If anyone wants the full article, let me know offlist.
Jon
http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/feature/2003/02/26/trek/index.html
Capt. Kirk's bulging trousers
A touring exhibition of genuine "Star Trek" gimcracks reminds us of the virile greatness of the original Shatner/Nimoy series -- and the p.c. limpness of all the spinoffs.
- - - - - - - - - - - - By Mark Simpson
Feb. 26, 2003 �|� The first thing that greets me is Capt. Kirk's package. Jim's intergalactic manhood is clearly, alarmingly outlined against the fabric of his tight 1960s-cut black trousers, dressing very much to the left. I assure you I wasn't looking for it -- it just loomed up like a de-cloaked Romulan Bird of Prey. It shouldn't be surprising that James Tiberius Kirk, the famously gung-ho Starfleet commander, went commando, boldly swinging where no man had swung before. Maybe that, as much as his twinkly mascara'd eyes and his captaincy of the fastest, flashiest vehicle in the galaxy, the USS Enterprise, was the secret of caddish Jim's phenomenal success with lady humanoids and aliens alike.
Indubitably, as his first officer might have said, raising one angled eyebrow: This was the crucial difference between the sweaty, highly Freudian original "Star Trek" series and the sexless, sweatless, p.c. "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Can you imagine Jean-Luc Picard not wearing spotless knickers with a built-in containment field, changed twice a day and incinerated after use?
Alas, I'm not actually in the humbling presence of the godlike genius of William Shatner himself. Rather, I'm gazing up at a monitor playing a clip from "The Trouble With Tribbles" in a medley of "classic 'Star Trek' moments," at an exhibition dedicated to a genre and a universe that have, so to speak, sprung from his loins. "Star Trek: The Adventure," held in a "climate-controlled" "hi-tech" 7,000-square-foot tent in London's Hyde Park, showcases the "Trek" universe, from the original series more than 35 years ago to the newest feature film, "Star Trek: Nemesis." Sets, costumes, props and models from "Star Trek," "The Next Generation," "Deep Space Nine," "Voyager" and the current "Trek" series, the low-tech "Enterprise" prequel, are all here. Billed as the biggest "Star Trek" exhibition ever, the London show has been a great success. This is only the first stop on a world tour, taking in Europe, Australia and the U.S., on a "five-year mission to boldly go where 'Star Trek' has never been before" -- although where that would be is something of a mystery.
In addition to six successful "Trek" TV series, each of them being rerun somewhere in the world right now, there have been 10 "Trek" movies, grossing well over $1 billion. Amazon lists 1,238 "Trek" books, 1,832 "Trek" auctions, 515 videos, 73 music items, 61 PC and video games. I simply refuse to enter "Star Trek" into a Web search engine, as I fear it will cause some kind of terrible e-feedback loop and global net overheating of the kind that happened whenever Kirk asked some upstart out-of-control alien computer to compute "love."
The whole phenomenon is, to use another Spockism, fascinating. The "Trek" series is not only the most frighteningly successful and profitable TV series of our "timeline" but also one that has helped to make television what it is -- and us what we are. "Star Trek" really did turn out to be the future -- not of faster-than-light space travel, but of couch-potato entertainment. We have been, to use yet another Trekkian phrase, assimilated. Resistance was futile.
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Naturally, true Trekkies prefer the more recent series, precisely because they have much bigger budgets, more special effects -- and no William Shatner. Apparently Star Trek creator (and much of the original cast) despised Shatner and the way he played Kirk. He was too aggressive, too violent, too sexist, too vain. The anal-retentive goody-goody Jean-Luc Picard, played fastidiously by Patrick Stewart, was much closer to what Roddenberry had in mind.
It was Shatner's Kirk, with all his magnificent flaws and vanities, however, who made "Star Trek" more than just another canceled '60s sci-fi series. He saved the show from its own appalling virtuousness -- or, to put it more pretentiously, he was the Dionysian bass line to Roddenberry's Apollonian synth music. (By the same token, Cmdr. Data's quest to become human on "Next Generation" is comic, since his colleagues seem to aspire to be androids.) Shatner was rock 'n' roll -- his post-Trek album-cum-aural breakdown, "The Transformed Man," notwithstanding. It was his perversity, his Napoleonic ego, that made "Star Trek" an epic for our times. Not for nothing was his pre-"Trek" project a canceled series called "Alexander the Great," starring Shatner as the lovable Macedonian psychopath himself. Shatner has earned his place in the pantheon of postwar virile degeneracy: What Brando did for the cinema and Elvis did for music, Shatner did for the small screen.
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