Star Trek blooper. Found on the Web; all rights reserved.
Live, now, at Las Vegas CityLife: my essay, nominally a review of Star Trek: The Original Series 365, on the Trek mythos and its fandom:
How is it that, more than 40 years after its barely three-year run on network TV, a low-budget, Nielsen-challenged space opera noted for its tinfoil-space-helmet special effects, overearnest attempts at ripped-from-the-headlines “relevance,” and the. hilariously. stilted. delivery. of. star. William (“Captain Kirk”) Shatner still casts a mythic shadow across the pop unconscious?
Star Trek commands a fandom whose fervor amounts, at the far extreme, to religious zealotry. How else to explain the fan mentioned in the 1997 documentary Trekkies, who approached James Doohan (Scotty, the ship’s engineer, on the original series), produced a hypodermic needle, and asked if he could have a sample of the actor’s blood? Or the bidder who paid the hammer price of $40,000 at a 2001 Profiles in History auction of Trek relics–one hesitates to call such venerated artifacts “memorabilia”–for Captain Kirk’s mustard-yellow “tunic”? “As a pop icon of its era, Kirk’s tunic can’t be glibly excluded from our cultural inheritance,” writes the visual-culture critic Ralph Rugoff, in Circus Americanus. “For many, Kirk’s tunic is a relic of significant power.”
And I say that as an unabashed–oh, alright, cringingly shamefaced–fan of The Original Series.
More, HERE.
Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn!!!!
(io9’d by Annalee Newitz! Thanks, Annalee!)