Topic: Family and Friends, TV, Movies, & Music
When I was a kid, watching Star Trek was a bonding experience for my mother and I (they were re-runs for her, but new to me). The best episodes were thought-provoking, which she liked, not to mention the then-young and handsome William Shatner. I don’t recall exactly what I liked about the show back then, but I do remember especially enjoying it because my mom watched it with me. I also remember my first experience being among an excited crowd, waiting in a big long movie line with her when I was 9, to see the first Trek film on opening night. But I’ve tried to forget the movie itself, being bored to the point of tears as I watched it drag on, waiting in vain for something – anything – interesting to happen (2+ hours is a long time to be bored and stuck in a chair at that age).
Kai and I are going to see the new Trek movie for its opening night tonight, and I don’t think he needs to worry about being bored. If anything, he’ll need to worry about sensory overload, as it looks like it’s action packed. It also has an impressive 96% score on the tomatometer.
Writing this post reminded me of a review I read years ago when the 1st season of the original Star Trek came out on DVD. The review is unusual – it’s as much about the reviewer’s relationship with his father as it is about the show. It’s touching, and reading it was what made me remember my childhood experiences watching the show with my mother (although she’s nothing like the curmudgeon this guy’s father was). The reviewer also perfectly captures what made the original series so iconic: it definitely wasn’t the cheesy sets and effects; it was the actors and the friendship of the 3 main characters. I’m going to reprint most of his review here, just in case it disappears from the web someday.
My father hated television so much, he used to keep the TV in the closet. He put it on a rolling cart, so if you got the urge to watch, let’s say, Mama’s Family or Sheriff Lobo, you had to drag it out of its tiny, dark, sport-jacked filled home, position it in front of the couch and then plug it in. Actually, that was always the easy part. The hard part was unplugging the set and rolling it back into the closet when you were done…
Luckily, this didn’t affect my life too greatly, since my parents had just gotten divorced and my father had only weekend visitation (the rest of the time I lived with my mother, who put the TV in its rightful place, living room front and center, where I would stare at MTV for hours waiting for Journey’s Separate Ways video). Anyway, paternal duty mixed with the guilt of turning his son into a latchkey kid, compelled my father to do whatever I wanted come Saturday and Sunday. Most of my weekend desires were innocuous, but there was one thing he was loath to do: drive back to his apartment by 5pm so I could watch Star Trek. This, of course, involved not just watching Star Trek, but me dragging the television out of the closet, positioning it in front of the couch and plugging it in so I could watch Star Trek. Then, right after the Desilu logo faded, I had to unplug the set and roll it back into the closet. My father would begrudgingly watch with me, but after about a year, something unexpected happened (that is to say, it was unexpected if you knew my father): he got hooked. He wanted to watch Star Trek as much as I did. In fact, as I remember, every once in a while he would even take it upon himself to drag the TV out of the closet, position it in front of the couch and plug it in. Who says sons don’t influence their fathers?
I’m not sure what part of the show intrigued him. Although he liked science fiction, I figured his hatred for television would have cancelled that out. My guess is, some of the better episodes reeled him in… First season shows like Balance of Terror, The Conscience of the King, The City on the Edge of Forever and The Corbomite Maneuver rose to the level of serious sci-fi and were about as smart as the genre got, at least on television.
Plus, and this is probably what made my father such a fan, the performances were immediately iconic. William Shatner’s body language and line deliveries seemed less like acting and more like performing some exotic new dance. But he imbued Kirk with not only a swagger, but a sense of humor that undercut and made entertaining the somber idea that he was responsible for over 400 people in what could very well turn out to be an intergalactic space casket.
As for Spock… Leonard Nimoy is just so damn Spock, it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role, which is the very definition of great casting and great acting… Nimoy was just tall enough, just thin enough and just odd-enough looking that had he not played Spock, he would have been relegated to portraying stoic Russian submarine commanders and mysterious strangers. His amazing trick was that, over the course of the series, he was able to parcel out little packets of humanity to what is essentially an inhuman character so by the end, he was more interesting and three-dimensional than most people on television…
Dr. McCoy had two functions… First, he was the sarcastic and rather pissy ying to Spock’s logical yang. But the good doctor also served as the audience surrogate. Of all the characters on the show, McCoy acted much like we would if we had to serve on a starship (I always enjoyed the notion that the transporter creeped him out and he didn’t completely trust it). The show never gave DeForest Kelley a particularly large reservoir of character history to draw upon, but he made McCoy’s three basic personality traits pretty damn terrific: ornery sarcasm (“I’m a doctor, not a fill-in-the-blank!”), disbelief (used whenever Spock said anything overly Spockish) and a neutral, genial absence of ornery sarcasm or disbelief. When combined, Kirk, Spock and McCoy comprised the most entertaining, non-pornographic threesome ever to take up precious space in the pop culture universe…
There came a point when my father and I so enjoyed Star Trek that when the films opened, he would skip work and I would skip school and together we’d go see Kirk and company’s newest big-screen adventure. Star Trek lasted long enough to spawn ten movies and, I believe, 640 television series, so unfortunately the show outlasted my dad. But Star Trek will always hold an everlasting place in my heart and in the heart of my father, who hopefully is exploring strange new worlds on his own celestial version of the Enterprise.
Tonight Kai and I will see how the new cast measures up, and someday down the road, seeing the movie with me on opening night might be a fond memory for him too.
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