Resident Trekker Keith Phipps: The Five Ages Of Shatner: Age 2: The Heroic 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.]
Interesting fact: Just before landing the role of Captain Kirk in Star Trek, William Shatner starred in a pilot called Alexander The Great for a proposed weekly series in which he would play the young conqueror. Imagine what might have been, if you can. For Shatner is not a man of the past. Shatner is a man of the future. Before we move on, let’s consider this retrospective set to the 1980 cult-hit song “Where’s Captain Kirk?” by the punk band Spizzenergi (as compiled by video director Euterpe Jones):
(After the jump, Shatner and SEX!!)
To talk about the genius of Star Trek means spreading the credit around and mentioning creator Gene Roddenberry, major creative contributors like Robert Justman and Gene Coon, excellent writers such as Harlan Ellison and Theodore Sturgeon, the core cast from Leonard Nimoy to Nichelle Nichols, and all the hard work that went on behind the scenes in the show’s three seasons of breakneck an-episode-every-six-days production.
But consider, for a moment, the future without Shatner. What would the show’s intelligent plots and utopian idealism be without Shatner’s Captain Kirk? Sure, Spock had the logic and McCoy the testy empathy, but it was Kirk who asked the questions the audience wanted answered: If diplomacy fails, can I kick this big lizard’s ass? If I need to hightail it out of here, how fast can I make this starship go? What would it be like to have sex with that green-skinned chick?
In a world of ideals, Shatner’s Kirk was a man of action. Whether the threat was Romulans, failing engines, or alien STD’s Shatner’s Kirk considered his options, and usually opted for full steam ahead. His grin was assurance that even in a future governed by the high-minded Prime Directive, there would still be plenty of room for sex and violence.
But soon the real-life Shatner would discover that five-year missions can’t last forever, and coming back can be a real bringdown.
Shatner Link Of The Day:
One of the more curious phenomena to arise out of Star Trek was the birth of slash fiction, fan fiction and other creative endeavors that imagine gay relationships between ostensibly heterosexual Star Trek characters, most commonly Kirk and Spock. In subsequent years, slash has spilled over into virtually every franchise in which same sex characters have strong emotional bonds of any kind. Are they picking up on subtext or just making stuff up? The world may never know. In the meantime, the website Side by Side maintains an extensive archive of Kirk/Spock material, from stories, to poems, to online icons, to art, like this:
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