We’re celebrating the 92nd birthday of Star Trek icon William Shatner with some trivia!
William Shatner is a pop icon, and at 92 years old, there isn’t anything he hasn’t done. He’s a writer, a spoken-word singer, a space traveler, and so much more. But he’s also an inspiration for many parodies and spoofs. Shatner’s turn as James Kirk on the original Star Trek series and the subsequent films has been memed and mocked to high heaven.
But it isn’t just his over-dramatic way he delivers lines that have caused people to endlessly overact when they impersonate him. It’s also his life as a member of the Star Trek community and the not-so-great things that came with that a few decades ago.
This brings us to the cult classic Galaxy Quest. The film loosely takes its premise from the Star Trek series of the 60s, featuring Tim Allen as a Shatner-like actor who starred in a popular science fiction series some 20 years before the events of the film.
The early portion of the film tries to capture some of the drama that revolved around the original Trek actors but in a more over-exaggerated light. One of the moments that the filmmakers tried to do justice was when Shatner himself found out how little his own castmates liked him.
Galaxy Quest captured the issues between the Star Trek castmates well
In the film, Allen’s character, Jason Nesmith is the stand-in for Shatner in many ways. In one scene, early in the film Jason heads to the restroom while at a convention and overhears two fans talking about how much his cast mates don’t like him and how oblivious he was to all that.
That scene with Allen apparently mirrored an actual event from Shatner’s life in 1986 (according to IMDB), where Shatner overheard a similar conversation while in the restroom at a public event.
In the film, Jason ends up making things right with his cast mates, helping save the day and unexpectedly getting their show re-launched.
In real life, most of Shatner’s co-stars had issues with him until the day they died. So sadly, the real world wasn’t as sweet and wonderful as the world Hollywood gave us.