Ten strange, unexpected, and interesting Star Trek guest stars

Craig Huxley

Craig Huxley had two roles in the original series, the first as Captain Kirk’s nephew Peter, and then as Tommy, a child rescued from a scientific research colony, where all the adults had mysteriously died. But it’s what Huxley did after Trek that’s notable. He became a jazz musician and perfected and patented a musical instrument called a blaster beam, which is basically an electric guitar that’s the length of a U-Haul truck, that you play by striking the strings with, among other things, artillery shell casings. And because everything comes back to Star Trek, the blaster beam has been used to create sound effects in several Trek movies and TV series. The Blaster Beam was first featured in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, as the sound of the mysterious space probe V’ger. It was also used in The Wrath of Khan and was the sound of Jango Fett’s seismic charges in Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. The blaster beam’s most prominent use in Star Trek was that famous “SPRAAANG” at the beginning of the intro to Deep Space Nine.

In 1990, when Huxley played a concert at Central Park, over a dozen women reported feelings of… let’s say “intense stimulation” from the beam’s sound, up to and including… let’s say “completion”. Must’ve been that Kirk DNA.