Resident Trekker Keith Phipps: The Five Ages of Shatner: Age 1: The Formative Years
(Keith Phipps, self-confessed Trekker, with cat Oscar)
[On Sunday, August 20, Comedy Central will air the Comedy Central Roast Of William Shatner, a sure-to-be reverent tribute to the man widely considered to be the finest actor of his, or any generation.
To increase viewers’ appreciation of this event, Keith Phipps, editor of The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion and a lifelong Shatner fan will be guest-blogging a refresher course on the life and passions of the man named Shatner.]
First a clip, explained below:
What kind of man is William Shatner? To understand the mystery of Shatner, we must go back to the source of many mysteries: Montreal, a strange land of clashing cultures living without the benefit of a Neutral Zone. It’s there that Shatner was born and attended school.
But you won’t understand Shatner from the bare details of his life, his Bachelor Of Commerce degree, or even his Shakespearean training. To understand Shatner you must put yourself in his place for a moment, if you dare. This is a man who walked the sleepy streets of Montreal in the ‘40s and ‘50s and thought, “I’m bigger than this. I can get beyond this. I can go somewhere where the street signs are in only one language.” This is a man who sat in the movie theaters and thought, “I can project my voice further. I can tilt my head more suggestively. I can. Pause. More—dramatically than. That!”
This is a man who came of age watching Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, and John Agar thinking, “My eyes can twinkle just as invitingly. I can leer just as lasciviously. What they can do I can do.”
What kind of man thinks that way? Is he a god? No he is not. Shatner bleeds like the rest of us. He’s a man, to borrow a phrase from Conan The Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth. He’s like us but bigger, and possibly better. He is, in short, a hero.
And like many heroes, he began humbly, playing sidekick to Howdy Doody, starring in low-budget films such as The Intruder—still Roger Corman’s favorite—getting overshadowed, albeit just barely, by a plane-devouring gremlin on The Twilight Zone. Yes, Shatner kicked around Hollywood and did it all in the early years, even battling the supernatural in Esperanto in a film called The Incubus. (Long thought lost, it was restored in 2001, hence the trailer above.) But this was not a man to be confined to the margins. This was a man destined for greater things. Where? The answer would soon become clear: The stars.
Shatner link of the day:
My co-worker Tasha Robinson’s 2003 interview with the man himself.
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