The Little Engine That Could

You can't help but dig out The Transformed Man after listening to all those old Nimoy records, and on Star Trek Eve, I think it's appropriate to dwell for a moment on poor, misunderstood William Shatner.

Gene Roddenberry may have created the Star Trek universe, but I think it's safe to say that the whole kit and caboodle would've never gotten off the ground without Shatner. If it weren't for his masterful creation of the James T. Kirk character, there's precious little chance that the collection of potboiler scripts and papier-mâché sets that made up the original series would've inspired generations of storytelling.

The Transformed Man is as roundly parodied as Shatner's Kirk. While nowhere near as brilliant as his TV work, the album is well worth a listen, and I confess to finding parts of it downright addictive. The chorus of 'Mr. Tambourine Man' is hypnotic, and Shatner's over-the-top reading of Dylan's lyric is captivating, regardless of your view of its quality. It's easy to turn off bad music, but it's next to impossible to turn off Shatner once he gets going. He's just too magnetic.

The rough concept of the album is that of an acid trip. The 'man' gets transformed by drugs, and most of the album is Shatner reading a classic verse next to a contemporary lyric. The entire track is 'Theme From Cyrano/Mr. Tambourine Man'. The first part is Cyrano's monologue about creating art without a patron, "I prefer to sing, to laugh, to dream, to travel light in my own way to see things as they are, and speak out without fear, to cock my hat at any angle that I choose." The second is Dylan's plea for an escape, "cast your dancing spell my way, I promise to go under it." The connection is loose enough to work, much in the same way that Shatner's juxtaposition of 'To be or not to be' with 'When I was 17, it was a very good year' does. The point of the album isn't to deliver hall of fame versions of Shakespeare or to commit brilliant textual insights to vinyl. Instead, it's a kind of performance art that's well thought-out and well-intentioned.

But as with his performance as Kirk, the parody of Shatner's readings are more well-known than the actual thing. The halting speech of Jim Carrey's Kirk is rarely glimpsed in those early episodes. Kirk is mostly seen as a principled and extremely competent captain of a ship, concerned with the safety of his crew first and his mission second. He's often got a wry grin on his face, and most of all, he's gorgeous to look at, a golden god leading his rainbow-colored crew on mundane scientific missions that have a tendency to go seriously awry. That Shatner was able to make all of that work as Grade A entertainment is a minor miracle of the stage. Put a lesser actor in there, and you'd end up with a couple episodes of a show that NBC cancels in the fall of 1966. There'd be no movies, no Next Generation, no Klingon Language Institute.

In watching the original series, the comparison that comes to mind is actually Russell Crowe's Jack Aubrey. Aubrey lives in the very real world of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic wars, and Kirk lives in the high camp of 1960's sci-fi. But the same sense of power and authority that Crowe invests in Aubrey is present in Shatner's Kirk. They both have a wink in their eye which evaporates at the slightest sign of insubordination.

Now, I'm not saying that there's nothing to lampoon in Shatner's work. I'm just saying that the parodies have become better known than the actual work, which would be beyond most actors. Take that quintessential Shatner moment, when Khan maroons him on Regula. Shatner's howl starts in his toes, moves up his quivering body and then explodes from his mouth: "KHAAAAAAAAN!"

But it's all a put-on. He's screaming for Khan's benefit, knowing full well that he's not marooned at all. It's a performance within a performance. That scream is all most people remember though, which is sort of like remembering the cheese and forgetting about the burger.