Holy Shat
For me, William Shatner's appearance on Saturday was the crowning moment of the experience. Attendees were able to stake out spots in advance, but lost those spots if they left the hall for so much as a bathroom break. This is how my friend got 5th-row seats during the cosplay contest, but her brother and I had to wait in a long, looping line because we went to a panel on genre-blending. The volunteers would let in several dozen people at a time, but at some moments it came down to whether the person in row 6 had walked out to get better cell reception. During the William Shatner/Adam West appearance on Friday night, Shatner was asked rather insistently if he was ever going to appear on
The Big Bang Theory. The idea met with a lot of enthusiasm from the fans and when he mentioned it on Saturday, it had such a great response that he promised to call a friend at the show to agree to be on an episode on Monday morning. The applause didn't stop for a couple of minutes. He has a storied history with the state of Utah. William described at one point being on the slopes of a Utah mountain when someone mentioned that they were playing
Star Trek at the ski lodge. Actually, they were playing the blooper reel, but it was not long after that that they started making the motion pictures. It was also here that he first got into a certain franchise: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKFvUalyo2M One of the best questions involved the issue of pranks. If you have not seen the Neutron Cream prank associated with
Star Trek: Into Darkness, go find it now. Someone asked if the original series cast ever played pranks on each other. According to Mr. Shatner, they only had half an hour for lunch and the Paramount commissary was a long ways away. Captain Kirk's actor had run track and played football, so he was out the door and halfway to the commissary as soon as the Assistant Director called "Luuuuu..." Leonard Nimoy usually arrived later and this often meant missing lunch because of the lines. So one day, Leonard bought a bike. He made it to lunch before William. William didn't want his friend Leonard's bike to be stolen, so he brought a bike lock and chained the thing to a fire hydrant. The following day, Leonard brought bolt cutters and made it to lunch on time. Worried again that the bike would be stolen, William took Leonard's bike to his dressing room for safekeeping. When he directed Leonard there, he failed to mention that he also kept his pet Dobermans in there. This finally came to an end one day when William made some arrangements with the crew. As the AD called out "Lunch," the lights on the set went out, except for two spotlights which were trained on the ceiling. Rigged to the support beams was Leonard's bike. One fan asked about the first interracial kiss and "what was it like afterwards." William gave him a weird look and said, "What was it like? Her lips were moist!" He then went on a quasi-romance-novel litany that had us all laughing hysterically and remarked that "At the time, we didn't see her as an African-American woman. We saw her as a beautiful person and it was a pleasure to embrace her and it seems to have worked out pretty well since then."