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| 1940-2026 |
Here's an interview the recently deceased actor Patrick Stewart gave on BBC television in 1988. Although Star Trek: The Next Generation had been on the air in the US for about a year, and was well on its way to becoming one of most popular syndicated TV series of all time, it had yet to make its debut in the UK, where Stewart was primarily known as a Shakespearean actor. The Brits were familiar with the original Trek, the one with Shatner and Nimoy, and like American audiences just a year earlier, wondered how a new version could possibly measure up. Stewart cheerful reassurance follows:
In addition to cheerfulness, dig how fast the man talks. Very unlike his taciturn TNG character, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, whose every word out of his mouth seems painfully measured. Of course, there's a reason for that difference, what they call acting.
A decade ago on this blog, I posted a 15-part series on Star Trek. Inspired by the passing of Leonard Nimoy (yes, I know, what a gloomy source of inspiration) it mostly had to do with the original 1960s series but I did take some time out to write about its latter-day spinoff:
I haven't been able to find the exact quote on the Internet, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that when plans were announced for a new Star Trek TV series that would be subtitled The Next Generation, Leonard Nimoy publicly denounced the move, implying that it was a cynical attempt by Paramount Studios to further cash in on the beloved science fiction franchise. Well, of course it was! As was the Saturday morning animated series. And the paperback novels and comic books. And if Nimoy had really been honest with himself, the feature films, two of which he directed. For that matter, back in the 1960s when Gene Roddenberry brought the idea for a science fiction TV series to Lucille Ball, or more likely the person Ball hired to run Desilu on a day-to-day basis (before Paramount got into the act), that person probably thought to themselves that maybe it could be another Lost in Space, which at the time was doing reasonably well in the ratings. Maybe it could sell a few toys (which in fact it did.) That's just the nature of pop culture, mass media, mass entertainment, whatever you want to call it. It exists to make money. At least that's how the owners of the means of production--the television networks, movie studios, record companies, comic book publishers, etc--view it. The creative people that they hire--"hacks", I believe, is the proper term--are there to make sure it does make money. But every so often--and this is part of what fascinates me about pop culture--a hack decides to approach a product to be marketed not as a product to be marketed but as art meant to elevate. No one knows exactly why this happens. Did the hack have a nervous breakdown? Was the hack struck by lightning on the way to Damascus? Hard to say, but it happens. This is especially true of Star Trek, which seems to have a mesmerizing effect on any hack that gets too close to it. So it came to pass that a hack named Roddenberry and a hack named Gene L. Coon and a hack named Harve Bennett all took turns assuming the role of creative visionary, crossing their fingers that the suits wouldn't mind terribly much. After all, if the Medicis supported Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci...OK, so it's Hollywood and not medieval Florence, but I hear both places have similar climates. Anyway, the suits at Paramount picked a guy named Rick Berman to get the new Trek show off the ground. As was arguably the case with Roddenberry, Coon, and Bennett, there was really nothing particularly visionary about Berman's resume. He had started out making industrial films, segued into documentaries, became a producer for PBS, and then jumped from public to commercial television, from education to entertainment, from highbrow to lowbrow, and, naturally, from a lower tax bracket to a higher one. And he became a suit himself, Vice-President of Something-or-Other at Paramount Television (formerly Desilu Productions.) One conspiracy theory goes that he took a demotion of sorts to keep an eye on Executive Producer Roddenberry, who by 1987 saw himself as the Dali Lama of the entertainment industry. Whatever his motives, or those of the studio he worked for, Berman seems to have caught the same art-for-art's-sake bug as all the other hacks that booked a flight on the starship Enterprise. After a slow (sometimes literally slow) start, Star Trek: The Next Generation became one of the classiest, most well-written, most well-produced science fiction shows in the history of the medium, one that earned a following all its own. Well-acted, too, with a cast that included Michael Dorn as the proud Klingon Worf, Brent Spiner as the amiable android Data, and, best of all, the Shakespearean-trained Patrick Stewart as the no-nonsense Starfleet captain Jean-Luc Picard. Stories differ, with everyone wanting to take credit, but Berman is said to have pushed to have Stewart, a well-regarded but at the time largely unknown British actor, cast as the lead in the new version. So, Berman, you done good. That said, I have to admit that I've never quite accepted or related to TNG as a continuation of the original '60s show. A point I've tried to stress throughout these series of posts is that for me personally, it's the characters, and the actors that bring those characters to life, that make Star Trek Star Trek. I like The Next Generation, but it has different characters played by different actors, so I've just always seen it as fundamentally different.
Except...
...on the rare occasion that a cast member from the original series guest-starred on the new one.
I'm not going to show you that particular clip, as I want to avoid comparisons between characters from the old show and the new show, but I would like you to read this snippet of dialogue that has Nimoy's Spock making the comparison himself:
DATA: In what manner, sir?
SPOCK: Remarkably analytical and dispassionate, for a human. I understand why my father chose to mind-meld with him. There's almost a Vulcan quality to the man.
So what's Spock talking about? Jean-Luc Picard in action:
The Vulcan Romulan on the big screen was played by Mark Lenard, who also played the Romulan Vulcan Sarak, Spock's father, at various times in various episodes and movies.
OK, I've told you Stewart was originally an actor who specialized in Shakespeare. Well, then, it's only fair that I end this tribute with him quoting a little Shakespeare:
All the galaxy's a stage...
