Merry Shatmas and a Crappy New Year!

Welcome to the year 91.

Happy birthday to the greatest Canadian in history.

On this most sacred of holidays, let us recall the joy of celebrating past Shatmasses with our family and our loved ones. (May they never meet.)

Stay crappy, Bill. You have already lived long and prospered, so just keep up the … er … good work.

12 thoughts on “Merry Shatmas and a Crappy New Year!

  1. Fun Fact – The actor in the Gorn costume is none other than Lurch from the Addams Family TV show – Ted Cassidy

      1. Also, as they conclusively proved on Mythbusters, only James T. Kirk could have made a gunpowder-and-diamonds cannon out of stuff just lying around.

  2. You’ve gotta see him in the vintage Hawaii 5-0 episode “You Don’t Have to Kill to Be Rich…” He used a Southern accent so wildly overboard that you have to wonder if he thought it was a comedic role. There was no need at all for that character to have that accent. At best, I’m sure the script simply said the guy was from Texas. No one else is acting comedically in the show. Considering that he won the Captain Kirk role over Jack Lord 6 years earlier, I wonder if he did it intentionally, to get under the skin of the notoriously uptight Lord by turning his serious crime show into a joke for that episode. It’s *that* laughably bad. Ultimately, Bill got the last laugh; he became legendary for all the various things he’s done & his amazing staying power, while Lord is remembered only by seniors for that one show.

    1. I thought younger people remembered Jack Lord for Ray Walston’s parody of him in “Fast Time’s at Ridgemont High”. Or was that only in the book?

      But of course you are right – Lord is one of an army for forgotten TV stars, while Shatner is still a current present. I think it was because he did not take himself seriously (at least after a while), which is exactly the opposite of how Lord seemed to be.

      I suppose dying didn’t help Lord either, of course. It can be good for a quick shot in the arm, but you have to do it right, like James Dean, for it to have lasting effect on your fame. IMO, anyway.

    2. “So wildly overboard” just sounds like baseline Shat to me. Still, the guy who sat there with the script and *counted*lines* to make sure he had more than Nimoy probably would overham to piss off McGarrett. On the third hand, how could you tell?

  3. According to IMDb, Shatner was originally offered the TV role of Dr. Kildare, but turned it down. Since that show ran until 1966, the first year of Star Trek, it would have been a very different world if he had taken it.

  4. His new show is very good: The UnXplained. He had a similar Canadian show before the called Weird of What? that was also very good.

    I will always say to all the scientific materialists: “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”

    For instance, how do you explain the Buddhists who can produce steam by meditating on freezing days?

  5. When they first came with the Next Generation, the question echoing through all of Trekery was: Kirk or Picard? I’m with my friend Chris on this one – Kirk by a country parsec. Screw all this empathy and getting everyone to play nice. Kirk will roll up, kick ass, get you those crystals and still have time to throw one into the green lady.
    Plus, the Shat did his own stunts. How many of today’s pretty boys can say that?

    1. Um…have you ever seen the Kirk vs. Khan fight? It’s almost like they went for the stunt doubles who LEAST resembled either of the featured actors. Don’t get me wrong, Shatner got some surprisingly good drop kicks in here and there, but he did have a stunt double.

      That all being said, turning 90 with the energy and activity of Shatner should be a general all-around life goal for just about anyone. He and Dick Van Dyke are the youngest nonagenarians I’ve ever seen.

    2. The greatest irony of all was that instead of Kirk dying on the bridge, he died with a bridge on him…

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