William Shatner is 80 years old today!
This GeekDad post at Wired totally nails the fusion between Shatner and Captain Kirk in our collective imagination and how he has reinvented his own persona into a character just as memorable and almost as bad-ass as James Tiberius Kirk himself. The Washington Post’s Monica Bell explores the origin of “Talk Like William Shatner Day” (which is also today) and offers up a few choice Shat-talking clips including this one with near-perfect imitations by Jason Alexander and Kevin Pollak (who really is the undisputed BEST Shatner imitator):
In fact, last year for “Talk Like William Shatner Day”, Kevin Pollak went head-to-head with voice actor Maurice LaMarche (who also does the PERFECT Orson Welles voice) reading lines from “Shit My Dad Says”:
And did you know that William Shatner speaks Esperanto? It’s true! In fact, he starred in one of the very few feature films ever made in Esperanto, a bizarre film from the early 1960s called “Incubus”. Shatner actually spoke the synthetic language, it wasn’t just phonetic recitation of the lines. Here’s a clip from that film, which was thought to be lost but was restored about ten years ago from a print discovered in France:
