Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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AnOminous said:
His entire performance in TOS was scenery chewing.
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Trek lends itself to big sweeping speeches and grandstanding. Which explains why Bakula sucked so bad in the role; the show keeps hoping he can pull it off like Shatner and Stewart.

As for Shatner, he was burned out by season three. "Spock's Brain" is not much for an actor to get a grip on. And the resulting performance is beyond parody because there is nothing else he can do to amuse himself.
 
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AnOminous said:
His entire performance in TOS was scenery chewing. Top-notch scenery chewing but he definitely hammed it up well before Rocket Man. Similarly with Denny Crane, although Crane was himself an over the top personality and was supposed to be (I actually think Crane may have been his best performance).
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Seconding this. My favorite Shatner performance ever is actually in the Twilight Zone episode Nick of Time (not the one with the plane). Shatner gives a chilling performance as a superstitous man slowly losing his nerve. Its one of the best and most subtle performances he's ever done, but he still hams it up in a way only Shatner can do. The episode predates Star Trek by quite a few years, I think, but it shows Shatner has that style to his performance even at the very beginning.
 
L50LasPak said:
I honestly don't know how you people managed to make it a single episode into either Discovery or Picard if Lower Decks was that repulsive. I consider both live action nuTrek shows to be far worse.
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I didn't.
 
I read somewhere, probably apocryphal, that Shatner invented his hammy technique when he was cast as the lead in The World of Suzie Wong with France Nuyen.
Apparently the play was kind of a dull stinker and Shatner experimented with some of his famous mannerisms and actually succeeded in getting the audience energized and laughing.
 
Travoltron said:
I read somewhere, probably apocryphal, that Shatner invented his hammy technique when he was cast as the lead in The World of Suzie Wong with France Nuyen.
Apparently the play was kind of a dull stinker and Shatner experimented with some of his famous mannerisms and actually succeeded in getting the audience energized and laughing.
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I was actually going to say something about the ham technique being very stage actor-like, but hadn't known about this particular play. I could easily see this. Part of why the stage favors this style of acting is you have to project yourself. You don't really have machines doing the job for you. So exaggerated facial expressions, being loud, chewing scenery, all helps. Stewart also started out as a Shakespearean stage actor, and while he was somewhat similar in TNG, he was more restrained in his delivery of speeches.

It's somewhat ironic to think Shatner started out as a stage actor, while Leonard Nimoy started out as mainly playing thugs. James Doohan was on the Howdy Doody Show. You might have seen DeForrest Kelley in old Western shows and movies, like Bonanza and Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (for some reason he was in three different versions of this maybe just from being good at it).

He was far from the only Star Trek star who showed up on Westerns. Bonanza has a lot of them. Did you know Ricardo Montalban showed up on it? So did both Leonard Nimoy and DeForrest Kelley.
 
Season 4 of Voyager has been so good, I've really been enjoying the show way more than I was expecting. Just finished Message in a Bottle which was all around great and the payoff of something to do with the alpha quadrant was well done.
 
L50LasPak said:
Didn't like the whole cast also show up at various points on Gunsmoke too or was that mostly after TOS had wrapped?
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My reflexive reaction was, "Gunsmoke came and went before TOS aired, right?" but holy shit, Gunsmoke was on TV for a hell of a long time. But yeah, Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and Bones were all on Gunsmoke at various points, mostly in the early to middle sixties, just before TOS. In Kelley's case, though, all the way back in 1956.

Mark Lenard, Spock's dad, was also on an episode of Gunsmoke. Had a small role in Hang 'Em High, too, one of my fave Eastwood westerns.
 
All I know regarding Gunsmoke is some odd years ago I watched a clipshow of famous actors who were on the show before they made it big and it was like a solid 20 minutes long even though each actor had like, one line.
 
I will admit that I had a lot of relative good will for Star Trek (2009) at the time. Sure, in retrospect, there were plenty of red flags... And there was literally no point in time where it was even in my top 5 favorite Trek movies.... But at the time, it genuinely seemed like an improvement over the most recent Enterprise. And nobody could have predicted just how shit Trek would get after that, even just in the next movie. Not to even mention the current state of Trek -_-
 
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UnKillShredDur said:
I will admit that I had a lot of relative good will for Star Trek (2009) at the time. Sure, in retrospect, there were plenty of red flags... And there was literally no point in time where it was even in my top 5 favorite Trek movies.... But at the time, it genuinely seemed like an improvement over the most recent Enterprise. And nobody could have predicted just how shit Trek would get after that, even just in the next movie.
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I always just tried to see films like this in IMAX because the visuals are really the good thing about films like this if they otherwise suck. It was fun to watch in that format. Unfortunately the whole J.J. Abrams thing turned into complete shit.
 
White Devil said:
I thought the holodeck wasn't invented until TNG.
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iirc it was an idea for Phase II that maybe popped up in TAS?
but as for the stage thing, yeah iirc it was "shatner and stewart had a stage background and were used to playing to the back of the house, then brooks ran with it because lol he just figured that's how starfleet rolls"
 
XYZpdq said:
but as for the stage thing, yeah iirc it was "shatner and stewart had a stage background and were used to playing to the back of the house, then brooks ran with it because lol he just figured that's how starfleet rolls"
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And even Brooks, for all that he was mostly famous for TV, spent plenty of time in live theater.

Also, yeah, they just called it the "rec room," but the first appearance of the holodeck concept was an episode of the cartoon.
 
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