Our fellow scrapper Corylea gently pointed out to me that last Saturday was Bill Shatner’s Birthday! I knew this somewhere in the back of my brain, but I’ve been very busy lately with work and projects. So without further adieu, Happy Belated 83rd Birthday to our sweet Captain Charming! Love ya, Bill! 
(I’ll get your weekly dose of Spock up later today 🙂 )
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Memories & Musings of a Mature Star Trekker, and home of StarTreKomics!
Memories & Musings of a Mature Star Trekker, and home of StarTreKomics!
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I love the guy and Kirk wouldn’t be Kirk without William Shatner playing him.
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Shatner gave excellent performances in TOS when the scripts were good and chewed the scenery with abandon when the scripts were bad, often using sheer manic energy to provide entertainment that the script didn’t give us. People love to make fun of Shatner, but Star Trek would have been SO much poorer without him.
Mr. Nimoy will always come first in my heart, but Star Trek desperately needed Shatner and needed him all the more in its less admirable episodes. 🙂
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Yes indeed! I’ve always said that Kirk wouldn’t be nearly as fun if any other actor played him! Bill owns it!
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Re watching the episodes, one is struck by how much better he was than one remembers. There was much ham, but much very good work too. And of course he added to the whole that was the Star Trek magic.
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And as ham goes, he was pretty tasty! And TOS does have an element of magic in it; I think that’s what has held me enthralled for all these years.
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What I find really interesting is how much the ham seems to be mostly limited to the episodes where the script wasn’t very good. Rather than the portrait of an actor who’s out of control, that gives us the portrait of an actor who understands what’s going on and who makes up in ham what the script lacks — but only when the script IS lacking.
I do wonder, though, what happened between the TV series and the movies. Shatner was throwing so much raw charisma at the screen during the TV show that those episodes were just awash in it, but by the time the movies come along, Shatner feels — to me, at least — to be a shadow of his former self, the charisma damped WAY down. Maybe it was that starvation diet he put himself on before TMP — sapped his energy too much. 😉
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