“You! You there!” he shouted to a boy on the street. “What day is this?”
The boy gave a puzzled look. “It’s Shatmas, sir.”
“Good! I haven’t missed it. Here, lad. There’s a big, juicy turkey of a Shatner movie in the bargain bin at Walmart. Buy it and deliver it to my house.”
There are those who, with apologies to pretenders like Alexander Graham Bell and the not-as-great Gretzky, call Bill Shatner the greatest of all Canadians.
That’s true, but is such limited thinking. Why restrict his importance to a single frozen land with only about 40 million inhabitants? He is simply the greatest HUMAN, possibly excepting the anonymous inventor of the wheel, and of course Bobby Troup.
Today is his 95th birthday. I celebrate his birthday as both Shatmas and New Year’s Day. Different people reckon the start of the new year with different methods, and have varying ways to calculate how many there have been. At the end of September in our calendar, the Jewish community will welcome the year 5787. The Chinese just celebrated the beginning of 4723. In a site dedicated to crap, we have no choice but to count the birth of William Shatner as the beginning of time (or at least any time worth living in), so today is the beginning of the year 95 A.S.N. (Anno Shatner nostri).
Referencing the great day to the common calendar, the day known to most of the world as March 22, 1931 was the greatest day in history, for it marked the birth of the promised one … the golden child … the chosen one. Know him. Embrace him. For as surely as crapped is the past tense of crap, Shat is the past tense of shit.
Like most of his followers, I celebrate by getting into costume and re-enacting one of his many career highlights. I normally choose this all-time classic:
During the pandemic I could not re-create that fight, since the scene requires two actors, which was inappropriate in the era of Coronavirus and social distancing, so that year I chose to re-enact the fight scene from White Comanche, since Shatner plays both parts.
This year: The Scoopy Players, my community theater company, will present a stage version of Incubus, Shat’s offbeat 1966 movie performed entirely in Esperanto.
I did not make that film up. The entire movie is below.
Further study from the ancient archives of Other Crap: decades of Shatner curiosities.
From the proprietor of a site that worships crap, happy birthday and stay crappy, Bill. You have already lived long and prospered, so just keep up the … er … good work.
Kidding aside:
There are those who say that Bill Shatner sucks. But did you know that there was a time when Shatner received unanimous acclaim from high-brow critics for a major Shakespearean performance? No, not ironic praise, but sincere encomiums.
My parents started taking me to the Stratford Festival in 1962 or 1963, too late to see Shatner, but his picture was in their halls, and I have read about his one magical night. The big draw in the 1956 festival was Shakespeare’s Henry V, starring Christopher Plummer. Shatner had only a minor role, but was also Plummer’s understudy. Plummer suffered from kidney stones, and his pain became so intense one night that he couldn’t perform. It was June 18, 1956. Enter Shatner.
This is an understudy’s greatest dream, and greatest nightmare. Shatner was going on for Canada’s most acclaimed young actor, and had to play Henry the Fucking Fifth, one of the best roles Shakespeare ever wrote (you have probably heard of the Band of Brothers speech). His career could have ended right there. Instead, it was a triumph. He got the greatest applause from the rest of the cast, professional actors who understood how difficult it was to do what he did at all, let alone to critical and audience raves!
Shatner’s other work at Stratford was nothing more than workmanlike. Here he is as Lucentio in a modern-dress staging of The Taming of the Shrew
I assume he took his wardrobe home with him after that role, because he wore the same outfit about 20 years later in that notorious screen triumph Big Bad Mama
Same haircut as well!
I never got to see Bill as Henry V, but I absolutely love him as Marc Antony in a hip-hop production of Julius Caesar within Free Enterprise, a wonderful, underrated film.
Shatner also played Marc Antony in a serious production – a CBC broadcast, pre-Trek (December, 1960). I like the hip-hop version better.
