In 1990, my college chum, Ed Marsh, called me up yet another time with an idea for a fun project. Our mutual friend from USC, Doug Blush, was producing a show for cable TV called “TV Babies” which would be an amalgam of short subjects and interesting films... Ed had the idea of doing a short bit using my party trick: my William Shatner impersonation. This segment, called “Kirk Korner” would feature blurbs from the scripts of Star Trek episodes rendered in a manner not unlike Coffee House Poetry.
The first segment was from the Episode “The Omega Glory” and featured Kirk’s recitation of the United States Constitution on a far away planet. The segment was filmed in James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment office in Burbank at the time. The over the top performance is enhanced with intentionally cheesy video effects.
Segment two was filmed about a year later... and it was decided to go on location. Since this was to be from the episode “Arena” where Kirk fights the lizard alien, the Gorn, that location was Vazquez Rocks, near Palmdale, California, where the original was filmed. We tried to find the same areas where the episode was filmed. A chance encounter with a real, tiny lizard provided the necessary glimpse at the villain.
The Third and final segment was made a couple of years later and was thought lost, though an archival copy was recently located in a box. This features “The Ultimate Computer” and of course was made on a Mac. The video you see on the screen was actually piped through a video capture card, but was not digitized, it was filmed off the screen live, then edited together. This guest stars the voice of the Macintosh speech synthesizer circa 1994 as the treacherous M5 Computer.