William Shatner
Interview 1969
Compiled,
Written & Edited by K. R. Overholt
Critchfield
The Wayne Communique, Published March 6,
1969
~~ Webpage Published March 6, 2022 ~~
Updated March 8, 2022
Updated March 29, 2022
SPECIAL EDITION!!
AN INTERVIEW WITH
WILLIAM SHATNER, STAR OF NBC-TV's STAR TREK
Editor's Note:
On Washington's Birthday, February 22, Belk's
Department Store in New Bern was host to William
Shatner, who plays Captain James T. Kirk in the
NBC-TV series Star Trek. Through no
small miracle, with the help of R. W. Baker, the
Sales Manager of Belk's, I managed to schedule an
interview with Mr. Shatner.
Edward Nicholson, the
Dean of Academic Affairs, graciously consented to
drive James Joyner, the future editor of the Communique,
and myself to New Bern and back. So, loaded down
with three cameras, film, flash cubes, a new
portable tape recorder from the library, and our
gifts to Mr. Shatner, we started out early
Saturday morning.
We spent approximately
35 minutes with Mr. Shatner in Mr. Baker's
office. Of course, the first question we asked
was if there were any chance Star Trek
would not be canceled next season.
Mr. Nicholson:
Would it help to write?
Mr. Shatner: No,
I think it's too late for that. But it'll go
through the summer reruns. They're changing the
time slot to Tuesdays at 7:30 in April.
Karen: They
should have done that before.
Mr. Shatner: Yes,
they should have. That may have some results If
the ratings go up dramatically, it may have some
result. But, to all intents and purposes, the
program's canceled. I'm curious. Is this for a
particular subject?
James: No.
Karen's the editor and I'm the co-editor of our
school paper.
Karen: The
Wayne Communique.
Mr. Shatner: Oh,
I see. So, it's really a newspaper rather than
for any academic credit of any kind.
Mr. Nicholson: In
a two-year college, you always have the problem
of a varying quality of student interest and
you're helping to maintain it.
Mr. Shatner:
(laughing) Well, I don't know; my English may not
be very good. But we had the same problem. I went
to McGill at the University of Montreal and, of
course, every college has the same problem—
the constant turnover. The football team gets the
most publicity, (laughing) but it works for the
newspaper, too, doesn't it?
Karen: Did you
work on the newspaper?
Mr. Shatner: No.
My office for the college musicals and the
theater society was next door (laughing) to the
newspaper. But I didn't work on the newspaper at
all; I didn't do any creative writing on it.
Karen: Then
you've never written any scripts?
p. 2
Mr. Shatner: Oh,
yes, I've written scripts and, in fact, whenever
I'm not working as an actor, I try to do
something in the area of creating a script. And
by that, I mean, I have, in the past, sat down
and written shows -- either a finished screenplay
or a story idea -- and in the past three years, I
tried to put together a film by either buying a
property, a book, or a script that I think can be
improved, or by one means or another, putting
together a film. I've tried on three separate
occasions to have a screenplay in a finished form
of such value that somebody would be willing to
invest money. I haven't succeeded in three tries,
but that won't stop me.
Mr. Nicholson: Star
Trek and the show you did before that, as
well as the one before that, all had pretty good
critical reviews. They made points; they had a
point of view that they were expressing.
Mr. Shatner:
Social commentary.
Mr. Nicholson:
Right. This brings the question to my mind: Is
this general approval of the point of view
reached through discussion with writers and the
entire staff, or is it representative of the
official decision of just one or two people?
Mr. Shatner:
Well, in the case of the series you're talking
about before, For the People, the same
group that produced The Defenders, Herb
Brodkin of Plaudus Productions. Well, to
go back even further -- I had been asked to do The
Defenders and I turned it down, wanting to
make a career in theater and movies.
Subsequently, some four years later, I changed my
mind, and Brodkin called me and said, "We
have a show ready to go. We've got a pilot. We're
on the waiting period, ready to go on the air,
and its point of view will be that of the
opposite, the other table, than The Defenders."
In other words, The Defenders was
defending the criminal against the machinations
of the law. This program, For the People,
would be defending the people against the
aberrations caused by defense lawyers, so that
the people, themselves, would be protected
against the criminals, in order to prosecute the
criminals, put the criminals away. And I, at this
point, had kind of adhered to that point of view
anyway, you know. I mean, much had been written
about the defense of the individual and the
pendulum has just begun to swing back the other
way and say, "Wait a minute! It's all very
well to say his mother didn't like him and that's
why he murdered that person, but what about that
murdered person and his family?" which is
the other point of view. So, I selected to do the
show for a number of reasons and one of them
being that the point of view did not offend me.
On Star Trek, we take a very humanistic
point of view and that's part of my philosophy,
as well. If I encountered a situation whereby a
script offended me, and I was tied by contract
with the necessity of doing it, uh, I think at
this point now, I would object. Whether I would
have when I was in a less strong position,
I don't know (small laugh).
Karen: Have you
ever changed the dialogue in a script that you
didn't think went with the character?
Mr. Shatner: Oh,
yes! These scripts are written so hastily! The
author of a particular script will conceive an
idea or get an idea from the producer of the show
and he'll go home and write it in two or three
weeks. An hour is an act and a half of a play.
He'll bring it in as a first draft and he's tied
by contract, the writer's contract, to do a
second draft. Sometimes, the thing is so bad that
they say, "OK," and they pay him off
and the story editor of the particular program
will give it to another guy to rewrite or in some
instances, they'll give it back to the original
writer and say, "These scenes are terrible;
this construction is bad, let alone the
dialogue!" They don't even talk about
dialogue; they talk about construction! Then
he'll hack it up for another week, and if he
spends more than two or three weeks on a script,
he is not going to make as much money as he could
if he didn't, you see. And a lot of these
writers, as everybody else, get themselves --
p. 3
are necessitated by
economic motivation to get in there and be a hack.
So, what usually happens is by the end of the
second draft, the script comes in and it doesn't
sound anything like the way we ordinarily sound.
And then the script editor takes the whole thing
and rewrites it in the manner that the script
editor would think we talk. And I have noticed,
for example, that during the first year, when the
man who was doing most of the rewriting was Gene
Roddenberry, himself, we sounded one way. The
second year, there was a gentleman -- a very fine
writer -- by the name of Gene Coon, and he wrote
in another way. He was an ex-Marine and he wrote
tough and terse. And this year, we had a more
verbose script editor who wrote in longer
paragraphs, and our speeches are longer and our
questions more academic. "But what would you
do if --," you know. So, it was changed. And
in the final analysis, when we get on the set and
look at the script, and we'd say, "Good
Lord, I'd never say that!" we'd change it.
Karen: Have you
ever had a script writer who actually wrote the
character into the script well?
Mr. Shatner: Very
few. I think on one or two occasions. Of all the
scripts we've had -- all 79 scripts that we shot
and maybe some hundred scripts that were bought
-- I think on a very isolated occasions did the
script writer write in the manner that Captain
Kirk and Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy would speak
traditionally and still maintain the same
relationship. Very difficult. And I don't know
why. I think Star Trek is particularly
difficult in that way, because other shows don't
seem to have that trouble. They acquire a stable
of writers -- seven, eight writers -- and then
the guys keep bringing in scripts. They make
around $3500 for a script, and so a top writer, a
top talent -- mathematically you can figure out
-- if he gets in one a month, he's not making by
comparison as much income as he could -- as
others are.
James: How long
does it take you to learn your script?
Mr. Shatner:
Well, I have acquired -- it's an acquired
characteristic, memory. When I was working
freelance before the series, I would take my
script home and learn it in time so that when I
went in for the first day of shooting -- and you
shoot out of sequence; you don't necessarily
shoot the first scene the first day -- I would
know the whole script cold and I'd know exactly
what I was going to do in what scenes. So, if
they shot the middle of the show, I would know
what was leading up to that. Well, on a series,
you can't do that because of the dint of time. I
mean, sometimes we'd finish a show in the morning
and some in the afternoon. Sometimes you barely
have time to read them. Well, in the first half
of the first season, I found myself learning as
much as I could when the show started, and then
taking that first weekend and learning the rest,
so that at some point during the entire show, I
learned the whole script. In the second half, I
found that I could learn what was necessary to
learn the night before for the following day's
shooting. In the second season, I got so that I
could learn the scenes coming up at the makeup
table. Finally, in the third season, I got so
adept at memorizing, and needing the necessity of
a challenge, I would wait (laughing) until we had
rehearsed it, or wait until everything was set,
to start learning massive speeches. And I got
pretty adept at it.
James: Is it true
that you like some special passages of
Shakespeare?
Mr. Shatner:
Shakespeare, in the English language, is the
finest dramatist, so any actor with any knowledge
of his craft has necessarily to like Shakespeare.
Whether he can do it or not is another question.
But as for favorite passages, those that have
become cliches in our language have been quoted
because they are the great passages, and so I
care for them, too.
Mr. Nicholson:
You had formal training in the theater at McGill?
p. 4
Mr. Shatner:
Well, I took the theater courses, but they're
usually a waste of time. Paint a flat, learn how
to light a set, and if you can answer a few stock
questions, you pass the grade. But it wasn't
anything comparable to Yale or Antioch here, for
example, at McGill at that time. I don't know
what it's like now. So, my training has taken
place in the theater by experience and by outside
classes, like at Stratford (Ontario). I was at
Stratford for three years and I took all kinds of
classes there, and classes outside at night.
Mr. Nicholson: It
seems to me that you might call yourself more of
a classic actor as far as your training is
concerned, rather than a method actor.
Mr. Shatner: Oh,
yeah. I don't understand the method acting, and I
took courses in it and I've studied a little bit.
I don't understand exactly what they're doing,
because it seems to me that what they're doing is
what every actor should do, and maybe it's a
method of learning. But, as for being a classical
actor, I'm capable of doing the classics. I have
a record out called The Transformed Man on
Decca.
Mr. Nicholson:
Who wrote it?
Mr. Shatner:
Well, it's an idea that I had had as a result of
being on several conversation programs in doing
Shakespeare. They asked me, "What can you do
besides talk?" (laughing) and I'd say,
"Well, do some Shakespeare," and I'd do
some Shakespeare. Finally, they'd say, "What
else can you do?" and I said, "Well,
play a song and I'll say the song. The lyrics in
some of these modern songs are sometimes very
beautiful." So, they'd play the melody and
I'd say the song, you know, not wanting to risk
being laughed at by singing. But finally, it
occurred to me to combine the two. To combine
background music with Shakespeare, segueing into
a modern song. So that, on this record, the first
cut is Once More Unto the Breech from Henry
V, with the great majestic music of War
segueing into a simple little song about peace. I
do Cyrano the No Thank You speech
which ends, "I may climb to no great
heights, but I will climb alone!" segueing
into Mr. Tambourine Man, which is a guy
needing a fix, who can't stand alone. Romeo
and Juliet, the romanticism of Romeo's part
of the balcony scene, segueing into How
Insensitive -- Baudelaire, a piece of
Baudelaire poetry tied in with Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds, LSD, the psychedelic
experience from Baudelaire and the Beatles. This
kind of thing. So, it's an unusual record, and Decca
has it and I'm very proud of it. There are
mistakes, but then again, where isn't there? It
would be interesting to anybody, especially to
anybody studying the theater.
Karen: Do you
think Star Trek is a good representation
of the future?
Mr. Shatner:
Well, everybody has a right to his opinion. Who's
to say? I say that anything you can imagine can
plausibly come to pass sometime in the future, so
that anything these script writers can imagine is
possible. Whether it represents it, I don't know.
Karen: Have you
ever met any astronauts?
Mr. Shatner: Yes.
Karen: What do
they think of the show?
Mr. Shatner: They
dig it! The whole Cape Kennedy just closes down.
I went there! I flew in and they rolled out the
red carpet. I got into the Apollo moon ship, the
LEM module. I met Don Isley [Donn Eisele],
who took me around and showed me everything.
Karen: I've heard
that when "Star Trek" comes on,
everything at Cape Kennedy stops. This is true?
Mr. Shatner: Yes!
And they played a practical joke on me! I was
looking through one of the quartz windows -- and
through the quartz windows, they had televised a
screen of the star systems that they'll be flying
by, well, this was just before the moon shot
(laughing). Did you ever hear the story?
p. 5
Mr. Nicholson:
(laughing) No, but I can imagine what happened!
Mr. Shatner:
Yeah! And I'm looking -- I'm lying on my back --
and they say, "Are you looking?" and I
say, "I'm looking," and across the
screen flies the Enterprise!! (general
hearty laughter) The idiots -- on my tax money --
(more laughter) had spent four hours making this
model to televise it. And when I got out of the
Apollo ship -- I had to climb down some stairs --
there were two or three hundred engineers
laughing! They had played a practical joke on me!
Oh, it was hysterical! It was the funniest thing
that had ever happened! And they handed me the
model to autograph and I wrote down on it:
"When you get to the moon, I'll see
ya!" (laughing).
James:
Approximately how much fan mail do you get?
Mr. Shatner: It's
varied a great deal. In the early days of the
show, we were getting many thousands of letters a
week. It's slackened off since then, and I don't
know what it is now.
James: Have you
ever received any marriage proposals from your
fans?
Mr. Shatner:
(laughing) Yes! I've received a number of
marriage proposals! And other kinds! (general
laughter) And I don't read too much of the mail.
There’s so much coming in, and there’s
so much to do that I see very little of it.
Mr. Baker:
How is that mail handled?
Mr. Shatner: It's
handled in two manners. If the person writing in
says, "I'd like a picture," that's
automatically handled. If there's a more
extensive letter, there's a service which tries
to answer in as brief a manner as possible.
Karen: Do you
think it will be easy for you to shake the
character of Captain Kirk?
Mr. Shatner: To
shake it? Yes. I made quite a good living before
I went into Star Trek and I hope I'll be
able to make a good living by playing other parts
after Star Trek. Actually, the character
of Captain Kirk is merely a Greek hero in
futuristic terms.
Karen: I saw you
in Alexander the Great.
Mr. Shatner:
That's right. It's Alexander the Great.
The same company that produced Combat
wanted to produce Alexander the Great. I
did a pilot film on it. And I call Alexander
the Great Combat in Drag! (laughing)
And he, too, was a hero, of course. Captain Kirk
is a hero in the same classical terms as
Alexander was.
Karen: I've been
in the military all my life, so I sort of relate
to orders, etcetera. I've often wondered what
would happen if the Enterprise (laughing)
didn't pass inspection.
Mr. Shatner:
(hearty laugh) That'd be funny!! That's a good
idea for a story!
James: Do you
play a musical instrument?
Mr. Shatner: I
have a guitar that I can strum, but I don't play
it very well, so in effect, I don't play a
musical instrument.
James: What's
your favorite pop hit?
Mr. Shatner: Pop
hit? (sigh) Well ... there's so many great songs
that have been written in the last few years.
Jimmy Webb is, you know, the new sensation. The
Beatles are simply great. And Simon and Garfunkel
are, perhaps, the minstrels of today. Those three
are the great artists in the modern music.
Karen: Which were
your favorite episodes of Star Trek?
Mr. Shatner:
Well, I liked two of them. I liked performing
them— that which I can remember, 'cause they
all begin to fade into (laughing) one giant Star
Trek! But there was one in the early season
that I played where I played the
p. 6
two aspects of Captain
Kirk: the animal -- I call it the animal -- and
the mental, the cerebral. And the idea of the
show was that man needs both of those aspects of
his personality in order to exist and that we
must come to peace with the fact that we need
both. The intellect must control the animal. At
the same time, the vitality of man is evidenced
by the animal. So, I tried to indicate, rather
than Jekyll and Hyde -- which it could have been
-- I tried to indicate that kind of philosophy.
The other one was the aging one when we all got
old to the age of 90 and back and it was quite
fun. I enjoyed it.
James: How did
Nichelle Nichols get her part on Star Trek?
Mr. Shatner: I
don't know how she got the job in the first
place. She obviously has talent, beauty and
brains, and apparently, she had luck. And those
are the ingredients you need for success anyway.
But she is a very talented girl. She sings and
dances beautifully.
Mr. Baker: Do you
know any of the plans of the other members of the
cast?
Mr. Shatner: No,
I don't know what anybody else is doing. They're
actors; they'll grub around for jobs like
everybody else, you know.
Karen: What about
Leonard Nimoy?
Mr. Shatner: I
don't know. He's a very good actor and he'll have
no difficulty maintaining his career. I'm sure.
Mr. Nicholson:
You work out quite a bit, don't you?
Mr. Shatner: Yes,
as often as I can.
Mr. Nicholson: I
can see that if you gained five pounds you'd be
out of a show.
Mr. Shatner: Oh,
yeah, the costumes! God, you eat one big meal and
you're dead! You can hardly breathe! It's quite
true. Quite true. And I put on weight on the
show. I'm so used to being athletic, you know,
that by the end of the filming season, which
takes about eight months, I'm really sadly out of
shape, because there's no time to work out. So, I
put on weight. And then, beginning the following
season, I've worked out and I've swum.
Mr. Nicholson:
There's one side effect you may not be aware of.
You are an ideal to -- well, we don't say it, but
it's true -- to middle-aged American men. You've
shown you can be thin after your 20's.
Mr. Shatner:
(laughing) Yeah?
Mr. Nicholson:
You helped me lose 55 pounds.
Mr. Shatner: Did
I really? That's wild! That's about the nicest
compliment I have received, really! I have to
keep weight off as a necessity to my trade. And
I'm really about 10 pounds overweight right now.
I will take off 10 pounds in the next two or
three weeks. But the camera puts on 10-15 pounds like
that, you know. I mean, it makes you look
heavier and fatter than you are, so you've got to
actually be gaunt. The best-looking guys are
gaunt and look somewhat sickly (laughs).
Karen: Do you
ever get to see Star Trek after you've
filmed it?
Mr. Shatner: The
only time I see Star Trek -- I see the
show fresh and new as you do. I watch it, you
know, and if I miss the show, I've missed the
show. I've missed quite a few this year.
James: How old
are your daughters?
Mr. Shatner: One
is four, one is seven and one is ten.
Karen: Have you
ever received any strange gifts?
Mr. Shatner: Yes.
Yes. One of them that comes immediately to mind
are muffins and brownies -- in the same package.
They came all bent and crumbled from across the
country someplace. And they brought it to me on
p. 7
the set and said,
"This came for ya," and I opened it up
and there were these dry muffins and these
brownies. And I kinda looked at the brownies, you
know. Everyone looked at the brownies. There was
a five-minute pause where we all (laughing) kinda
eyed the whole thing. They either could contain
arsenic, or pot, or just be bad cooking
(laughing). And who was gonna bell the cat
was the idea. Finally, one of the stuntmen said,
"I can't take it any longer!" He
grabbed one of the brownies (laughing) and he
shoved it in his mouth and spit it out, and he
said, "It's just bad cooking is all it
is!" And that was one of the more exotic
gifts.
Karen: In some of
the larger shows, there are many extras. How many
extras do you usually have?
Mr. Shatner:
Well, that depends mostly on the budget of a
show, because extras and things like that cost
money that doesn't go into script and film time.
So, if the show has a large budget, or is
budgeted as a large show, it'll have 20-30-40
people. If it's not a large show, if they have to
save money, it'll be a crowd of three -- or five.
Karen: And they
use them often.
Mr. Shatner: Oh,
yeah. They'll cut back to the crowd of three.
Mr. Nicholson:
With a low budget, that's when you get stranded
on a planet?
Mr. Shatner:
That's right! (laughing) Alone, you know, haunted
by a voice!
OTHER LITTLE-KNOWN FACTS
ABOUT "STAR TREK"
1. All the special
effects on Star Trek are done in a special
laboratory. Highly skilled men develop the film
so that the crew of the Enterprise appear
to beam up and beam down to the
various planets they encounter in space. None of
the cast of Star Trek knows how the
special effects will look until they watch the
show on TV.
2. Mr. Spock's pointed
ears are made of plastic. It takes about an hour
to put them on and these props are so heavy that
the makeup artist must tape Leonard Nimoy's ears
against his head. The ears are very painful, and
Mr. Nimoy can hardly wait to take them off at the
end of the day's shooting. He pops them off in a
second. Mr. Shatner says, "I don't know how
he could stand them! I know I couldn't."
3. William Shatner does
not believe in UFO's. He has on several occasions
tried to spot a UFO while riding his motorcycle
through the desert at night, but he never saw
one. Although Mr. Shatner does not believe in
flying saucers, he does believe there are other
intelligent beings in the universe.
(Story continues on page
8)
.
| |
THE WAYNE COMMUNIQUE
the voice of
Wayne Community College
Drawer 1878, Goldsboro, N. C.
Editor, Karen R. Overholt -- Co-Editor,
James Joyner
|
|
p. 8
And then we wrapped up
the interview. I presented Mr. Shatner with our
gifts: a WCC mug, a WCC pennant, and a copy of
the last Wayne Communique! I am pleased to
say that he liked the gifts very much.
During the interview and
the three shows at Belk's, we took pictures and
slides of William Shatner. If any students or
teachers are interested in seeing these shots and
listening to the tape of the interview, they may
sign up for a general showing. Just sign your
name on an appointment slip in the library and
indicate what day and hour you wish to see them.
When there is a sufficient number of names, the Communique
will announce the day of the show.
-The Editor-
Karen R. Overholt
| Karen's Note: Regarding
the above paragraph about pictures and
slides, in response to a recent query
made to the Clyde A. Irwin, Jr. Library
at today's Wayne Community College, the
Director of Library Services revealed
there are no such pictures or slides in
their archives, or even the tape
recording I left of our interview with
William Shatner. Any such
artifacts may have disappeared in 1973,
when The Wayne Communique ceased
operations, or when the second newspaper,
The WCC Campus Voice, was
running in 1988. No cassette tape,
pictures or slides relevent to the
Shatner interview were included when the
contents of the first library at the U.S.
70 Bypass location were transferred to
the new library at the Wayne Memorial
Drive location.
They do
have issues of the WCC college newspapers
that are now digitized for the DigitalNC
website, an archive that includes the
Shatner interview. The Director's email
included something that made me smile:
"I remember processing that
collection and was fascinated to find the
Shatner issue. We featured it in a public
exhibit in the 2000s."
|
Star Trek Publicity Photo (1966-1969) Paramount
| This picture was at the end of
the article, something I cut out of a
magazine to illustrate Star Trek.
It may have been a publicity photo
readily available for publication back in
1969. Strangely enough, after perusing
hundreds of the perhaps thousands of Star
Trek pictures available on the
Internet, I could not find this exact
pose. |
Pictures
and Comments About the William Shatner Interview
Written by
K. R. Overholt Critchfield copyright 2022
Photograph by K. R. Overholt (Critchfield)
copyright 1969
| We arrived in New Bern
early enough to see a crowd of people
listening to William Shatner answer
questions. I took a few snapshots with my
Brownie Starmite camera. James
Joyner had a better camera, but I am not
sure how many times he snapped pictures,
because he said only a few shots would be
available at the end of his roll of film. |
Photograph by K.
R. Overholt (Critchfield) copyright 1969
| While we watched and
listened, I was in "journalism
mode," and wrote down any of
Shatner's responses that I particularly
liked, thinking it would be good to ask
the same questions and thus get his
answers on tape -- the WCC library had
loaned us a small tape recorder and a
cassette tape. This plan backfired
during the interview, when at one point,
Shatner tilted his head and said
something to the effect of, "I think
I've heard these questions before."
Without question, I blushed with guilt. |
Photograph by
Karen R. Overholt (Critchfield) copyright 1969
Photograph by
Karen R. Overholt (Critchfield) copyright 1969
| When the first Q&A
session was over and the people moved
away, we three were ushered into the
office where our interview was held. Of
course, the first thing I wanted to do
was take a few pictures. |
Photograph by
Karen R. Overholt (Critchfield) copyright 1969
Photograph by
Karen R. Overholt (Critchfield) copyright 1969
| During the interview,
which was going very nicely, the sales
manager, seated at his desk, took a few Polaroid
photographs of the three of us WCC
visitors. He asked us to switch seats, so
that each one of us could be represented. |
Photograph by K.
R. Overholt Critchfield copyright 2022
Photograph by K.
R. Overholt Critchfield copyright 2022
| The photo above is a
photocopy of the picture that was meant
for James, because he is visible in the
frame, included here in remembrance of
what happened during the interview. |
Photograph by K.
R. Overholt Critchfield copyright 2022
| The room felt different, when I moved
to the chair near Shatner. The main thing
was I no longer was sitting at a
distance, observing from a corner, which
was my normal position in life. I tried
to keep to my notes. Just before our
interview, the Star Trek episode
that appeared on television was Requiem for
Methuselah, first broadcast on
February 14, 1969. Shatner asked if we
had seen it, and I said, "Yes."
Plainly, Shatner was clear-eyed about
the stories produced for the third season
of Star Trek. "What did
you think of it?" he asked, and he
was serious.
Stuttering
a bit, I finally said something like,
"Well, it was okay. The story could
have been better, but for what it was, it
was okay."
He
replied, "I thought it was
dull," and his voice was as dull as
the comment.
Feeling
challenged, I added, "The problem
was that for all three seasons, Captain
Kirk was most concerned about the welfare
of his crew, but in this case, it seemed
he forgot about all that, so it did not
make sense." He seemed to accept
that notion from me, and the conversation
moved on.
|
Photograph by K.
R. Overholt Critchfield copyright 2022
| Before we left the
office, I remembered to ask William
Shatner for his autograph. In my life, it
has not been my desire to ask for
autographs, so I was embarrassed to ask
Shatner to provide one -- it seemed so
much like a high school request. I cannot
remember whether the sales manager or I
gave him the index card, but I do recall
being dismayed that he chose to autograph
the side with lines, rather than the side
without lines. Looking back, his choice
may have revealed something about his
personality, just as every signature
reveals something about the person's
outlook on life, for instance.
Nevertheless, when I put all these
pictures into a photo album, I trimmed
down the card to fit it in with the other
pictures. The trim was a mistake, I fear,
but the signature is still real. It
became very special to me, because
William Shatner had complimented my
scriptwriting effort. |
Photograph by K.
R. Overholt Critchfield copyright 2022
| At the end of our
interview, the sales manager gave us a
few of his pictures, then took my Brownie
Starmite camera to take a few more of
us standing with William Shatner in the
hallway. I could tell he was too far away
to be effective, but did not speak up to
say so, and it turned out I was right
about that. BUT it is good to see that
the top of my head reached the top of
Shatner's shoulder, which gives you an
idea about how short I was then (about 4'
11"). Nowadays, I am even shorter! |
Photograph by K.
R. Overholt Critchfield copyright 2022
| Before leaving the
department store, James and I checked out
the "Captain's Chair" set
design that had been created for
Shatner's personal appearance. Using
James' camera, I took a picture of him
sitting in the chair, then he took a
picture of me sitting in the chair. He
said he would send me a copy of my pose,
but that never happened. It has been a
long time since 1969, but if he gets in
touch, maybe any pictures he still has
can be added to mine. |
Wayne Community College, Goldsboro, NC
(1968-1969)
"Wayne Community College came to life in
1958, as the Goldsboro Industrial Education
Center. Several IECs were established in North
Carolina to provide vocational training for
industry workers, and Goldsboro's center was
among the first. Under the governance of the
Goldsboro City Board of Education, the IEC used
classrooms in Goldsboro High School ... A campus
was established on the U.S. 70 Bypass in 1960. By
the fall of 1962, the IEC had eight faculty and
47 students ....
"Goldsboro IEC changed its name to Wayne
Technical Institute in 1964. Enrollment increased
steadily and by the fall of 1966, there were 550
students on campus and 1,500 extension students.
In November 1967, a community vote approved the
necessary financial support for WTI to become
Wayne Community College. One year later,
curriculum enrollment was 700. Wayne Community
College was accredited by the Southern
Association of Colleges and Schools in 1970, and
has been regularly reaffirmed by the agency's
Commission on Colleges, most recently in 2016.
"The student population's rapid growth
overwhelmed the U.S. 70 Bypass facilities. In
January 1974, the Board of Trustees commissioned
a Master Plan for campus relocation to Wayne
Memorial Drive. The first building on the new
campus, constructed in 1978, housed auto-diesel
technology, welding, watchmaking, drafting and
electronics programs."
By 1996, seven new buildings were completed
and were in use by that winter, along with an
aviation building at the Goldsboro-Wayne
Municipal Airport.
- From Growing Futures: A
Brief History of the Institution
Wayne Community College website
Current WCC Campus on Wayne Memorial Drive
Karen's
Addendum
Written by K. R. Overholt Critchfield copyright
2022
The original introduction to the
William Shatner Interview failed to mention the
man who was the Dean of Students at Wayne
Community College, when I was there, Jefferson
Faucette, whose picture is included above. He
should have been mentioned, because he must have
approved Mr. Nicholson's proposal of driving two
students from Goldsboro to New Bern to meet and
interview William Shatner.
 |
These two
gentlemen were well-known to me and vice
versa. The summer before I began classes
at WCC, I worked as a secretarial
assistant, mainly a clerk typist, off the
main entrance to the premises, where the
offices of Faucette and Nicholson were
located. Also at the main entrance was
the switchboard operator's station, where
I took over during her lunch hour. Yeah,
I learned to use the latest rendition of
the old-fashioned switchboard. If my
memory serves correctly, an incoming call
was connected by pulling up a cord and
plugging it into the lighted hole in the
facing board. Then once the caller
identified who was wanted, the operator
punched a button to put that person on
hold, picked up that cord's mate and
inserted it into the proper phone line
hole, and punched another button, so the
call would go through to ring the proper
telephone in the proper office. At the
end of a call, a light on the set would
change and the operator would pull out
both cords to return them to the
waiting-in-place position.
It was a really interesting procedure,
and many years later, it was quite
valuable in understanding the workings of
a primitive computer. Data in; data out.
|
One day, I should
write about how I was operating one of the first
typewriting devices that connected with a
university computer via the office telephone.
That university was Carnegie Mellon in
Pittsburgh, and I was working as a clerk typist
in the Advanced Building Studies office. Before
that, back in Florida, occasionally I operated
one of those old TWIX machines -- but do not get
me started on my journey through computer land! I
am an old lady and have a lot of stories to tell,
but not now.
Back in 1969 Goldsboro, when
transcribing the audio tape of William Shatner's
interview, as editor of The Wayne Communique,
it seemed necessary to leave out a few details
for the sake of clarity. Also, somebody in some
office had complained that the previous issue had
used up too much mimeograph machine time printing
on too much paper, so that claiming machine time
had been difficult and the usual supply of paper
had been seriously diminished. So, I was trying
to save paper, too. All that aside, as a pioneer
journalist in an educational institution that had
never had a student newspaper, that big complaint
was not going to diminish the Shatner interview
publication. This project was the last thing I
could do to support the fledgling newspaper,
before getting back to my family in Florida.
Most of the details that were
left out of the original publication are related
above, along with the interview pictures, so now
they are part of the whole story. Only one bit
more should be revealed now. Truth be told, there
was an exchange with Shatner that was left out of
the article, because it was personal to me, and
it was my belief that WCC students would be more
interested in William Shatner than Karen
Overholt. My 19-year-old self had something more
than an autograph in mind, because of a Star
Trek project that had taken up all my spare
time since my senior year in high school. And I
needed an honest opinion or assessment of it.
Karen's Idea for
a Star Trek Script
At the end of the
interview, I pulled out a folder, the kind used
in school to turn in an essay. I had developed a
story and had typed the beginning of a script
meant for Star Trek, but now that the
show was cancelled, the project was pointless, a
mere exercise. A TV or movie script is laid out
on the page differently than a stage play. I had
made the effort to learn how to create a TV
script, especially the format containing camera
shots, the director's data and actors' dialogue,
all of which were relegated to specific locations
on a page. My typed script amounted to the
first few minutes of a Star Trek episode
-- the "teaser."
After a quick
explanation, I said to Shatner, "You don't
have to read it. Just look at the pages and see
if everything is in the right places. Does it
look like the scripts you get on the set?"
Shatner took the folder,
saw the title, Valera, and with some
consideration, flipped through the pages. Then he
stated firmly, "This looks better than the
stuff we get on set," and suggested I
move to Hollywood, if I wanted to be a
scriptwriter, because that was where the jobs
were. So, that was
that, and because it came from a professional, it
meant the world to me.
Questions and Comments
Several questions I put
to William Shatner seemed to be prescient, as in
the definition, "human anticipation of the
course of events." For instance, there was
my question, "Do you think it will be easy
for you to shake the character of Captain
Kirk?" Despite his answer at the time,
Shatner never did shake off the aura of being
Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise.
In that department store interview of 1969, the
actor was struggling to see his own future, but
personally, I was sure the Star Trek
role would cling to him like Superman's cape. And
this thought reminds me of some Jim Croce lyrics
from 1972.
You don't stomp on Superman's cape;
you don't spit into the wind;
you don't pull the mask off-a old Lone Ranger,
and you don't mess around with Jim!
Consider my comment to
Shatner about my being raised in the military, so
I was familiar with rules and regulations, and
related to orders, etc. I said, "I've often
wondered what would happen if the Enterprise
(laughing) didn't pass inspection." He
responded with laughter, saying, "That'd be funny!!
That's a good idea for a story!" Perhaps he
remembered that exchange and shared that
plotline, for it was often used in the Star
Trek films. In The Final Frontier,
which he co-wrote and directed, the newly
commissioned Enterprise-A was "not
up to specs," and provided memorable inside
jokes for fans. Even the original TV series
regularly built tension by having the starship
lose power or defensive capabilities in the midst
of a crisis situation, but The Final Frontier
teased mirth to a high point, when Scotty gave us
a pratfall.
Seriously, though, how
many Star Trek stories included crashed
ship systems?
Remember the first Star
Trek film that rolled out in 1979, Star
Trek: The Motion Picture, often referred to
as ST:TMP. The story began with a newly
designed starship that was still undergoing
technical troubleshooting. In other words, it
would not pass inspection in the condition it was
in, when Admiral Kirk insisted on taking her out
to meet head-on with one of the most dangerous
adversaries Earth had ever known, specifically, V-ger.
Occasionally, fans got
to see a brand-new Enterprise on their
TV or movie screens, but after ST:TMP,
subsequent films often featured a subplot that
the Enterprise was not equipped for the
mission at hand. The ship might not have had a
full refit after a battle, or not completely
reliable in her upgrades. The Wrath of Khan
began with an inspection and a training shakedown
cruise in the hands of amateurs (i.e., Starfleet
Academy's finest cadets), before they were
waylaid by the villain Khan. Taken by
surprise, Kirk had to accept blame for the damage
incurred by a supposed "friendly"
Starfleet vessel, and being caught with his
"pants down."
The Search For Spock
began with Kirk's theft of a battle-scarred Enterprise
that had to be jury-rigged in order to slip it
out of spacedock, for a rescue mission that sadly
included the senior officers forced into
initiating the dreaded self-destruct sequence
that completely destroyed the ship. What a sad
sight, that ball of fire streaking across the sky
of a doomed planet!
In the film, The
Voyage Home, Kirk and his bridge crew were
aboard a confiscated Klingon vessel and were
still trying to translate Klingonese, when they
took off from the planet Vulcan to return home
and face serious charges. The Klingon ship barely
survived a slingshot maneuver around Earth's sun
to get them into the past. Then its dilithium
crystals had to be reconstituted, and the cargo
bay had to be refitted to accommodate and deliver
to Earth's future two humpbacked whales -- before
sinking to the bottom of San Francisco Bay, a
hopeless wreck. After once again "saving the
day," Kirk's crew is still intact, and he is
happy to be finished with the admiralty and once
again serving as a Starfleet captain. At the end
of this film, he is given command of a new ship, Enterprise-A.
In The Final
Frontier, Chief Engineer Scott and a
skeleton crew were working overtime, trying to
get the Enterprise-A to work properly,
and before the technical and mechanical problems
had been resolved, Starfleet gave Kirk the
mission to recover three consuls taken hostage by
a renegade Vulcan. It is a story that has the Enterprise
being overrun by renegades, who commandeer the
ship and chart a course directly for a dangerous
barrier at the edge of the galaxy. Beyond the
barrier, the ship and everyone aboard are at
risk, when a battle ensues with a powerful
unknown entity.
The Undiscovered
Country had its Enterprise fiasco,
too, when it appeared that torpedoes were
launched that devastated the Klingon Chancellor
Gorkon's ship and enabled multiple murders. In
that story, there was no evidence that the Enterprise
did any such thing, but Kirk faced an imminent
war or a saving peace, so he ordered a stand down
and surrendered to the Klingons. The real
screw-up took the form of Lieutenant Valeris,
a highly regarded Vulcan that Spock had been
grooming to take his place on the Enterprise.
She turned out to be a saboteur undermining the
proposed peace between the Federation and the
Klingon Empire, and along the way, she personally
murdered two crewmen who had been working with
her. Once found out, not only did she have to
face the consequences of her crimes, she also had
to face Spock, who gave her no room to dissemble.
Regarding the name Valeris,
could Shatner have remembered the name of my Valera
script? Maybe, but my Valera was not a
villain.
And then there was Star
Trek: Generations in 1994, a film that right
up front gave us the commission of Enterprise-B,
a ship revealed to have been launched without a
full crew, or any defensive systems that could be
deployed to meet the emergency they met in space.
That ship survived, but the film also gave us the
total loss of a future incarnation, Enterprise-D,
when even the dramatic separation of the saucer
portion of the ship from its engineering section
did not save the day. The first time around,
everyone that survived a crash landing were
killed, when the Veridian star was obliterated.
The second time around, Enterprise-D
still suffered catastrophic damage and crashed on
the surface of Veridian III, but a heroic fight
to stop the launch of a sun-killing missile
protected the lives of all the survivors.
What a legacy the
writers of Star Trek have given us about
the trials and tribulations of living and working
in space. Despite all the negatives, people still
look forward to a future that includes space
travel. Men and women still put their lives on
the line to help that future come to pass.
How the Overholt Kids Assimilated
Science Fiction
Written by K. R. Overholt Critchfield copyright
2022
When we were young, my
three brothers and I experienced many science
fiction movies and TV programs that stretched the
imagination. Our little sister was ten years
younger than our oldest sibling, born when I was
nine, so she really did not get the same
education that the rest of us did. We were Air
Force dependents, and as such, at every
Air Force base our father (and later our
stepfather) was stationed, we had access to very
inexpensive tickets to see movies at base
theaters, and were gifted with free access to
base libraries, and both were often within
walking distance from base housing. I was the
avid reader of the family, and would go to the
library with a load of books I had finished, then
walk home with another load of books to keep me
company, whenever I got a break from picking up
after my brothers.
Those were the days when
lots of low-budget "sci-fi" movies and
big-budget adventures were hitting the theaters.
The stories being told were wonky, like Mothra
vs Godzilla, The Day of the Triffids,
Curse of the Fly, and the one about a
gigantic spider spinning webs in a cave. And
there were classic Jules Verne adventures, like Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Journey
to the Center of the Earth, and Around
the World in Eighty Days. By the time we
were attending schools in Goldsboro, North
Carolina, a lot of the movies we saw in Air Force
theaters were being shown on television. Yeah,
but by that time, we kids were near experts in
the history of existing science fiction
entertainment.
In my senior year at
Goldsboro High School, my brothers were telling
me about a new TV show they had been watching
(usually while I was in the kitchen washing
dinner dishes) and they were sure I would like
it. So, one evening while they were watching the
show, I came into the living room and saw NBC's Star
Trek episode, The Devil in the Dark.
That episode was aired for the first time on
March 8, 1967, so that was probably the evening I
first saw Captain Kirk and Crew. Forever
thereafter, I was a solid fan of Star Trek.
Over time, serious fans
were called Trekkers, not Trekkies. The word
Trekker implied a person is on a journey, and in
this case, on a journey into a future in outer
space. Definitely, I was a Trekker. And a writer.
Therefore, I began to make up my own stories for Star
Trek, just as I had done for every other TV
show that I liked. The stories in my head were
usually running while I was doing housework,
especially washing dishes, because my stories
made the time spent on tedious work seem shorter
-- I was always creating my own time distortions.
The ability to develop stories was handy a
lifetime later, when I began to write about our
Overholt ancestors, attempting to make their
lives and times come alive.
Wrapping
Up Subject Matters
Written by
K. R. Overholt Critchfield copyright 2022
As I recall, Wayne
Community College divided the academic year into
quarters. I believe it was in the middle of a
quarter that our Air Force sergeant Dad (our
stepfather at the time) returned to the U.S.
after a TDY (temporary duty) in Thailand, with
orders of a change of station from Seymour
Johnson AFB in Goldsboro to MacDill AFB in Tampa,
Florida. Once again, my family had to pack up and
move, but it was decided I should remain in
Goldsboro to complete the coursework for the
2-year Executive Secretary curriculum. With some
help, I found a room to rent at the home of a
local widow and her teenage daughter. When the
next big holiday came around (Christmas?) I took
a bus to Tampa to spend time with my family, and
then returned to Goldsboro.
Before the final quarter
that I was at WCC, I switched from Executive
Secretary coursework to the new College Parallel
curriculum, because the non-business courses
would give me more credits that would count
toward a four-year degree. North of Tampa, the
new University of South Florida was taking shape,
and it would be a good place to earn a degree in
Journalism. My intention to stay several days
beyond the end of the quarter was a problem for
the widow, who said it was important that I leave
before the new quarter began, so that another
student could rent the bedroom. So, I moved
out and a friend drove me to another friend's
house, where I stayed for a short while.
My last task was to
accomplish typing up the Shatner interview,
getting it mimeographed, and making sure it was
available for distribution at WCC. I believe all
that was done by me alone, because James and the
rest of the student body had scattered at the end
of the quarter. Once accomplished, I made plans
to 1) purchase a trunk that was big enough to
carry all my worldly goods, and 2) get to the bus
station and travel back to Tampa. Again, there
was help from friends.
Accomplishing all that
built up a modicum of self-assurance, but
unfortunately, it took a couple years to
negotiate my starting classes at the University
of South Florida (USF). Once that process began,
before starting my new university life, I was
able to help with the upcoming cost of attending
by working full time, through a full semester, in
the Office of Admissions. Once again, I was
typing, filing and processing paperwork for
students. I even designed a new USF application
for admission form that (surprise!) ended up
being used years later at the University of
Tampa. While working at UT as a secretary, I
totally recognized the distinctive format that
had been my invention. In more than twenty years
of office work, there was always room to create
new forms for vital documents, for I was an Air
Force kid influenced by signage that perpetually
ordered, "Do it right the first time!"
Establishing a major
came before choosing classes, and a USF advisor
convinced me to enter their shiny new curriculum,
Speech Communication and English Education,
rather than my heart's desire, Journalism. But
the man sat up straight, looked me in the eyes,
and said firmly, "This is a double
degree! You're sure to get a job with this!"
Ha!
Well, I earned the
double degree that gave me the credentials to
teach Speech, English, Drama, Journalism,
Broadcasting and Mass Communications on a
secondary level. Unfortunately, upon graduation,
my Florida license to teach was useless, because
the state was under a legal restriction to hire
only minority candidates. It took several
perfectly solid job interviews that went nowhere,
before an interviewer explained it would be years
before the lay of the land changed in Florida.
That was one big reason to leave the state.
Another reason was my perceived "call"
to the priesthood. At that time, the Episcopal
bishop of southwest Florida was totally against
the ordination of women. He did, however, approve
my application to have my short, sad marriage
nullified by the Church.
Let us skip over the
rest of that life in Tampa, where a legal divorce
added to the religious nullification, and jump to
the part where I drove away from all my hard
times. It was the autumn of 1976. It was me
getting back to Pittsburgh, the city of my birth,
and the few Italian relatives on my mother's side
that I knew about. There was a little bit of
familial care in the beginning, but I was a
stranger in a strange land, and both public
schools and private schools were well into a
severe downsizing mode.
I have lived in
Pittsburgh most of the time since then, always
missing the city when I was away, always longing
to get back as soon as possible, where at least
for more than a decade, short-term secretarial
jobs could be found at several different colleges
and universities. And there were a number of
Episcopal churches that accepted me in their
choirs along the way. I had been singing in adult
church choirs since about 10th grade, loved to
sing and loved to sing in church. But as for
secretarial work, it was always more comfortable
to be in educational surroundings, than in pure
business atmospheres. Given the conservative
nature of the diocese at that time, it was easy
to imagine it would take years to convince
somebody in the Commission on Ministry to support
my calling. And if it was impossible to find a
teaching job beyond Sunday School, the least I
could do to support the spiritual lives of
parishioners was to participate in the liturgy of
the Church as a chorister. And the least I could
do to support the education of young people was
to work as a secretary where interacting with
students was part of the landscape.
Let us continue by
jumping over another huge portion of my life in
Pittsburgh, where after eleven years of being
single, earning a master degree in Religion for
Christian Education at Pittsburgh Theological
Seminary, and trying twice to get approval to
become a candidate for the priesthood, I got
married and flew away to live a couple years in
California, where my actor husband performed at The
Great American Melodrama and Vaudeville Theater.
Then we drove back to our hometown to deliver our
one son, Matthew. This nearly 73-year-old woman
really does have a lot of stories to tell,
but not now!
The DigitalNC
Archive and the Vulcan Salute
In recent years, I
learned about DigitalNC, a website
that is a digital archive of lots of North
Carolina printed and published history. The
information came to me from emails sent by
members of the Goldsboro High School Class of
1967, many of whom had found items that pictured
their parents or grandparents in school yearbooks
and newspapers. I never found time to investigate
the site, until deciding to look for the Shatner
interview, for I had lost track of my copy.
Aside from finding more
published issues of The Wayne Communique
than I could ever hope to find, I was happy to
learn the site contained my high school
yearbooks. And surprise! I discovered WCC had
published yearbooks, too! So, collecting pictures
from my GHS years and my WCC years was made easy.
For some reason, while attending WCC, it never
occurred to me that yearbooks were being
published. Possibly, they were overlooked,
because I could not afford to buy them. Anyway,
my junior and senior high school pictures
appeared in two yearbooks -- the 1968 Teknik
and the 1969 Insight -- so I collected all
the data that would be good to have in my
computer files.
While about 98 percent
of my Karen's Branches webpages are
genealogical and historic in nature, a few are
otherwise, so my decision to publish the
memorable William Shatner interview could be done
on my existing platform. A few events
prompted this decision. First, there was
the Blue Origin launch that
allowed the 90-year-old Shatner to experience the
weightlessness of suborbital space. I was
watching the Blue Origin launch as it
happened, and listened to Shatner's comments upon
landing, and later watched the Prime
Video special, Shatner in Space,
three times, and could not help being
impressed. A few days ago, I watched it
again, and it was equally impressive on the
fourth go-round. The man's determination to work
at his craft and still feel obliged to experience
the unexpected is remarkable, despite advancing
age and probably the same kind of health issues I
have dealt with in my time on planet Earth.
When I create a webpage,
the whole process is something like building a
house. For me, it is important to find or create
the best background for the subject matter, then
figure out the physical parameters of the page,
and develop a few ideas for content. The next job
is to collect data and let the data create the
story. As I began my Internet searching for and
gathering Star Trek jpgs and biographies,
the next big incentive to continue the project
happened. The Beatles Get Back three-part
special was broadcast on Disney Plus. It
was a case of, "Get back, get back, get back
to where you once belonged," that pushed me
to keep working on a webpage that has become my
ode to science fiction, the adventures of Star
Trek, and the driving personality of Captain
James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise,
a character created by Gene Roddenberry, made
believable by the grace of good scriptwriting,
and energetically performed by William Shatner.
My last personal words
on the subject of Star Trek are these. I
always loved the idea of the Enterprise as
much as I loved the idea of the characters who in
imagination inhabited the imagined starship. And
with every new generation of the ship, seeing her
damaged or destroyed made me cry. For those who
do not know, the Enterprise was always the
main character of every story unveiled on her
decks of the imagination. With all these memories
to support us, may we all live long and prosper!
Three Seasons of
a Science Fiction Show That Changed the World
or The Little Starship That Could
Written by K. R. Overholt Critchfield copyright
2022
Over
succeeding decades, the original Star Trek series
gained several new lifetimes after the show was
cancelled. This was due to numerous local and
regional television stations utilizing the series
in continuous reruns. This filler programming
always generated a following, and the stories and
characters stood the test of time.
In the year
1977, when the film Star Wars exploded
in movie theaters worldwide, new interest in Star
Trek generated a healthy Paramount
franchise that produced the first four new Kirk
& Crew films -- The Motion Picture
(1979), The Wrath of Khan (1982), The
Search for Spock (1984), and The Voyage
Home (1986).
In 1987, Star
Trek: The Next Generation was launched as a
regular network TV series that produced seven
seasons of new adventures. It was the first of
four new expressions of the Star Trek
Federation and Starfleet universe. Deep Space
Nine was launched in 1993 (seven seasons), Voyager
in 1995 (seven seasons), and then Enterprise,
a flashback before Kirk's timeline, launched in
2001 (four seasons).
While The
Next Generation was in production, Kirk
& Crew starred in The Final Frontier
(1989) and The Undiscovered Country
(1991). In 1994, a seventh Star Trek
film, Generations, featured the
characters Kirk, Scott and Chekov,
as well as the cast of the The Next
Generation TV series. It provided a story
arc that connected the timeline of Captain
James T. Kirk with the timeline of Captain
Jean-Luc Picard, captain of a future Enterprise.
It was the first of four Picard & Crew film
adventures, which included First Contact
(1996), Insurrection (1998), and Nemesis
(2002).
In recent
times, three new animated series -- Short
Treks (2019), Lower Decks (2020),
and Prodigy (2021) -- joined the first
animated Star Trek series (1973), that
featured the voices of the original Star Trek
crew. Also, two popular live-action spinoffs -- Star
Trek: Discovery (2017) and Star Trek:
Picard (2020) -- have been launched on
streaming services. Star Trek: Strange New
Worlds (2022) premieres on May 5, 2022,
which is a new series featuring the adventures of
Captain Christopher Pike, the immediate
predecessor to Captain Kirk on the Enterprise.
In the United States, the full roster of Star
Trek films and TV series productions are
found on the streaming service, Paramount
Plus (Paramount +).
(1966-1969)
Paramount |
As for Star
Trek: The Original Series, true to
form, the compendium is still found on
television. All three seasons are
available to current generations of new
Trekkies (fans) and Trekkers (serious
science fictioners) on Paramount Plus
(Paramount +). The fact that
kids and adults are still enjoying the
original series, despite the fact that Paramount
is producing brand new versions of the Star
Trek universe(s), proves the worth
of that short-lived TV series. This is a
case of The Little Starship That
Could -- that could survive, could
live on in films and spin-off TV shows
and today's streaming services. About
writing good science fiction, my
suggestions follow.
First,
take an idea grounded in real science and
extrapolate further. Second, do not make
the villain or villainy too big to handle
(i.e., beyond belief). Third, make
humanity (in all its forms) the driving
force in the arc of a story that has a
beginning, a middle and an ending.
Fourth, leave all forms of magic and
magical thinking far behind, unless used
as a device to point out the differences
between magic and science.
|
Star Trek Films
with William Shatner
Star
Trek I: The Motion Picture (1979) Paramount
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) Paramount
Star Trek III: The Search For Spock
(1984) Paramount
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) Paramount
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) Paramount
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
(1991) Paramount
also
Star Trek VII: Generations (1994) Paramount
with Star Trek: The Next Generation Crew
Star Trek I: The Motion Picture (1979) Paramount
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) Paramount
Star Trek III:
The Search For Spock (1984) Paramount
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) Paramount
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989) Paramount
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
(1991) Paramount
|
