MUGATU!: or, Battle of the Star Trek Monsters

We all know the Gorn,

and since I was born

He always scared me silly.

He attacked Cap'n Kirk

Cuz he wuz such a jerk. . .

Such scenes always gave me the willies.

But then came a blur

Made of spikes and fun fur

Mugatu was  mean and unkind

He was six different monsters

Kind of all stuck together

Desilu couldn't make up its mind

But old Furr-a-saurus 

Had to join the angel chorus

When Bones went and whipped out his phas-ier

It went zap and kazoom

And the monster went boom

Didja ever see anything craz-ier?

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Captain Kirk gets jiggy with the Gorn!

THE HOBBIT: where it all began

The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, as sung by our favorite vocalist of the '60s. . .the only man besides Sonny Bono (and maybe Illya Kuryakin) who can really rock those bangs.

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This is a unique form of choreography known as the Bilbo Bop.

                       

"He fought with the dragons! He fought with the trolls!" This involved someone throwing some kind of jumpsuit up in the air.

Yes! They're here. Last night my son showed me how to convert     
YouTube videos into gifs. After much fiddling around on a site called Y2gif, I came up with these, excerpts from one of my favorite videos. 

This is only the beginning. . . 

Star Trek "Forget"

Were we talking about William Shatner? Then we were talking about Leonard Nimoy (who, I must admit, is by far the more subtle of the two, playing a role where he can only emote by raising one eyebrow). This is a scene in which Kirk has found out that the love of his life is not only an android, but dead. (No one explains how an android can die if she isn't alive in the first place.) Now he must forget, and he can't forget. Spock is a fascinating character because of all his quirks, qualities and special abilities, like the mind-meld and the Spock pinch (most of which he invented himself). In this scene he seems to be able to induce a compassionate amnesia, giving the lie to McCoy's accusation that he knows nothing about love.

It is my all-time, absolute, nothing-beats-it, coolest, bestest Star Trek moment ever.

SHAT HAPPENS: What's William Shatner's secret?

I think one of my first Shat memories was on a TV program, not Star Trek at all (for I had just started watching it and had decided I liked Spock best,) but The Ed Sullivan Show, something we watched with religious regularity. It was just unthinkable NOT to watch Ed Sullivan (which meant we had nothing better to do on a Sunday night). 

Along with the plate-spinning acts, contortionists and Topo Gigio, there was the odd - very odd - monologuist, some ehk-torrr who got up there and recited something tony like Dylan Thomas or Shakespeare. This was the Culture part of the program, and there seemed to be some kind of quota. I vaguely remember Richard Burton, probably held up with some sort of stand, and David Hemmings (briefly famous after the movie version of Camelot) doing And Death Shall Have No Dominion with an orchestra playing  in the background.

Speaking of Dominion, that used to be the name of a chain of grocery stores in Canada, but it was never quite as popular as Loblaws. Which is why you see William Shatner doing a Loblaws commercial in this video in about 1978, a lean period when he supposedly lived out of his truck. But before all that, before the magnificent rise and fall, there was Shatner the young Shakespearian actor, and there he was on Ed Sullivan doing Hamlet's soliloquy.

Canned culture, for sure, but I remember my father looking at him and muttering, "This guy is supposed to be the next big thing in acting. Hmph." That "hmph" sealed it for me. If my father hated him, Shatner was officially "in".

I don't remember much about that reading, but I did find a YouTube video in which he does the same passage, "to be or not to be", on the Mike Douglas show. And - he's good. Actually, a little understated; maybe he needed to bring up the intensity a bit. But he did a creditable job and said all those antiquated words as if they actually meant something. 

It's funny, but I do not remember anyone complaining about his overacting during the 3-year run of the first Star Trek series. Nobody said boo because nobody thought he overacted. I've been watching those old Treks for the eleventeenth time (and somehow they must have enhanced them for HD, because they look a hell of a lot better now, except for Sulu's acne which is worse), and so far I'm not laughing or groaning. That's because I think he's good. 

All this Shatnerian overacting business seemed to be retroactive (so to speak). The parody came later, and Shatner sort of fell into it, went along with all of it because it meant more public exposure, more work. He has been criticized for ubiquity and self-caricature, but that's like criticizing someone for having fun with their job.  

Myself, I've begun to think that Shatner on Trek was just being true to Captain Kirk, who was always a bit of a drama queen. Like Anthony Perkins and a lot of other dreamy leading men of the period, the young Shatner had a slight peach-fuzzyness about him, appealing to be sure, but just a touch androgynous. And dynamite to young women.

Shatner always works, always has, and at 82 or something, some insane age like that, he's still at it, and will do anything it seems, even make a safety video about the dangers of deep-frying a turkey. He's just around and seems not to need to sleep. He has sort of enlarged since his fox days (and he WAS a fox, make no mistake, especially during his Twilight Zone years when he was downright painfully fox-ish). He doesn't seem exactly fat, just "blown up" or expanded in some way. He does not have the saggyness and seams and crinkles that all other old people have, nor does he look freakish like Mickey Rourke, so it's doubtful he has done too much to his face. So what gives here? His skin has gone kind of like orange peel, thicker, but not slack. He'd be harder to peel, so to speak.

Sometimes I think he's like that character on one of the old Star Treks, the guy who was a gazillion years old and had been all these different famous people on earth. (The only one I really remember is Brahms.) He must be doing something different, or. . . I don't know. He acts the buffoon so frequently that no one would ever suspect that he ISN'T "one of us", but comes from some other place or has been subjected to some sort of "treatment", experimental to be sure, but which in his case seems to have worked. Like Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, he doesn't seem to know how to die. How will he look at 100. . . 110. . . 150? Has he sold his soul to the devil or made a bargain with the turkey farmers or what? 

It's a secret. A William Shatner secret, and I doubt that he is ever going to tell it. But when he outlives all his children and then his grandchildren, the world is going to be asking some pretty tough questions.

You don't look like that at 82, you don't sound like that at 82, and you don't go around doing turkey videos unless you have something going for you that is very, very strange indeed.

This is my usual p. s., meaning I forgot a whole bunch of stuff. I am a big fan of Shatner's quirky series Weird or What, in which he explores a whole bunch of bizarre phenomena every week with his usual wacko wit. The self-parody here reaches the level of the sublime: when he points to a shelf full of books he has written, one of them is about synchronized swimming. And it is just so cool when he rides in on a horse. I don't know if I believe any of the stuff he examines on the show, but some of it is intriguing (like the signals from Russian cosmonauts that I blogged about a long time ago). 

Then there is that other thing, the thing that kind of shocks me now: there was a Star Trek episode called The Deadly Years in which everyone caught a horrible disease and began to age at a frightfully accelerated rate. The thing is, the makeup on this show was really bad, so no one really looked like an old person. Scotty looked like he'd stuck his face in a banana cream pie. Kirk, well. . . Kirk looked dumb, but absolutely nothing like his "old" self. Not even close.

When you think about it, it's all so - 

Whatever became of the wildwood flower?

In one of his most compelling songs, Gates of Eden, Bob Dylan wrote: "At dawn my lover comes to me/and/tells me of her dreams/with no attempt to shovel the glimpse/into the ditch of what each one means."

Not at dawn, but at morning coffee hour, I get up and find my mate sitting in his Lazy Boy reading the paper, listening to the radio and drinking coffee. I add one more activity to his multiple roster: listening to my dreams.

Not every morning, but just when I have had an unusually vivid one, one that stays with me for a while. This one is already dissolving like frost into the winter air.

 

I was about 20 years old. I wasn't "I", but this slender, pale wildwood flower of a girl, as if I were barefoot except I couldn't tell if I was barefoot or not. I was wearing a dress like Pippa Middleton's at Kate and Wills's wedding, very close-fitting white satin. My hair was streaming down my back, long and brown and straight and completely unstyled. (I have never looked even remotely like that in my life.) Anyway, I was in a church and was about to be married. I didn't recognize the church at all, or any of the people, though my mother was supposed to be there and I even had dealings with her but didn't know it, didn't recognize her. I had the feeling she might have been one of the people who tried to fuss with my hair.

At one point I even asked someone if the sides shouldn't be pulled up at the back in a ribbon or a rose, and someone else said, "You mean up? Please don't put it up, it looks so pretty that way," but I worried it would look a little too informal or even make me look uneducated and "backwoods". I only recognized one guest, my former English professor from 1991 who kept bustling around very urgently in a suit and tie, as if he was supposed to be doing something. The minister (a youngish guy with a lot of tousled brown hair, whom I had never seen before) kept getting up and blabbing to the congregation about things that I don't remember now.

At one point a woman ripped open buttons on the neckline of my dress (which went all the way up to my chin), leaving the front sprung wide open, and I thought of the man's collar in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, the tenor, when he couldn't stop singing. Then she said, "Ahhh, that looks better," though I worried it didn't look good at all and would look unkempt and out of control, but I couldn't check it because there were no mirrors in the place at all. All the way through this dream I kept hearing the music on this video, which I recently heard on an old Star Trek, a favorite episode called Shore Leave in which the crew of the Enterprise was on a planet where all your thoughts immediately materialized and became real.

There were all sorts of things, a knight, Don Juan, a tiger, Finnegan (asshole from Kirk's Academy days), but suddenly there appears Kirk's old girlfriend Ruth, dressed like an Athenian goddess and so heavily made up (like all Star Trek babes, probably for the grainy b & w TVs of the time) she could barely keep her eyes open. She looked like his date for the Academy grad party or something. Yes, this music came on and from the beginning I loved it, not for its sweetness but for the almost agonizing dissonance in the strings that underlay the innocent flute melody. Anyway, as I was preparing to get married, three girls I vaguely remembered from high school (actually, I only remembered one of them, Janet, who always beat the hell out of me in grades and getting awards) pulled up chairs at the front of the congregation and sat in a sort of triangle (not facing everyone) and began to discuss contract work and contractual obligations and how it was important to know exactly what you were signing.

At this point I stretched out between two chairs in my Pippa Middleton white satin wedding gown and took a nap, thinking I would look more refreshed for the ceremony. The three girls (only about 15) were giving a sort of seminar and no one thought it was unusual. Then I began to worry about the vows, which I had had nothing to do with. I was afraid the minister, who seemed somewhat fundamentalist, would say "love, honor and obey", and I didn't want the "obey" in there, I wanted "love, honor and cherish", but didn't know how to change this because I seemed to have absolutely no control over anything that was happening that day. In fact I seemed to be the least important person in the place, almost as if I were invisible or a walking ghost.

It was not until after I woke up and analyzed this dream that I realized the strangest detail of all: there was NO GROOM - no one, nothing! He was just a cipher, a non-entity. I did not even think about this, did not wonder about it, nor did anyone else. It did not matter at all who I married, in fact it was clear I was not marrying anyone. Hmmm, what else? In a side room, before the ceremony started, a few people I sort of knew from my old church were watching a video on a large flat-screen TV, a movie featuring dangerous mountain climbing. I watched it for a few minutes, then realized it was getting close to the time of the ceremony, so I said, "Will you pause it for me, please?", so I could watch the rest of the movie after I got married.

That flute music appears throughout the classic Trek series, whenever a particularly fetching young woman appears. It's almost a "fetching young woman" signal. The most poignant isn't the one about Ruth but the episode with Jill Ireland, long dead from breast cancer, who falls agonizingly in love with Spock on that planet with the spores that make you fatuously happy. At the end of it she doesn't just shed a tear, she really weeps, with red face and running nose, and Spock speaks to her as tenderly as a Vulcan can.


Watching these Treks again, they're better than the heartless parodies, though of course most of it is standard '60s action/adventure, and Sulu is particularly amusing in his ongoing romantic advances to Uhura (implying it's more acceptable for a gay Japanese man to romance a black woman). Kirk isn't as bad as you remember. Really, he's not. He only overemotes about 10% of the time. This is not the place for Shakespearean soliloquys (though one of these times I'm going to post his Hamlet from one of the daytime  shows of the '60s), so he pretty much sticks to the action/adventure hero mode. But as the series wears on he gains levels of humanity, transcending such hokey lines as "No blah, blah, blah!" 

The dynamic between Bones and Spock is brilliant, unique to television. DeForest Kelley has some real moments, especially in The City on the Edge of Forever, in which he runs around crazed but is still compelling and completely believable. I can see how and why this quirky little series somehow spawned a dynasty. But what does that haunting flute music have to do with getting married to an invisible groom? And if that pale wildwood flower really is me, whatever happened to her?

The shocking revelation that made me spit out my tea

Were we-all talking about the Wizard of Oz? Am I obsessed with this topic right now? A few posts ago I shared something from my childhood: a YouTube video of a low-budget, extremely weird cartoon from a series called Tales of the Wizard of Oz. I noticed a few people had posted comments along the lines of "I remember watching these in Ontario in 1961!" and "why do all the characters have Canadian accents?"


They do, but you have to listen carefully for a "hoose" or "aboot" (or "hewwwse," which is REALLY southern Ontarion, in fact right out of Scotland). I can even hear them trying to replicate the Bostonian/Bronxian accents of the actors from the 1939 movie: "If I only had a haaaaaahhhht"; "Puddem uhhhhhp."  But the "hewwwse" still pops through.

I had some idea that these were produced by a Canadian impresario named Budge Crawley, but the more digging I did, the stranger it got. Familiar names like Bernard Cowan kept cropping up (he was a jack-of-all trades announcer: "This is Bernard Cowan speaking", a hangover from radio when nobody knew who the fuck was talking).


But this! This was pay dirt, gold in my hand. Whenever I find an old scanned newspaper clipping, I have to try to blow it up (figuratively speaking). I was able to section up this yellowed old thing from the Montreal Gazette, circa 1961, so that it's almost legible.

I don't know about you, but the smudgy black and white photos that ran along with this piece remind me of that surreal silent movie Metropolis with all the identical workers trudging along in lockstep. Positively Orwellian. At best the Crawley animation factory must have been a sweatshop with slave wages, and not even Disney looking down his cheap-ass nose at you and getting his cigarette-ash all over your Day-Glo-colored cell of the witch's groovy castle.

The piece itself ain't much: it's mostly a nuts-and-bolts account of a "new" style of animation (read: cheaper than Disney's). But right in the middle of the dull grey prose came a surprise that nearly blew me out of my chair. Oh OK, it didn't do that, but I nevertheless did  a spit-take with my Red Rose tea.

Not too exciting, is it? But look at the names of the voice actors! Along with such then-notables as Alfie Scopp, Paul Kligman and Pegi Loder, we see none other than. . .

Scotty before he was Scotty! No wonder those characters said "hewwwse". I have no idea which voice impressions were James Doohan's: not the witch, surely. Not Rusty the Tin Man, nor the Wizard, who sounded like W. C. Fields. He must have voiced the gabbledy-gabbledy sound of the munchkins, or done guest spots as the dragon or Rubber Man.

The secrets of Oz never end.

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Across the Universe (NOT the John Lennon song)

The "It's Life, Jim, But Not As We Know It" polka.

And now, for something. . .

It's only Thursday, but surely the weekend is at hand (?). Until then, something to cheer your soul. I love these: I'm watching the old Trek series again (this comes around every 5 years or so), perhaps prompted by the extremely hokey Weird or What? series on History Channel, starring the ubiquitous William Shatner in yet another of his interminable parodies of himself. Bring it on.