With Stargate SG-1, the franchise has shifted from Hollywood and the big screen to Vancouver and the small screen. Richard Dean Anderson -- TV's MacGyver -- takes on the Russell role of U.S. Col. Jack O'Neill. In the series, Anderson will play the leader of a team that travels the universe using portals -- Stargates -- on various worlds. The head of B.C.'s film commission, formed as a guide for the film and TV industry, is pleased with Stargate's arrival in Vancouver. "It's a big-budget series -- lots of cash and jobs," says Pete Mitchell.

And it's likely to be around for a while, pumping up a TV and film production industry involving U.S. projects that last year meant about $530 million in direct spending for workers, services and products, mostly in the Vancouver region. U.S. movies like Jumanji and the upcoming Eaters of the Dead starring Antonio Banderas come and go largely lured by the low Canadian dollar, infrastructure and trained crews. But the TV series linger. Ongoing programs like The X-Files, Millennium, The Sentinel and Stargate can run for years and employ Canadian workers -- two of Stargate's regular leads, for example, are Canadian. Stargate producer, MGM Worldwide Television, is committed to 43 episodes of the show -- a two-hour premiere and 42 hour-long episodes -- that will all be shot in Vancouver through 1997.

"Forty-four episodes. How do you pass that up?" beams producer Michael Greenberg, star Anderson's partner in their production company. The show will premiere on the U.S. Showtime channel in July. Talks are under way to settle on a Canadian broadcaster that will be allowed to begin airing Stargate in September 1997. Shooting for Stargate's two-hour premiere ends this week. Then crews will be shooting a new episode every 12 days. Vancouver's parks, beaches, forests and other rugged areas will stand in for planets across the universe. "We're going to do a lot of matte paintings to create our different worlds," said Greenberg. "If we shot a scene on the beach looking out over the Pacific, maybe the water would be red."

The Stargate movie had a U.S. team using a Stargate to visit one other world, but the TV characters will visit various worlds. "The premise of the movie adapts very well to a series," says executive producer Jonathan Glassner, a producer of MGM's TV show, The Outer Limits, also filmed in Vancouver. But Glassner says the interplanetary travel will be demanding. "Most science fiction shows take place on a spaceship, on a space station. They use the same sets week after week," he said. "We're going to have to build massive new sets every week, and create new species and new wardrobes every week, so it's very expensive." Within a few weeks, Stargate will shift to its own stages on the site as part of a $5-million expansion of the facility owned by the B.C. government and now home base for Outer Limits and TV's Poltergeist -- The Legacy. For now, the effects stage of the Bridge -- a former B.C. Hydro depot turned studio in 1987 -- is filled with such Stargate sets as the corridors in the depths of a mountain base housing the Stargate.