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United States News Title: Happy 80th Birthday, William Shatner! Today another geek legend celebrates a birthday. He’s best known for his series of science fiction novels TekWar… wait, what? Oh, best known for portraying Captain James T. Kirk, William Shatner has cemented himself into geek science fiction lore forever. Today he begins his ninth decade on this planet — yes, Captain Kirk is now 80 years old. William Shatner has starred in numerous television & movie productions besides Star Trek, including winning Emmy awards and a Golden Globe for his work on Boston Legal and The Practice. Really though, us geeks just care about the Star Trek stuff. Because if Shatner never put on that gold shirt and curled a fist at an angry alien in space, we probably wouldn’t care that the Priceline guy has a birthday. James T. Kirk was the greatest iteration of a fictional space captain the world had ever seen, and is still a character that is hard to beat today. Shatner brought a flair to the job, a brash and emotional style, that has yet to be duplicated and probably never will be. Kirk was thoughtful and sympathetic but also decisive and combative. He was a lover to green alien chicks. He was always thinking, even if he appeared to be always fighting. To us, this was William Shatner. There was no difference between the two. We imagined this is how he was. Later we’d see that while similar, Shatner is a man full of life and humor, never afraid to show it to the world. While we are all endeared to Shatner as Kirk, over time, Shatner has become a character himself rather than a brash action star. Perhaps this is due to aging, though if you think back, the Shatner we see today is pretty much the Shatner we saw in Star Trek: Generations. Laid back, full of light humor but still ready to play the hero if called upon. Like when he delivers the best prices on hotels via Priceline. Heroic with a punchline. The perfect pitchman for saving the day, even if it’s something as mundane as booking a vacation. Another thing about Shatner that endears us all is his voice. Specifically, his delivery and speech patterns. The less than subtle pauses, the dramatic shift in general speak — the man probably makes taking out the trash exciting. I encourage you to check out his spoken word albums, the first from 1968 called The Transformed Man and Has Been in 2004. He was also a guest on Ben Folds’s album Fear of Pop. All of this spoken word is backed by mainly trippy orchestral music which makes for an interesting listening experience. It’s a great way to explore the life of a man that wasn’t just a starship captain as we all might assume. The point is, where Shatner was once only James T. Kirk to us, he’s become a pure pop culture icon in every sense of the definition. He’s been a stage actor, a multi-faceted television actor, a movie star and even a novelist with the TekWar series of books. This is aside from the spoken word stuff mentioned above. Shatner is a true Renaissance man and this whole aging thing, and I’m sure he would agree, is just another minor inconvenience to doing what he loves — which is entertaining the masses and seemingly, just being himself. So happy 80th birthday to William Shatner, from all of us here at GeekDad!
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