Space Shatner

I am kind of pleased about William Shatner going to space. If you haven't heard, the 90 year old is going on an 11 minute, suborbital flight with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin company. I saw a bit of an interview he did on Good Morning America for it where Al Roker called Shatner the "youngest 90 year old" he knows. And it's true--it's amazing how physically healthy and verbally acute he seems to be. Compared with how frail Leonard Nimoy and Deforest Kelly looked years before they died, it's remarkable.

Shatner's flight is scheduled for the 12th, just two days from now. It was only to-day I thought of his toupee and wondered if it would be an issue. Maybe that's why he was visiting a hair transplant clinic, according to the Mirror. That's right, people are still interested in William Shatner's toupee. Since I last blogged about it nine years ago, articles and blogs from others have appeared regularly. Cracked published an article just this year about a Star Trek producer who claims Shatner stole toupees made especially for him from the Star Trek set. Though, if you ask me, I don't see why Shatner should've had to have stolen them. Who else could have or would have used them? If the producers weren't just going to give them to Shatner, that's some pretty epic stinginess. Maybe they were planning to use them for Michael Myers?

I guess if the producer really wanted them back he could've just plucked them off Shatner's head.

Anyway, the news about Shatner's impending space flight made me want to watch Star Trek. Specifically, I wanted to watch him rolling around with a woman wearing a ridiculous criss-cross of minuscule cloth (you see, live action Cowboy Bebop, this is the fun you could've had). I did a search for "Skimpiest costumes on Star Trek" and came across this 2012 article by io9 co-founder Charlie Jane Anders. She would so be cancelled for it to-day, or at the very least given the stink-eye by all the shills currently sheltering at io9. It was via this article I was reminded of the third season episode "The Cloud Minders".

The basic concept is fairly similar to Laputa in Gulliver's Travels, being about a floating city of artists and intellectuals and a separate class of workers toiling on the planet below. "The Cloud Minders" follows a more obvious path of political allegory, though, making some of the city dwellers secretly corrupt tyrants (the others being ignorant) and the workers being kept mentally inferior by regular exposure to toxic gas. It ignores some of the complexities and morally grey areas that Jonathan Swift's version did a much better job with. Still, the episode has camp value and it's nice to remember a show that actually wanted to engage the audience with serious ideas instead of just mindlessly pushing a message.

Also when I searched for "Skimpiest costume on Star Trek", this article came up in which actress Sherry Johnson claims her improbable outfit in "What are Little Girls Made Of" was partially held together by Shatner's toupee ribbon. Could that possibly be true?