Goa'uld Origins

[Babarock]

OK, guys. Forgive me if its an old subject, but you gotta clear this one up for me. When Ra, the Sun God dies in a nuclear blast, it seemed to try to escape its body in another form. We presume it was a goa'uld parasite like the rest. Later, we find out in the SG-1 episode 'Thors Hammer' that the alien race of Unas was taken by the goa'uld long before they discovered humans, which were easier to repair and make imortal (also to enslave, apparently). So, IS the race of the Una the very one and the same as the being that tried to leap from the human body just before the blast that killed it in the original movie?

[DigiFluid]

It's...best not to look at it too closely.

As I'm sure you're aware, the movie was made without any thought at all being given to a TV series being made years later. This is one of several things that you kind of just have to handwave away and accept.

[Xaeden]

Yeah, the series is an adaption of the movie and not a strict continuation. It follows the basic events, but I would refrain from viewing anything that happened in the movie as canonical within the TV series unless it was repeated in an episode because the TV writers have never felt that they were strictly beholden to the movie's details. As you have discovered, one of their changes was to eliminate Emmerich's idea that Ra possessed humans through a form of spiritual possession and instead made the Goa'uld actual parasites. So that image you captured is what Ra's original body looked like prior to his needing to possess a human to extend his life. It's modeled after Roswell Grays. Here's a concept drawing of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:R...l_humanoid.jpg

Because Sg-1 later used the Roswell Gray design for the Asgard some fans like to play around with the idea that Ra previously had an Asgard host but this is just a fun way to pretend like inconsistencies between what are really separate continuities can be explained. You'll also notice that, in the movie, the Stargate was housed in the fictional Creek Mountain and in the series it has been housed in Cheyenne Mountain for decades. Also, movie Abydos was on the other side of the universe in the Kalium galaxy and series Abydos was one of the closest Stargate planets to Earth. And, of course, movie Jack was an O'neil with one L. Word has it that he had no sense of humor at all.

The technique they used in adapting Sg-1 is a not uncommon one referred to as a loose continuation or loose canon...

where the writers pick and choose what elements of an older story they want to accept into a more recent story. It could be that the overall story is intact but the specific details are changed, or that the story is ignored but the details introduced within are still being worked with.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BroadStrokes

Today, this most often occurs in retcons within an existing series, leading to writers basically starting a new story that is set after the events of what came before, but deciding that they are not going to be beholden to particular specifics of that old story. In the past, it was rather common to do what Sg-1 did in the epic poetry/mythological tale circuit because new storytellers would regularly add on to existing stories (for awhile this was a necessity since a completely original story was thought to lack authenticity) and perhaps only generally follow the original stories, with changes being made to suit the new story they were trying to tell.

A semi-recent example that follows this latter version of the trope was Byran Singer's Superman Returns. He based his continuity off the first two Superman movies so something similar to those events happens in his Superman's past, but whatever happened happened within the last few years (rather than in the 70s/80s) and it wasn't exactly as depicted in those movies; in the case of Superman's relationship with Lois, something very different appears to have happened since she knows she was involved with Superman but doesn't know Superman is Clark (meaning, it's more than the amnesia kiss just not happening). The filmmakers didn't do a good job of explaining it, so audiences thought it was supposed to be a direct sequel to the first two movies that ignored the last two movies and were thus confused by inconsistencies.