Shatner’s Trek Fiftieth Anniversary Idea
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Next year, Star Trek turns fifty, and William Shatner has an idea about how to commemorate it.
Shatner shared his thoughts with the audience at 2015 Fan Expo in Vancouver last weekend.
“I started thinking about a fiftieth anniversary celebration,” he said. “I went to the SyFy network, which hasn’t given me their final answer, but I broached the idea that the fiftieth anniversary show would be about the ideas that Star Trek dramatized.
Some of the topics could be based on shows that aired in the original series: “Race relations [as in Let That Be Your Last Battlefield]…do an eight minute capsule of race relations in this country,” said Shatner, “the effect that those shows had on the public, people who were affected by seeing those shows, in terms of their opinion about race.”
“Computer warfare, where the country never knew the slaughter and the blood and the guts of war, but war by computers…they never knew the horror of war (A Taste of Armageddon).
“Each one of those ideas for an hour and a half show…would be a good idea,” said Shatner.
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That’s actually not a bad idea.
Great idea. Would love to see it.
You’d think somebody would show the danged episodes. The original ones, not the remastered ones!
Great idea! But will Syyyyyyyyyfyyyyyyyyyyy make room in their busy faux-reality programming schedule for it?
No, we can’t show those anymore. See, the original versions are OLD, and old things are BAD, and we’re afraid the kids won’t want to watch old, bad things, so to fix the problem we had to throw out all of the striking, elegant fly-bys of the beautiful Matt Jeffries model that now hangs proudly in the Smithsonian and replace them with low-quality, poorly-composed CG renders of a flat, plastick-y Enterprise that looks like something out of a computer game from 2002. See, we had to make this show viable to the kiddos again which is why we’re now selling the TOS-R syndication package primarily to the MeTV network whose audience has an average age of 78. Trust us, we know what we’re doing with this property.
Dude I don’t know what you watched but I have watched and re-watched the entire series in both original and remastered versions and there is no low quality about the Enterprise in the remasters. Plus on top of that the remasters have added advantage that all of the other Constitution class ships seen no longer have the Enterprise’s name and number showing (a handicap of only having one model). When you watch The Tholian Web the Defiant says USS Defiant, when you watch The Ultimate Computer you no longer see 4 copies of Enterprise attacking, etc. I have no problem with the old versions, but that particualr aspect is immersion breaking and always has been.
You know, the only reason I liked this episode was because of Frank Gorshin. As a kid I felt like it hit you over the head in a silly way with the race issue. I appreciate it more these days but I feel there are many things they could visit from the old show better than this episode. Let’s see what Captain Ron Tracy is doing these days. Morgan Woodward’s still with us. He was, IMO, the best villain the show ever had.
Or let’s visit those space hippies again. They were after all, kind of environmental terrorist. That’s certainly topical today. Too bad Charles Napier isn’t alive anymore.
Praise!!!