Richard Dean Anderson was coming and going on the episode so while he was in town they were grabbing some shots. They were always miles ahead of everybody with their scripts and their development and breaking stories that they just got Will in their directing. That’s when I went upstairs and said, “I don’t…” They’re going, “we think it’s going really well.” I said “you haven’t been in my office, it’s chaos central down there.” Not that I was running around, we didn’t yell at each other and we didn’t misplace anything, It was just I could see it coming. I handed Atlantis over to Pat for the last five episodes and I stepped over with Kenny and just ran SG-1 for…

David Read
For season eight and season one.

Dean Goodine
Yes.

David Read
Okay. Wow.

Dean Goodine
Yeah, I know, it’s a bit of a mind meld there. The funny thing about season one of Atlantis, because with SG-1, you’re right, I came in and season seven was completed. I walked into a warehouse that looked like it was from Citizen Kane, Orson Welles, Citizen Kane, of just white boxes on shelves. It was massive, full of products. They handed me the inventory list as well and I said to them, “well, you have to let me go through these boxes so I know what I have. I want to be able to cross-reference. If you’re handing me this list I have to be responsible for what’s here and what’s not. They didn’t want any of the episodes broken apart because memorabilia was just starting to really come online at that point in time, Legends Memorabilia and the Collector. They wanted to be able to identify a prop to a specific episode so they wouldn’t let me just pull it out and stick it on a shelf, it had to stay in that episodic box. I said, “well, at least let me take photos of every box.” We created a binder of photos and we would stick a photo on the outside of the box and we had a binder so if we were doing an episode we could go through the binder quickly to see if there’s something there that we wanted to use and then we would always put it back in that box after. It was a bit of a complicated thing. When I get over to Atlantis, of course, we’re building from scratch. We’re building a new gate room there, we’re building the Wraith costumes, the Wraith weapons. George Horie called me in the office and said “listen Dean, we’re building these Wraith costumes. Because they’re so massive we’re going off the lot to have been built by and outside shop. Christina McQuarrie was costumes and Bridget was overseeing it. He said, “can you just sit in with them and if you see something, say something.” The problem was I wouldn’t say anything. I was with Bridget McGuire who had done every Stargate and then I’m with Christina as well who was ultra talented. I’m the new guy, I’m like trying to figure out why nobody has spurs on at this point because I’ve done so many westerns. The vendor was showing us Wraith costumes on the computer and they looked really great but he never met a deadline. It’d be like, “hey, can we have a piece to show on this date?” and you’d call him and he’d say “no, not ready. Not ready.” It got down to four days before we were going to film the Wraith on Atlantis…

David Read
Rising?

Dean Goodine
Yeah. The pieces came into the office and they were not good, they were not good at all. I remember Martin coming up to the boardroom and I was just staying back. Christina is doing everything in her power to try and sell them even though they’re not good. She’s trying to figure out how can we make it better and the only way we can make it better is we had to go back to the vendor and say “you have to work all weekend to get these costumes ready.” Everybody was in such a scramble. We get on set that first day with the Wraith and we’re about to start filming and we realize nobody put by eye holes in their head pieces. The big Wraith face piece…

David Read
The drones.

Dean Goodine
There are no eye holes so we’re drilling holes in them trying to make it so they can see out of them. The lesson that came out of that was we would never go off the lot ever again. At that point in time we were resetting the Stargate shop. Gord Bellamy, who had been with Stargate earlier and had gone off to do I, Robot with construction coordinator Thom Wells, they were coming back to take all this building over again. We rebuilt everything in our shop on Stargate which was state of the art builders. I still use them, even just a month ago I was using them. State of the art and it all settled after that. That was the last time we went off the lot to an outside vendor to get something massive built. I was like “we can’t do that.”

David Read
You can’t take the risk that you’re gonna fall behind.

Dean Goodine
Yeah, so that was kind of my “welcome to sci-fi.”

David Read
There’s a book. Linda, can you tell us about the book and have Dean piggyback off of that?

Linda Furey
Yes and I love a good book and this is a good book so all of you out there, go read Dean’s book, it’s fabulous. It’s called “They Don’t Pay Me To Say No” and he details his entire career working in props. It’s just a fascinating read. I went to theater school so this was right up my alley and I was loving every minute of it, especially all the talk about the historical props and the weapons that you used on various westerns. If you’re a big Western nerd like I secretly am, you’re gonna love this. You’re gonna love the sci-fi parts of it too everybody. I’ve been reading this and really enjoying it and one of the things that you mentioned was that Stargate was probably one of your first times that you had encounters with fans and fandom and that this was a little unusual. Would you talk about that a little bit? There was a big fan contribution to the show that helped you learn about the world of Stargate and also you had some interesting encounters with fans at the studio.

Dean Goodine
Yes. When I started Stargate, because it’s seven seasons…even in the boardroom, everybody had their usual chairs. Everybody sat in the same chair in the boardroom for seven years. I had to find my chair that would become my chair for the year and a half that I was on the show. They talked Jaffa, Goa’uld, ZPM crystals and I was sitting there reading the script and I didn’t understand half the language. I was just like, “okay, what does that mean?” I’ll give you one funny language story. I kept reading PFD, “Teal’c picks up his PFD and walks out of the set.” I’m like, “why does he need a personal floatation device, he’s in space?” Finally, I had to put my hand up and it was probably Brad Wright, he said “oh, that just means plot forwarding device. Do you have any ideas?” I’m sitting there looking at them like, “oh my god, I’m gonna die on this show.” John Smith could tell, my face, that I was really struggling with “what is that?” He said, “you need the Stargate Dictionary.” It was called something else but I called it the Stargate Dictionary. I said, “what’s that” and he said, “a fan has written a book of every Stargate term you used on the show. I have one of my office, I’ll give it to you.” For me it was like codebreaking, I would get a script and I would read something and I would go to the book and I’m going “oh, that’s what that is” and I would know what I was looking for. Anyway, the office at The Bridge [Studio] at the time for myself, it had an outside door. I had to go outside to go upstairs to the production office. I had not encountered fandom of shows ever in anything I’ve done. I open the door and there’s like 150 people outside the Stargate gate at the fence and they start clapping. It was kind of like Homer Simpson where he goes back into the hedge. I just slowly backed into the door and closed the door. I looked over and my prop buyer, Ina Brooks, who had been on the show for a number of years, I said, “Ina, there are a bunch of people outside the gate right now and some of them are dressed like the characters and they applauded me.” She goes, “Oh, that’s the Gatecon convention, they come every year. You should go to the fence and say hello to them.” I’m like, “yeah, no. They scare me.” Later that day John Smith calls me, he goes “the woman who wrote the Stargate Dictionary is here and the President of the fan club and the Vice President of the fan club are here and they want to come and talk to you about props.” I was still in the “I don’t know what half of this stuff is” mode. They came into the room and a lightbulb goes off when you’re in that situation. You realize that you can’t have a show without fans, if people don’t watch the show you’re not going to have a show. I really was embracing the Stargate universe at that point in time for how authentic they wanted things to be. We’re dealing with the US Air Force and then US Air Force just loved the show, they were very cooperative with everything. When I sat down with them we were doing pretty good until she asked me “Dean, at the end of season seven Teal’c picks up this spiky ball of death. Can you tell me what it’s called?” I was like, “yeah, that was last year’s prop master so I’ll have to get back to you on that.” Then the fan club presidents wanted to see the Zat gun so I went and got one and made sure it was all powered up and handed it to them. They were like, “oh, the power we have in our hands right now.” I didn’t want to burst their bubble because I knew it was two nine volts in the servo but I just let them enjoy it. You realize when you’re doing a show like that, or any sort of sci-fi show or anything that has a large fan base, you have to be responsible for the fans. I think that encounter actually made me realize even more just that there’s a responsibility and there’s a franchise to things you do. It has to make sense to the fans because they’ll call you out on it and you don’t want to be called out.

David Read
Yeah, it’s wild. Kate Ritter runs rdanderson.com and she is responsible for the original Stargate encyclopedia online, the Stargate Lexicon. That was a print version in your hand, is what that was, and production offices had that, long before Darren and I went and did the omnipedia or the online fan folks did Stargate Command wiki. Hers is the 1.0. and it is impressive. I can imagine looking at that and going “oh my god! Eight seasons distilled into two and a half inches.”

Linda Furey
Over five hundred pages, right?

Dean Goodine
It was the saving grace, it really was. I suddenly relaxed a bit and understood more. Kenny Gibbs, the prop master who took over after me and went on to Universe and the movies as well, he was also my lexicon because he’d been there already. I always would tease him, I said “I feel like I’m a placeholder for you, you should be prop mastering the show.” He’s brilliant. He knew RDA, he knew Amanda, Michael and Chris. He kind of understood whether something would work or whether something wouldn’t work. He was great and the same thing with Pat O’Brien over on Atlantis because he already knew RDA from before even though RDA wasn’t in Atlantis. There was still just a shorthand of how to do things and you have to rely on your set people. I’m a set prop master. That was probably the first time I was in a boardroom or meetings or doing budgets all the time or in the build shop on a show. Normally I’m by the camera, I’d do basically what Kenny was doing, I’d be by the camera working the props which is much more fun than sitting in a meeting, endless meeting. But good, good people. When I look back on that show… it’s funny…when you sent me that email, the request, I started going through it in my mind. I remember Brad Wright looking at me because I had always told them “look, I’m a feature prop master.” Trust me, Stargate was a feature, I had more resources on Stargate than I’ve had on most shows in my career. But I just really had some opportunities and I told him at the hiatus of season nine I was gonna go off and do a film, Kenny is here. It was just natural for Kenny to step in and take over and they never looked back.

David Read
Can you describe to me in layman’s terms what the function of the property master is holistically? It’s a lot of to unpack if we don’t set that out early on.

Dean Goodine
I’ll do it pertaining to Stargate because that’s what we’re on. Every show is different but the foundation is that anything an actor picks up and moves, uses on a set, is a prop. From weapons to food to eyeglasses, wristwatches, all of that is a prop. In the case of Stargate, what would happen is I would get the script and I would look at it and the first thing you do when you look at it is ask yourself “what do we have to manufacture?” because that’s going to take the most time. I would sit and do the manufacturing side and then you do your breakdown, you do your budget, you have a meeting with the director. I rarely would sit down with Brad and Cooper over…they really empowered their directors like Andy and Pete and Martin to really allow them to make decisions, If it was a franchise decision that carried over a number of episodes then Brad or Coop would get involved as well. They also empowered Joseph Mallozzi and Martin Gero and Carl and all the writers to make those decisions as well, there really was a lot of trust on that show. My job would be to meet with the director and flesh out some ideas. I would go to James Robbins at the time, who became a production designer, he was an incredible artist. He would do a lot of concept illustrations for me for a prop and I would go back. Once we got the drawings approved I would go meet with the model shop as we call them, Gord Bellamy, Paco, Don and Darren and the guys over there, We would sit and figure out how to build it, are we using 3D printers, are we CNC? The thing about the Stargate shop was we never, I talked earlier, we never suffered for anything. John Smith and those guys, every new tool that came on the market, we had it. I remember the first 3D printer I ever saw was the size of a Coke machine. The only thing we could print were the Atlantis PDAs that they used in the first season, we put an HP inside the clamshell. Those were 3d printed on a Coke machine sized 3d printer. Yes, there it is. I remember when we did those. The funny story about the HP PDA that went into it..

David Read
Yes, it’s a little HP device.

Dean Goodine
They changed their shapes after the first year and when I came back to do season three we were still using those PDAs. Of course they’re dated now and newer model so we couldn’t find them in Canada. I had my buyer, Keige Mullin from Ireland, that’s what we called her, Keige Mullin. I said “phone HP in San Jose. Phone their head office and tell them what we’re doing.” She got on the phone and our office is pretty common. I don’t really want to listen in on my crew but sometimes you can hear the coversation. She was trying to explain what she was doing and she got put on hold and I looked at her and I said “when the person comes back on, tell them you’re working on Stargate” because we’re building a computer world. She said the word Stargate and the world opened up to us. It was like, “oh yeah, we’ve got some in the warehouse that we will ship up to you. They haven’t been destroyed yet.” So we got a bunch of free PDAs from 2005, I guess 2004, because she said the word “Stargate.” I know I gave a long winded answer to your “what does the prop master do on Stargate?” All the weapons. I saw you had a great interview with Rob Fournier I watched. We we hire the armourers, we oversee the armourers, we hire them. In the case of Stargate, Rob Fournier is one of the best in the world, it wasn’t like I hired Rob, Rob was there before I was. I met Rob on Walking Tall and I still consider him one of the best and a good friend. We’re in charge of “what weapons are we going to use in the scene? Do we have enough ammo? Do we have all that?” I’ll sit with Rob and we’ll figure out “we’re going to use a 50 caliber.” The season ender of Stargate Atlantis, the one year, we had two 50 calibers firing in the large effects stage when the Wraith were attacking and they had the railgun up and everything. I’ve never heard anything that loud that we did that day that we did with that gunfire. We had to notify the businesses three blocks around The Bridge [Studios] that we were doing this. All the full autos at the time would only fire full loads which are extremely loud, it was crazy. So yeah, we deal with the armourers and food. We sit with actors, like when Jason Momoa’s character, Ronon, I had to develop his handgun. That was when the western part of me came in and I kind of convinced him he was a bit of an outlaw type of guy and stuff. We developed that six shooter looking sort of gun for him that we CNC’d and made out of aluminum in the shop. They allowed me to kind of go a little bit there with Jason.

David Read
So let’s take a look at Ronon’s gun for an example for a moment if I may and Linda then you can come in after me. I just want to jump on this because this is an iconic prop. So [James] Robbins designed the look of it, I have his illustrations of that. Did he hand that over and say “go to town” or were you in the process working with him to turn that out into that and then you went and made it? Where’s the line drawn there?

Dean Goodine
I went to James with my idea after going to Martin or whoever was directing that episode. We talked about what it could be, pulled out some images of six shooters and kind of came up with the idea. I didn’t go and say “it needs to look exactly like this.” James drew it. I gave him an idea of cowboy gun, sort of put the wrap on the grip and all that stuff, but James expanded as James always did. James will take the most rudimentary drawing…because trust me, I’m in my wife’s art gallery, I can’t draw anything. Whether it was a bad pencil sketch or picture on the internet or something, I would say “make this look like something” and he would then take it into James world. I called him “Jimmy the pen,” I was like “okay, gotta go see Jimmy the pen” because the ability to draw and create was, at that point in time I was blown away by it. I hadn’t been around that world, you have to remember I came from World War One or samurai films or cowboy movies and the odd really bad sci-fi show. I did meet Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut. I’m the only prop guy who’s probably sat and had a conversation with both of those men which would probably make your fan base go crazy. But yeah, James was just brilliant, he is brilliant.

Linda Furey
You went on to work with Jason a bit more. Didn’t you work on See for a while?

Dean Goodine
Yes.

Linda Furey
Can you share any stories from that experience?

Dean Goodine
Absolutely. First of all, the smartest thing I did on See was Gord Bellamy was kind of semi-retired after shutting down his portion of the Stargate shop. I convinced him after about five years to bring his shipping containers full of all his machinery into the See world. Suddenly I had that real shorthand of working with Gord, like we did all those years on Stargate, to then set up See. I had no idea whether Jason would remember me from Stargate because I was never on set. I was always the guy who goes, “here, do you like this, like this, do you like this?” and then Pat would take over and run it on set. I didn’t know how much Jason would remember me but I remember Francis Lawrence who directed the Hunger Games and feature films, well Francis Lawrence was directing the first three episodes of See. Every time an actor came to the office, which also had build shop and everything, he would bring them through the concept room and into the set decoration warehouse and then into props. I was coming around the corner and I could see Jason was walking towards the prop shop with Francis. All of a sudden he saw me and he came running, he sprinted towards me and picked me up and gave me this huge bear hug which I think realigned my spine. So I guess he did remember me. See is a show where everybody’s blind and you’re building all these tactile props and everything but it’s all found objects from a dystopian future. We built a lot of props and we had some ideas for Jason so we had a private show and tell with Jason. We showed him all the cool stuff we built for him but he decided he wanted everybody’s props. Jason came to us “I want this for a future episode, “I want this for a future episode.” It’s probably the best show and tell I’ve ever had except he took three quarters of props that we had for everybody else. We had to put all that stuff away for future episodes and rebuild more stuff for everybody else. Jason is a big hearted, kind human on set, really good to the crew and really fun to work with. It was really nice to see him from Stargate and we talked about Stargate a little bit. He told me he struggled a bit after Stargate, getting work, and how getting on to Game of Thrones kind of was a turning point for him. I’m so happy for his success now. Any of the Stargate people when I come across them, whether it’s Kenny, all these people that are doing really well in their careers since Stargate, I’m always happy for them because that was really an exceptional group.

David Read
That’s exactly right, they’re just exceptional people. Can you tell me about the security aspect of the props. You’re dealing with pieces that are several thousand dollars in r&d. The tricorders from Star Trek, there were regular stories about how the tricorders would just walk, they would just disappear. What kind of procedures were there in place to prevent certain guest stars and people like, “this belonged to my character. I want this to go with me.” It’s like, “no, we may need this for a future episode.” What’s the process like? Did you ever have any issues on Stargate or elsewhere regarding that? Tell me about the process of keeping this property secure.

Dean Goodine
I never had issues with anybody. I think that they respected the process on Stargate; Atlantis and SG-1. I think they respected where we came from and the fact that everything was very expensive in r&d, even the staff weapons for instance, just anything like that. Even though we may have had 30 or 40 of them for an episode, especially the short ones that we made, we kept everything. We just made sure, yes, absolutely. Kenny and Pat were running the sets for me, really were on top of that. We had vaults in the truck, stuff that didn’t need to be on the truck would come back to the warehouse and the warehouse was very secure. We were very good at what goes out comes back in and if something is missing we do the big hunt for where it went. Security on every movie is very high because the memorabilia market has really gone crazy with all this stuff. I get calls all the time going, “what props do you have?” I go “I don’t have any. I didn’t own them, they all went to the show, it’s all in the warehouse.” I rarely keep anything and if I keep anything I bought it from the show because I wanted it. Other than that, no, it belongs to the show. If John Smith or Brad or coop decided they wanted to give something to somebody at the end of an episode, then that was their choice, they always got to make that choice. Rarely did we do it because the shows needed the material. When you’re on a seven day turnaround on an episode, if you have the ability to go to the warehouse and pull something out and maybe adapt it as opposed to building it from scratch because you only had seven days, it was just really important to hang on to everything on that show.

Linda Furey
You mentioned in the book that at the point when you were working on both SG-1 and Atlantis you came to a point when you were going to tell them that you couldn’t keep doing both shows, you literally had 11 scripts that you were working on simultaneously on your desk. How many scripts were you usually getting ready at a time for just one show? I know they they filmed multiple at a time.

Dean Goodine
With Stargate Atlantis and Stargate SG-1, what would happen is it’s about the building up of the second units. When I say I had 11 scripts open, they were certainly on main unit with RDA, Joe Flanigan and everybody on the other, they were shooting their primary scripts. If it was episode four SG-1 and episode five of Atlantis or however that cadence worked, we would stay within that world. But there was all kinds of visual effects shots or insert shots and when I say I had 11 scripts open that just means I was trying to track a prop for a specific insert. You would get a call sheet for that unit, whether Andy was directing it or Will Waring or somebody was in directing all these visual effects, you’d look down and go “okay, from episode three we need the goa’uld whatever whatever, we need this, we need that.” That’s where the 11 scripts came out. They were very responsible to the actors and very responsible to the crew to not make us completely crazy. I think if I was prop mastering say just SG-1 at the time or Atlantis at the time, I’d probably only have about five scripts open and Pat over on Atlantis would have about five scripts open. We would only have one person from both shows running, or two people, running that second unit. They would have to talk to all of us all the time, we would make sure that they would know “this is from Atlantis, this is from SG-1.” Sometimes what would happen is the same director wouldn’t direct that second unit. It’d be like “oh, that’s Pete DeLuise, he’ll come in and direct these two scripts and then Will Waring will come in to direct these two scripts and then Andy Makita will come and direct these two scripts. Meanwhile, Martin Woods is directing an episode of Atlantis and somebody is over directing SG-1. It was really more organized than it sounded in the book, it was really more that I had gotten to a point where I was having trouble keeping track.

David Read
Okay. I’m wondering if this came down to budget. In season two of Atlantis the Wraith go from their over the shoulder launchers, which really are only there for the first half of season one, to a longer staff that was repurposed for, in addition to their pistol weapons, that was repurposed from [SG-1] season three’s New Ground. There was a Bedrosian zapper. You guys repainted these things and then they became the Wraith staffs that they used to fire stuff off predominantly for the rest of the show if they had the longer weapons with them rather than just their pocket sidearms. Were those budgeting considerations or were those “we’ve got these laying around, they’re five years old, we haven’t really used them. Let’s do something with that.” Who was responsible for that and at what point would that come into play rather than just “okay, let’s build a whole new series of weapon.”

Dean Goodine
Usually those decisions on Atlantis will come through the world of Brad Wright. I remember when we developed the up on the shoulder ones, everything was developed so fast. You get to a point, “is this working? Is this really what we want them to do? Is there a better way to do this?” You kind of look around at the inventory of what you have to begin with, “can we adapt something? Can we change something? Can we go into a different sort of world with these?” How many times have you watched a show where you’ve watched the pilot for a show and then it’s been picked up? You realize after the first episode, sometimes they even change the lead actor, so what you develop in the beginning, you realize as you’re going forward, that maybe it’s not what you want it to be for the whole show. I can’t speak specificly to what made that change but I know that we were kind of wrestling with that weapon in the first season as to “do we really like what this is doing?” I think it was always kind of a point of discussion of what we could do better,

David Read
You may be able to expand on this a little bit. I know that Wraith cannon, over the shoulder cannon, drove the visual effects people nuts. The guys on set had a button to press and that button would light up the front end of the cannon because the visual effects people like to have control over when the ZAP zaps.

Dean Goodine
Absolutely, 100%. When I went to Stargate I did have goal in mind, I knew the industry was changing. I had been doing historical stuff but the reality is theatrically, and television even, the stuff that I made a lot of my early career on were really not in vogue as much. We were moving into sci-fi and I love Terminator, I love Blade Runner. I’m a sci fi-fan if it’s a really good sci-fi and I watched the Stargate feature. I knew that if I was going to have a long career I had to go to Stargate and it was about learning CGI school for me and green screen. It goes to exactly what you said about anytime an actor pushes a button and a light comes on, even in 2023, drives visual effects people crazy. They really want to have total control on set as to when something is illuminated and when it’s not illuminated. On Percy Jackson, the series that I just finished for Disney, I did a lot of lights on swords and stuff. It was only so they could track it for whatever visual effects they were going to do after. A lot of times we’ll put the tracking lights on things for them. In the old days you’d put a piece of tape on but now they like the fact that we can give them a tracking light. They control it from the DMX board, they have a whole console and they sit there. They have the ability to turn that light on or turn that light off, the actor never has a choice as to whether that light’s gonna go on or off. In my case, on Stargate, I was still in the world of actors controlling their props. So I, probably with Gord and Paco and Darren at the model shop, put those buttons on which probably drove John Gajdecki and all his crew crazy. Yeah, you’re 100% correct. I probably made them nuts with that prop. Didn’t it have lights in the body?

David Read
Yeah, it had lights in the body and then there was a bulb in the end, then there was the button to trigger the bulb. It was so specific, we didn’t really see a lot of that with a lot of these props. If there were lights, the ones that I sold through Propworx, if there were lights they were merely static or controlled by remote control off screen. There was a couple that were designed to overload and die. They’re just wild, it’s absolutely wild the tech that came out

Dean Goodine
Electronic props were the bane of my existence early in my career. I remember one of my very first sci-fi movies I did in Winnipeg, it was so bad that the dishwasher was trying to kill a person with a butcher knife. I don’t even know how to describe that scene other than that was the script. I think it was like the house is trying to kill people. It seemed like whenever I put a light on a sci-fi prop it would burn out within five minutes or the batteries would die. I remember I was on a show with David Carradine and I think I had a prop built. I think I had $23 and I went to RadioShack. I don’t know what it was called in the States but it was RadioShack in Canada. I built this really bad prop on a Sunday and I knew there was no close up on it so when I handed it to David on the Monday morning “here David, here’s your Martian communicator, there’s no close up.” He looked at it and he goes, “good thing!” Once I discovered Paco and Stargate model shop, their stuff never failed. One thing I will always say about Stargate, all those lit props and stuff that you saw everybody carrying and working, no prop master was having an anxiety attack in the background that the bulbs had burned out. We had redundancy, we would always have some way to solve it, but their products never failed. They figured it out and they’re still figuring it out; cutting edge now with LED and all the wireless systems that you work with. I don’t have any anxiety about it anymore.

David Read
I have two weapons, one from Atlantis season two, an ice cream cone style weapon from Aurora, one from Atlantis season three, the replicator stunners from The Return, downstairs in my dining room. Both of them have the original batteries in them, they’re not as bright as they were, but they still work. That’s, so…18 years.

Dean Goodine
The cone would have been Pat O’Brien sort of overseeing that prop and the replicator one was me. I’m trying to remember what it looked like. I remember having this…

David Read
I can go and get it for you. It’s grey snd the piece lowered and then went back in and there were white crystals on the inside. The writing on the side of it, there were dots along the side of it that were white as well. Machined metal, it was water cut I’m thinking. Bridget McGuire said it, you guys could have built stuff for NASA. It’s just outrageous.

Dean Goodine
We had every piece of technical equipment. If somebody went to the high tech trade show in Las Vegas, Martin Wood especially, he would come back and go, “this cool thing.” Somehow we would end up with a prototype or something that would work. I remember the first time I saw, I can’t remember what the screen is called. It is a water screen, basically you run water and you can project an image on it. The Wraith come through a cave and come through the screen of mist and water where we’re projecting the image with the projector onto the screen. It wasn’t all about what’s the greatest high tech way to do it, sometimes we went to the basics I remember, it might have been Atlantis where we had to do a body scan on somebody. We bought the nicest projector we could and then the graphics guys created the image that would scan on. It was that simple. Rather than try to come up with a CGI, we did it with a projector. We did a lot of things with projectors. The Atlantis control room, we had gotten what were called at the time “holo screens.” A holo screen, you know the set, so the holo screens…

David Read
Flat panes that look like glass.

Dean Goodine
So basically, I think I found them and I talked to Bridget. Of course we had little time and they were on a truck coming from Ohio. I think we ordered three and one of the screens wasn’t there, the biggest screen we needed wasn’t there. Bridget and I are going “what are we going to do? We shoot on Monday, this is like Thursday.” We went to see Thom wells and they cut a big sheet of just Plexi. I went and bought some sort of like a matte tack type of material and I said Bridget, “let’s try a see through material. Let’s see if this will work just to get us until our screen comes.” We hung it and we projected on it and in the pilot episode of Atlantis, one of the holo screens is not a hollow screen. It is something that Bridget and I had to figure out with no time with Thom wells and get something so that we could get it to work and then our holo screen came in and we put that up. The cutting edge tech of all of those people”. When I left that show, I didn’t really talk about the shows in the book, but there’s a really great prop master in Vancouver named Jimmy [James] Chow. He’s retired. If you look at Jimmy late in is career he did X-Men, Man of Steel, Watchmen, both Fantastic Four’s. I would go and run his second unit for him on a lot of those shows. I can sit in the room with all of those people and talk to those people with knowledge and intelligence in that world because I was on Stargate. Had I not been on Stargate I’m not sitting with Zack Snyder or I’m not sitting running with the Silver Surfer second unit and talking technology and whether something will work or not without those. I’m not carrying on to a show like See or A Series of Unfortunate Events or Percy Jackson, I’m not carrying on to those shows without Stargate. Stargate was a turning point in my career in reality. I’ve had a wonderful career, this is my fifth decade. I started in the 80s and I’m in 2023. If somebody said, “what’s the turning point of your career?” I know my career took off with Unforgiven and those films in the Western world but Stargate was the turning point. It put me on a different path and a path of knowledge that I didn’t know I wanted to learn and I’m so grateful to it.

Linda Furey
You worked a little bit on MacGyver as well and you also sanctuary with Amanda Tapping. Can you talk about either of those.

Dean Goodine
The MacGyver story is very funny because it was the worst day I ever had in my entire career. It was Pat O’Brien’s fault and I had never met Pat at that point in time. What happened was MacGyver came to Calgary to film an episode where RDA travels to do a Western, some sort of time travel or flashback.

Linda Furey
It’s a dream sequence, yeah.

David Read
So it was Pat’s worst day today too.

Dean Goodine
I get a call, it’s like cold, snowy, rainy November morning, I get a call from the MacGyver office in Calgary, a temporary office, “hw fast can you get to Heritage Park?” I’m like, “why?” They said “we need a prop assistant on MacGyver.” I could get there in 20 minutes so I get to the set and I’m looking around, I don’t know where they’re filming. “Where are they filming? Where are they filming.” I walk onto the MacGyver set and I see a guy holding a Winchester rifle. In those days, the only people on set..because we didn’t really have armourers, we did the firearms as well as props so I assumed that he was the prop master. I walked up to him and I said, “hi, are you the prop master?” and he goes, “who are you?” I said “I’m Dean Goodine, I was called to come and do props.” He hands me the Winchester and he goes, “okay, the new prop master’s here. So this guy is riding in on a horse, this person is tied to a post and he shoots the hat off his head.” I’m going, “where’s the prop master?” They said, “oh, we took him to the hospital with food poisoning.” I said, “well where’s the assistant?” They said, “well, we have a track person.” I said, “what’s that?” They said, “it’s a person who stays in the truck and organizes things” and I’m like, “well that’s no good, get that person out here.” I get through the day, the person they took to the hospital was Pat O’Brien.

Dean Goodine
Yeah, so anyway, they phoned me that night and said you don’t have to come back which was great. When I hired Pat on Atlantis, the first thing I did was look at him and said “you’re the reason I had the worst day on set ever” and he had a pretty good laugh at that story. I have a funny Amanda Tapping story because Amanda of course, who doesn’t love Amanda Tapping? She’s one of the nicest humans on the faceof the Earth. This is not Sanctuary, this is just a good Amanda Tapping story. After I finished halfway through Stargate season nine I went off to do a film called The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. It’s a little cult film, it’s an art Western. Well we finished filming in Calgary. The difficulty with Calgary is winter comes fast and it comes hard there and we hadn’t completed a scene that we needed to do with Brad Pitt. The idea was, “well we’ll film in Los Angeles but we need to get Brad Pitt’s firearms, his three handguns, down to the States. They were in Canada on a temporary permit, I won’t bore you with all the details other than to say I phoned Falcon Enterprises who supplied all the Stargate guns at the time. I said, “I need to get these three handguns across the border and Tom said, “no luck, it takes 30 days to export them.” I said “30 days? They have to be in Los Angeles next week.” He said “no, 30 days.” I was always dealing with my license with the Alberta guys at the time so I phoned the Alberta guys who were really user friendly. I phoned this guy in Edmonton and I said, “listen, I’m having trouble with some firearms.” He goes “Dean, it is so nice to hear from you. That autographed picture you sent of Amanda Tapping to my daughter, she loves it, it’s on her wall.” I explained to him what was going on and he said “leave it with me for an hour.” He called me back in an hour, he said, “have your firearms at the border tomorrow.” I phoned Tom back and I said, “hey Tom, if you have those revolvers at the border tomorrow at 2pm they can cross” and Tom goes, “how’d you do that?” I said, “it wasn’t Brad Pitt,” one of the biggest actors in the world at the time in 2005. It was a photo of Amanda Tapping that got Brad Pitt’s firearms across the border so we could complete the movie. Then of course they called me to do Sanctuary, the first season. It was all green screen, again in my school of how to do CGI and living in a green screen world. I jumped on it because I really wanted to learn this foreground set to CGI walls and all that stuff. Personally, I am not a big fan of all green is better, as a matter of fact I hated the color green even though I’ve got a green shirt on.

David Read
You are wearing it right now, both of you are.

Dean Goodine
Yeah, I’ve embraced green again because I found the volume stage which I’m still not completely convincedof It was great working with Amanda and the Stargate alum again. It’s just such an ease of a show, it’s a family environment, they really care about each other on that show. I mean, Fridays at 6pm, if you were still shooting, somebody made a mistake. If they had a forest sequence they had to shoot at night, they would build a forest on the effects stage so we could go home early. You could just turn the lights off, keep filming and then we can go home early. Anybody who works in film and television knows that most times if it’s an episodic, you’re in the hamburger factory. It’s like you got eight days, let’s grind this thing out, move on to the next thing. Get your 20, back in the days when it used to be 20, 22 episodes, get it out there, eat the crew while you’re doing it, and move on. Which is why I hardly ever did episodic television. Stargate ran differently, it didn’t run like episodic television. It was episodic but it wasn’t episodic. We didn’t have a studio overlord breathing down our neck, everything stopped at Brad and Coop’s office. At the time Syfy were actually still good people and they just trusted, whatever the syndication side was, they just let them do their show. You could see it in everybody, you could see an ease. There was a lot of pressure, don’t get me wrong, but the pressure was not in the wrong place. The pressure on all of us was we wanted to succeed a) for the fans and b) for the producers and the directors. Ourselves as well because we’re all those types of personalities; perfection is just one of those things that’s driven into us as we do it.

David Read
I caught you saying for the second time, “eat the crew.” Do you mean get the crew fed?

Dean Goodine
No, “eat the crew up” as in “let’s just grind them.”

David Read
Oh, wow.

Dean Goodine
There was a point in time after Stargate when I entered back into episodic television again for about two years. By then they figured out that it’s cheaper to just shoot nine hours than break for lunch and then shoot another six hours because the penalties the other end weren’t as bad. I was like “who thinks this is a good idea?” Especially when you’re doing 12 or 22 shows. How do you think you’re getting the most creative product when everybody’s exhausted? Stargate was none of that. It never ran that way at all. As a matter of fact I spent more time laughing on that show than anything.

David Read
Yeah, I believe that.

Linda Furey
A lot of people say that it was a very nice atmosphere to work in. It’s nice to hear people from all different departments and sections of the show saying that.

Dean Goodine
I think if you sat down and pulled every department head for the most part that has had an experience on that show, they would all tell you the same thing. When you’re in it, you don’t realize how good it is.

David Read
You’re churning, right? You’re just churning.

Dean Goodine
I remember Brad saying to me when I was leaving, I may have said it earlier, he said, “I wish we could have made you happy here.” I said, “I’m not leaving because I’m unhappy. You made this such a happy show. I’m just leaving because I just have other things that I want to do.” I’ve never been good at staying somewhere for more than two years. It’s nothing against the people or the show or the people who stayed for 17 years, it’s just my own internal drive, the way I do things. I’m just a little bit different, that’s all. That was the happiest place. Looking back on it now I recognize that as well.

David Read
In hindsight would you have stayed longer or are you happy with the time that you spent on the show and that it allowed you to do the things that followed?

Dean Goodine
Yeah, there wouldn’t have been a following without being on that show. I think that I would have not excelled as a prop master had I not been on that show. I think that my confidence certainly grew tremendously from that show and it just allowed me to sit in the room and talk to some very smart people. Sometimes I would still think to myself, even on A Series of Unfortunate Events with some of the stuff that they would talk about in the Barry Sonnenfeld Oh, well, it’s world everything. I’m not smart enough to be in this room but I can at least understand what they’re saying. That all sort of goes back to Stargate. I think the other thing too is that as department heads you want to be a decent human. We’re just making entertainment for people; it’s a remote control on a coffee table. We really want to keep it in perspective and they did keep it in perspective, always. Even if you couldn’t deliver, if something was going horribly wrong, because it is sci-fi, things are going to stop working or something’s gonna go sideways, nobody yelled. Nobody pointed fingers at each other. Every department would jump in and try to help you. Whether it’s the special effects guys or whether it was the costume department or hair and makeup, everybody would try to help each other. There was no “this not my department.” That was never the case there.

David Read
You were all rowing together.

Dean Goodine
Absolutely. Absolutely we were. I’m certainly smiling at a lot of memories now. It really puts a smile on my face thinking back to Andy Makita, that drive where he said, “come and do our show” and I was like, “yeah no, you’ve got the wrong guy.” John Smith, knowing I was a huge music fan, made sure that I was in the office when Isaac Hayes showed up.

David Read
Oh my god!

Dean Goodine
I know. I’m like “Isaac Hayes is coming to do this show? Isaac Hayes?” Isaac shows up and John’s so polite to everybody in the office, he is such a class act. I still remember John looking at Isaac and going, “hey Isaac, do you want a box set of DVDs?” Isaac goes “no man, I got them all at home.” He’s such a huge fan.

David Read
He was a fan.

Linda Furey
You mentioned in the book some of the amazing things that the Air Force gave the show access to. Can you talk about that a little bit.

Dean Goodine
Yes. It always astonished me that the Air Force were so involved in the show. Kenny, when you have him on, will be able to go into greater detail about the nuclear submarine and some of the jets they flew in and the heavy transport. In my case, I remember when Gatecon was on, the publicity guy came into my office from the Air Force. I looked at him and said, “why does the Air Force support the show so much?” He goes, “it’s our number one recruiting tool.” I’m like, “really?” He goes, “yeah, people watch the show and they want to join the Air Force.” I said, “what do you tell them when you tell them the Stargate program’s not reall?” He goes “well they’re kind of disappointed but they sign up anyway.”

David Read
We have a sign on a door in Cheyenne Mountain.

Dean Goodine
Tom Falcon who supplied the arms for Stargate, of course the P90 was the machine gun of choice for Stargate because the shell casings would go straight down and not out of the side so you could use them in close combat. He told me that he had a call from the Secret Service, they questioned him about the P90 because they wanted some of their agents to use the P90 because they’re in such close contact. They can fire and not be hit by casings coming out the side. The reach of that show was tremendous. I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure that the Air Force Joint Chief of Staff at one point was on the show as well.

David Read
General Ryan and then later on, John Jumper.

Dean Goodine
Yeah, I mean, what more can you say than that? Part of me wishes I was there all 17 years but the other part of me is grateful that I got to be there for the time I was there for sure. I still keep in contact. Bridget McGuire emailed me last week looking for Gord Bellamy’s number. Kenny and I are texting each other all the time, so I still keep in contact. Pat’s retired, Pat O’Brien, he’s retired. He keeps sending pictures of some European country he’s in where he’s winning some golf tournament.

David Read
Nice, the guy’s earned it. Absolutely.

Dean Goodine
He’s earned it. Good people. Always when I talk to someone on a set, I go “it’s good to see you” and we chat about Stargate. Everybody says the same thing. The odd rumor will come that “maybe we’ll reboot it” or something. I think you’d have a whole lot of grey haired people show up to see if they can still do the show.

David Read
There is a lot of interest and we’re just waiting on Amazon to decide what they want to do. Obviously with the strikes and everything else going on, we’ll see. I’m curious what some of your favorite pieces were. Handling, just marveling at their construction and design or simplicity, from your time on the franchise?

Dean Goodine
Boy, that’s a good one. Got me thinking.

David Read
There’s a lot to pick.

Dean Goodine
There’s a lot to pick. I was always impressed, well it goes to Ronon’s hand gun to start with and then you work your way through the ZPM crystals. We had to change the design of them when I got there because they just took too long to turn on and turn off and dim, so changed that. I can’t remember the device but there’s a device, I remember picking it up on a Monday morning, it’s some sort of a hub that we had to put rocks or eggs in to and I can’t remember whether it was SG-1 or Atlantis.

David Read
Are you talking about the communication stone base with the blue crystal on the top? You had little magnetic sensors in all of them so if you put one in there it would light.

Dean Goodine
Well the thing about that is that was ready about an hour before we filmed it. Literally, I was pulling into the model shop and loading it in the truck and driving it to the set and getting it set up with with the crew and hoping it would turn on. The model shop guys would always come, they would always come to the set and help us sort of troubleshoot the start of a prop. I remember that prop just because it was one of those…I don’t know why, rarely were we up against a sort of a start. That one comes to mind. I said to my wife “I did 62 episodes and it was such a blur.” I think Bridget said it best and maybe Andy. It was so packed, I don’t know if you can pick one thing because it was just completely packed all the time with stuff to do. The model shop was always going. The synergy of working with those guys there on problem solving any build. The mechanical things like you talked about, the CNC the metal, you thought maybe it was water cut. Those would be CNC’d, I don’t think we water cut anything, I think everything was CNC’d from the machine and then coated. Then the sculpture artist we had in there, Eric Norman, who could sculpt all these very fine details of crystals and different things. Right down to building the sword for the episode where they find all the jewelry.

David Read
Yeah the Avalon caves, Excalibur. It was a cool sword.

Dean Goodine
Excalibur, designing that with Paco and putting the stone on the end. I remember we had a guy who’s an armourer named Lem Le Mercier. He came because he could buff out, because we were using aircraft aluminum at the time, you could buff out all the nicks between takes. Now with sword technology, you use bamboo as crazy as that sounds, we use bamboo. We have metal for the close ups and everything, but for the actual fight, any impacts, we are using bamboo. That’s the difference there, They’re always evolving and learning new ways to do things that are safer and faster and more efficient.

David Read
What did you say Linda?

Linda Furey
No, just the bamboo makes good sense. I have a lot of friends who do SCA reenactment and they use bamboo for their swords a lot.

David Read
They’re not snapping every five minutes?

Linda Furey
They don’t, it’s very sturdy. It’s less likely to hurt somebody too because of the flexibility of it, but then they don’t break. So yeah, that’s kind of brilliant.

Dean Goodine
There’s your secret. When I was doing Peter Pan & Wendy with Jude Law all our swords were bamboo for the fight sequences. I got a call from a prop master in Los Angeles named Scott Maginnis. Scott and I knew each other because he was the prop master on Inception and I went and helped him with snow unit on Inception. He was doing a HBO comedy series about pirates, I can’t remember what it was called, “Our flag something,” it just came out last year. He phoned me and goes “I heard you’re using wooden swords,” like it was some revelation. I’ve been using bamboo swords since Andy Makita and Bill Bannerman and I worked on Heaven and Earth, the Japanese movie, in 1989. We had 3000 Samurai fighting and we had bamboo swords back then in those sequences. We’ve been using bamboo swords for decades for the most part. I said “yeah we’re using bamboo because a) they don’t break and you don’t cut anybody and the paint has refined now that you can’t really tell unless the camera’s right there.

David Read
Our Flag Means Death, sorry, it was Our Flag Means Death.

Dean Goodine
All the swords for Peter Pan and also for Percy Jackson were built by the Stargate guys. The guys who built Excaiber built all my swords for those movies. When you find something or somebody that works and you have a shorthand with them you don’t leave them. I’ve had many shops offer me “I can do this for less.” I’ve never been seduced by that, it’s always been about the relationship and the fact that those people have never let me down. The pressure they were under on Stargate; always in that shop to deliver the quality that they delivered week after week. For two shows, not just one. They were doing Atlantis and SG-1 and they were delivering big time every single day. How do you walk away from that for the rest of your career? I even convinced the people who were working on Watchmen and X-Men and different shows, they started using the Stargate shops

David Read
There’s a quality there. The thing that always blew my mind in selling 6000 of the pieces through Propworx for SG-1 and SGA was the extraordinary craftsmanship. Going back to the communication stone hub, the stones had, Linda, they had little magnets inside of the bottoms of them. On the hubs, there were a couple that were made, one was destroyed and one was designed to light. There were a couple, three or four stones, already set into it, they were glued on. All the empty ports were there and you could move the stone from port to port to port and when you would put it down the crystal would glow blue. They went ahead and wired underneath every one of those ports so that the actors could pick whichever ones they wanted and not designated like a port here or a port there. They gave production that much flexibility. That was so cool. I don’t know if you saw Dean, were you in season 10, Bounty, when they built the BFG? Do you remember the BFG? The Big Effing Gun?

Dean Goodine
No. Oh, I saw it. I remember that

David Read
Big like crystals on the end, it was reused in Continuum. There was a panel on the side of it. When we got this prop there was something rattling in the center and we couldn’t figure out what this thing was. We had it lit, it was all going, the little micro naquadah reactor on top of it. Something was rattling and we removed this heatsink from the side of it and underneath this whole lit section of crystals had fallen out. We plugged the crystals back in and it was underneath this whole engineered section of the middle of the gun that had never been used on screen. It just popped off with rare earth magnets. They had designed this thing and it blew my mind, the amount of engineering that went into that that was never used.

Dean Goodine
Paco and Darren, that would be those two guys at that time. Darren, Darren Wright I think is his last name. Paco Don, those two guys to this day, you go there and their engineering brain exceeds… You kind of go with an idea and first of all they’ll look at you and think you’re crazy. You show up and go “can you do this?” and they’re like, “are you crazy? You think we can do this?” 15 minutes later they’re like “yeah, we can do this.”

David Read
Yeah, they’re sizing up the issue.

Dean Goodine
The fact that you can pull a panel or you can look underneath and it’s done. Many times you get a prop and only one side is done, not that we do it that way. But those guys, it was always a completed shape. Everything was always ready to go. They’re still hitting homeruns. I think they would also be part of the group that if Stargate, if MGM decided they wanted to, if Amazon decided they were gonna do it again and it somehow miraculously landed in Vancouver, they would be part of the group lining up to reestablish that. You’d have no problem getting a crew. If Amazon wanted to do it they’d have no trouble getting crew, they would get a crew. They would get Kenny to prop master, I would probably go help him. That type of thing, they’d get a crew. Bridget, Andy…

David Read
James Robbins, so many of them would love to take another crack at it.

Dean Goodine
Yeah, I think that there’s a point where you wonder if the fatigue…I was there for season nine and then of course Kenny stepped in for season ten. You kind of wonder, people can sense an end. I didn’t see the last few episodes, how it all sort of came together. The same with Atlantis and then of course they went into Universe. I remember going over to visit Kenny at Universe and seeing some of the suits that he was having built. I would go to the model shop and see, I still call it a model shop even though they have their own company now. I would see the stuff that Kenny had them being built and I would always look at it and understand the franchise that he was building for. I’m so happy that it still has such a following for your sites and other sites. I follow Joe Mallozzi every now and again on Twitter and you just kind of get a sense that we’re all still out there in some capacity and we haven’t really let it all go either.

David Read
It’s appreciated.

Linda Furey
You talked very early in your book about how there are very few routes into becoming a property master. You said you fell into it kind of accidentally and that other people mostly ended up going into it because they have family connections in the business. If someone wanted to go into your career, what would you recommend to them in the current time?

David Read
Stay away! Oh my god. I’m kidding.

Linda Furey
If I wanted to work in props what would you tell me to do?

Dean Goodine
I think personally, the best prop people come out of theater. You have to have a knowledge of so many things; you have to build, you don’t have a lot of money but you have to be super creative. I feel like the best prop people in beginning and stepping into our industry have come from theater. That’s not to belittle the other three groups that I’ve seen which of course are the tactical weapons part like Rob Fournier. He could easily slide into propping, he’s worked in props on set. He hasn’t prop mastered yet but he’s a very talented prop person so I see a lot of those people, technical people, come over that way. The family route, obviously even in Vancouver the sons and daughters of very talented prop masters have taken up the family job. For the most part they’re very successful and very good because they’ve seen what their parents have gone through in their career so they have a good understanding of it. Then of course me, the accidental prop master who just sort of stumbled into it but got some great mentorship so early. I’ve always embraced the education side of my craft. I always tell film students when you step onto a set, your first two years, you should just mentally think that this is still two more years of my education. You shouldn’t come home from school or technical school thinking “I’m ready, I’m going to be a director now” or “I’m going to be the department head.” As any department head will tell you, from Bridget to Kenny to anybody, this is my 38th year, I still learn. I still look at a script, I start a new script next week, I still have things in there that I don’t know how to do but I have to figure it out in a very short period of time. You always want to take it from an educational standpoint. When you get there, be quiet and listen, keep your eyes open but don’t be afraid to speak up if you think that there’s something you can add to. Be with good people. I can see how a young film person could have their career derailed pretty quickly by the wrong person. I think that’s the same in any job in society. I think it’s my responsibility as a department head who’s coming to the end of his career to offer mentorship and be kind in that mentorship. But the person you’re mentoring has to want the mentorship as well.

David Read
Absolutely. Your book “They Don’t Pay Me To Say No: My Life in Film and Television Props.” Where do you want us to go and pick this up Dean? There’s a couple of different places, where do you recommend we go and get it?

Dean Goodine
Well, I think that Amazon has it in the USA. There’s a website that I have called, theydontpaymetosayno.ca and you leave the apostrophe out of don’t so it’s youdontpaymeto sayno.ca. There’s a bunch of links where you can get it, directly from the publisher, you can get it from Barnes & Noble or other stores, Kobo, Apple books. Depending on how you want to read it Amazon is probably the easiest for everybody, unless you hate Amazon. You can order it through a local bookstore and they’ll probably be able to get it for you through one of their suppliers. It was a book I didn’t want to put out on in all honesty. I wrote it and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do with it. I wrote it before the Rust tragedy happened and it was sitting on the shelf. I sent it out to some conventional publishers and I thought “who would want to read a book about props?” and they thought the same thing even though they thought it was funny and pretty good. When the Rust tragedy happened my wife said, “you have to put the book out because people need to understand what props does.” Props is not a department that’s readily talked about in the annals of film. You guys understand because you have a business that deals in props but for the most part from the craft side I even have people in accounting who don’t know what we do. I don’t mean to pick on accounting, that can go across the board. I put the book out just to kind of explain the craft, but do it through a series of funny stories. It’s kind of a book of short stories so it’s not a book you have to linearly read. You can open any chapter and read it from beginning to end, the chapters aren’t long and then put it down for a week and pick up and read. I wrote the book for people like myself who are exhausted at night and can only read three pages before they fall asleep at the end of the film. I’ve had messages from around the world. I’ve had messages from the legendary prop master [Dennis J. Parrish], he’s retired, he did Papillon with Steve McQueen and Patton, who said “if I wrote a book about props I’d have nothing to say because you said it all.”

David Read
Ah, that’s a great compliment.

Dean Goodine
I really wanted it to be a book of gratitude to the career. There’s not any meanness in the book and you could probably say that better than I could. I really didn’t want it to be mean, I wanted it to be almost a joyous celebration of my craft. I wanted people to laugh.

David Read
I’m looking at the cow here. Part of me wants to think at some point something becomes set dressing if it’s so large, but I guess if you can move it and handle it, it is a prop even though it’s a cow?

Dean Goodine
Animals for the most part are always props. In the case of the book cover I’m carrying a cow to put down in a field for Diane Lane. The school mom coming to the harsh western territory on the Virginian looks out her wagon and sees this dead cow on the grass. Obviously nobody wants real dead animals on the set so I had a prop builder build a cow for me. Of course I thought it’d be a funny book cover to see me carrying it across the prairie towards the set. It’s an attention grabber. Somebody said to me, “Oh, if I saw that in a bookstore I’d at least look at it and decide what…”

Linda Furey
When David told me about your book he was like, “I have to read this. I have to find out why he’s carrying a cow.” I was like, “he’s carrying a cow?”

David Read
Right. Yeah, that was our reaction.

Linda Furey
It definitely got both of us.

Dean Goodine
I just want to give a shout out to all the Stargate people and the fans that are watching this show or may watch this show. The crew members that I’ve worked with, they were the best of the best. I’ve learned to embrace fandom now, I would actually almost go to Comic Con and not be afraid. I understand the love people have and we all need escapes in this world and escaping through entertainment. We all want to go to movies, we all want to feel something and I’m glad that people kept the show alive and in their hearts. It was really nice to revisit that world for me as well, it’s almost a reaffirmation of my own career.

David Read
You guys make magic happen. It’s sleight of hand and it’s editing and it’s ingenuity. I am grateful Dean that you came on to pull the curtain back a little bit on a few of our favorite pieces and tell us about how this whole thing gets made. We both appreciate you coming on.

Dean Goodine
Well we can get Kenny on. Kenny will really pull the curtain back for you. He’s hilarious and he’s such a good guy.

David Read
He’s a good guy for sure. Thank you so much for your time, sir.

Linda Furey
Thank you.

Dean Goodine
Take care.

David Read
That was Dean Goodine, property master for Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis. It was such a pleasure to have him on and I’m really thankful for Linda Furey for joining us as well. She helped fill in the details of his book. They Don’t Pay Me To Say No: My Life in Film and Television Props available on amazon.com in hardcover, paperback and Kindle editions. I am so pleased that he was able to join us for this episode. The more folks that we have on, particularly the behind the scenes folks, the more the gaps are filled in in terms of some of the details of some of these extraordinary shows. Seventeen seasons of production, it’s a lot of material that we’ve been privileged to go through and we’re nowhere near finished. More episodes are heading your way, keep it on dialthegate.com for the complete list as we go down it. Ivana Vasak, Stargate SG-1 art director from seasons one to five is joining us next and she’s had some interesting stories to tell as well so I hope you can stay tuned. My thanks to Tracy and Antony, my moderators for this episode, along with Sommer, Jeremy, Rhys, you guys continue to make this thing possible. I couldn’t bring the show to you guys every week without the moderator support. My producer, Linda “GateGabber” Furey, thank you for joining me in this episode. Frederick Marcoux at ConceptsWeb, he helps keep dialthegate.com up and running. I’m grateful to all my folks and I’m grateful to our guests. Thanks again to Dean Goodine for joining me and Linda, joining us, for this episode. My name is David Read for Dial the Gate and I’ll see you on the other side.