Tag: ShatnerKhan

ShatnerKhan X

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews, Twilight Zone , ,

Today I spoke to my fellow initiates in Advanced Shatneriana and it was decided that ShatnerKhan X will take place on January 17th at the Compound in the heart of Dunwich.  Now you may ask is this really the tenth ShatnerKhan.  Well, I tried to look back at the records and discovered that in November of 2024 I mentioned ShatnerKhan VIII.  But before that the highest number I could find was III.  So, something seems wrong.  I went farther back and found that ShatnerKhan I occurred on November 1st 2019.

That was over a year after my initial decision to celebrate all things Shatner in my groundbreaking post. “William Shatner a Demigod of Bad Acting.”  It’s required reading at Starfleet Academy.

The actual agenda is not as structured as in ShatnerKhans past.  Will we watch the two Twilight Zone episodes?  Will we review the various Star Trek episodes where Kirk performs his signature shoulder roll?  Will we rate the various alien women he groped?  Will we analyze his interactions with Lieutenant Sulu for any telltale animosity?  Will we do a survey to decide in which episode Kirk looks fattest?  The only thing I’m certain is we will play “Rocket Man.”  After all it’s a short performance and it combines all of Shatner’s signature tics in one package.  It has the weird pauses, the meaningless syllable stress changes in dialog and his truly embarrassing facial expressions trying to convey inappropriate emotions.  It is a masterclass in bad acting with bad singing thrown into the bargain for free.

And it is important to have a ShatnerKhan.  As we all know Bill Shatner was born in 1931.  He will be ninety-five in 2026 if he makes it to March 22nd.  And honestly, he’s starting to look a little raggedy.  So now is definitely a good time to review his many achievements and mock him relentlessly.

In addition, it’s also an excuse to eat extremely fattening foods and sit around and shoot the breeze with my old friends.  We’re not getting any younger either and it’s time to catch up on what’s gone on over the last year or two.  There are milestones and family stuff and plans to make for the upcoming year and now is the best time before we all get swamped with work and other commitments.

So it is with a light heart that I announce this incredible event.  Will we wear the Shatner masks from the “Halloween” movies (probably not, they’re really uncomfortable and would stop us from continuously eating)?  Will we watch any of the Star Trek movies like parts of the Wrath of Khan with the famous “Khaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!!!! Moment (probably not, too much work to tee up)?  Will we eat and drink way too much food and dessert?  There I can answer categorically and emphatically Yes!!!  Of course, there is the danger of bad weather upending our plans and causing a cancellation.  This is after all Dunwich, a cursed land with endless evil bleeding into everything including the weather.  But we are intrepid individuals and fear no evil.  So SHATNERKHAN X !!!!!!!

Shatnerkhan VIII Will Have to be Convened

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews ,

Shades of Mediocrity!  Mother of Mercy!  Can this be the end of Shatner?  Or at least Kirk?

William Shatner – A Demigod of Bad Acting

Well, here we go again.  You know maybe Trump can appoint Shatner to some kind of ambassadorship to Canada or Hollywood or some other make believe place.  Or maybe Elon can shoot his rotund corroded hulk to Mars as a send-off.

ShatnerKhan III – The Anti-Climax

photog Current Events, OCF, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews , ,

In these years of decay and barbarism even ShatnerKhan is only a pallid shadow of its former glory.  All the zest has been drained away.  How can we mock Bill Shatner when the present regime makes us look back with nostalgia at a time when tawdry power mad behavior and laughably bad acting was restricted to Khan and Kirk.  Now it’s everywhere.  Joe Biden, Mitt Romney, Merrick Garland and most egregiously Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  Here we have a man whose original role as a bad comic actor has catapulted him into his present role as bagman for Joe Biden and the rest of the kleptocrats in Washington.  How can a mere ham actor and his Corinthian leather-hawking adversary compete?

Well, we’ll do our best today to celebrate the last few years of William Shatner’s already overextended time on this planet.  I’m not sure what facet of his career we will concentrate on today.  We’ve already hit all the high notes (such as they were) before.  Possibly today we will just reflect on the lessons we’ve all learned living in the wake of this tremendously opportunistic mediocrity who proved that post-World War II America truly was the land of opportunity, flowing with milk and honey for anyone with a room temperature IQ and a pulse.

Things may be a little quiet on the site today but I will check in from time to time.

But I’ll leave you with a taste of the Shatner that we all love to mock.  Here is what ShatnerKhan truly stands for.

He’s a Rocket Man – Shatner Rejected by Space and Hurled Back to Earth

photog Current Events, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews , ,

Jeff Bezos and William Shatner travelled a few time higher than a jet plane goes and then parachuted down to Earth and pretended that made them astronauts.

Watching the video I was pretty depressed that the once vaunted space program has been reduced to this, billionaires and moribund tv actors popping champagne bottles after accomplishing a tiny fraction of what was done more than fifty years ago by real pioneers.

But for Shatner I’ll allow that he has made Captain Kirk just slightly less fake.

Khaaaaaaan!!!!!!!

 

 

Jeff Bezos Plans to Kill Shatner in Space

photog Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews , ,

Hat Tip to One of the ShatnerKhan founders for passing this along to me.  Apparently Jeff Bezos wants to turn Bill Shatner into an actual Rocket Man.  But I have to assume he also intends to turn the fat, bald, 90 year old Shatner into a corpse.  Could his corpse be ejected in low Earth orbit and allowed to crash back into Earth?  Imagine the surprise of some family if Shatner crashes through their roof and is deposited in their living room, maybe as they are actually watching an episode of Star Trek!  This truly is an age of miracles and wonder.

William Shatner – A Demigod of Bad Acting

ShatnerKhan 1 – Part 1

A Horrible Injustice Has Occurred!

photog Current Events, OCF , ,

Yesterday was William Shatner’s 90th Birthday and I missed it!  Excusing myself by pleading COVID vaccination side effects would be a pathetic lie.  I have no good reason.  Forgive me Bill, I knew not what I did.  Well, I will atone for this sin.  I promise very soon to provide a ShatnerKhan update and provide some very shatnerian widom.

Meanwhile follow the link.

05OCT2020 – OCF Update – photog Bound

photog Current Events, OCF, Reviews, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews ,

Regular readers of OCF will have been dismayed at the low output for the last couple of days.  Shameful as it is to admit, the day job is interfering with my work here on the site.  As tragic as it is it will be short lived.  After Wednesday I will have a very long break that will allow me to bloviate to my heart’s content.

In the meantime, I’ll produce as much content in the next couple of days as is humanly possible while simultaneously being beaten like a red-headed stepchild or whipped like an army mule.  Working where I do is akin to being an orc.  But not one of the really cool orcs like the Uruk Hai, more like the morgul rat types that grumble and complain and are constantly whipped by the non-commissioned officer orcs that always overhear them grumbling.

The President has once again befuddled his critics and seems to have dodged the COVID bullet and now claims he’s feeling better than he has in twenty years.  What the hell!  Where’s my dose of dexamethasone?  I could really use a dose of “twenty-years-younger” right about now.  Oh well, he is the leader of the free world, if there is a free world anymore.

As an aside ShatnerKhan III will occur this Saturday and as a major change of pace, there will not be any pastrami or corned beef.  There was a decision to go with homemade sausage.  There will apparently be both regular Italian sweet sausage and a specialty thin Italian sausage called cervellata that was much in demand in Brooklyn back when there were Italian neighborhoods in Brooklyn.  Of course it isn’t pronounced anything like it’s spelled thanks to the magic of southern dialectical Italian.  It sounds more like shivrelod.  But if you told that to one of the guys from the old country they’d claim you weren’t hearing it correctly.  Yeah right!

It has been speculated that ShatnerKhan has degenerated into an excuse for eating fattening foods.  I would argue that is actually an upgrade.  Be that as it may, we will be breaking new ground exploring a little known gem from Shatner’s middle period called The Devil’s Rain (1975).  Just listen to this summary and look at the cast.

A satanist cult leader is burnt alive by the local church. He vows to come back to hunt down and enslave every descendant of his congregation, by the power of the book of blood contracts, in which they sold their souls to the devil.

Starring Ernest Borgnine, Eddie Albert, Ida Lupino

You might think this could be a good horror movie.  You might be wrong.  To round out the program we’ll be watching a favorite Star Trek episode to be decided by popular acclaim, listening to some of Shatner’s latest spoken word songs and watching a particularly disturbing interview that includes Shatner and Mike Tyson threatening each other with death.

In addition to sausage and peppers sandwiches there will be  pumpkin, coconut custard and apple pies a la mode, various sweets and coffee.  Camera girl offered a fruit salad as a healthy choice but we’re going with mounds bars and M&Ms.  Considering the age and weight profile of the audience there may be casualties.

There was a discussion about live streaming our comments on The Devil’s Rain but in order to maintain anonymity I purchased multiple copies of the mask that Michael Myers wore in Halloween.  This mask is supposedly based on a mold of William Shatner’s face.

After wearing one for thirty seconds I don’t think this will work out.  I also have my doubts about our technical ability to perform a live stream.  But some enthusiasm still exists.

Strange and stranger things are happening wherever you look but I contend we need to have some fun in the midst of this so bear with me.  I’ll be back to share some serious thoughts soon but right now chaos reigns here at the compound.

29SEP2020 – OCF Update

photog Current Events, OCF , , ,

Well, where are we?

Tonight, is the first Presidential Debate.  The level of insanity that will be on display should be breathtaking.  I remember Biden in his debates against Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan.  He never lets truth or even common-sense stand in the way of saying something Biden.  His creepiness should be on full display.  But the big mystery is whether he is coherent or not.  Apparently, there are some drugs that can be used to lift a dementia patient up out of the fog.  If Joe seems sharp, not intelligent but sharp, then we’ll have to assume they’ve got him doped up.  Either that or he dogged it during the whole earlier part of his campaign.  Either way watching the debate should be interesting.

A month or so before Election Day and indications are that voter fraud through mail in ballots is going to be a wholesale business.  It’s going to be interesting to see if the adjudication of this election ends at the Supreme Court or goes way beyond that.  From the things I’m hearing this may turn into a freak show where voting levels go to unheard of levels and the whole process goes off the rails.  That sounds like something that could cause a very serious reaction from both sides.  The Left is already occupying the street in many blue locales.  If unrest occurs in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin then armed conflict cannot be ruled out.

Florida has ended the COVID precautions and raised the all clear signal for its citizens.  This should be an interesting moment.  If two or three weeks down the road the daily death rate remains the same it will be an indicator that the other rational areas can do the same.  And it’s none too soon as far as I’m concerned.  The holidays are coming soon and I’d like to think this lockdown will end before Christmas.  New England will be the last to relent but at least if there are some early examples it will build impatience among the sane to pressure the authorities to wake up and smell the coffee.

I keep threatening to do some of my photo retrospectives but the day job has been keeping me busy.  But in about a week, things will definitely improve and I’ll keep some of my promises.  Insects are the first subject.  But hopefully I’ll have a foliage group and some other things too.  And I haven’t forgotten my promise to do a report on what I learned about photographing hummingbirds.

I still have another Olivier Shakespeare play (Othello) to review and I will continue on through the Star Trek series no matter how painful it becomes.  The powers that be are threatening to inflict ShatnerKhan III on an unsuspecting world.  I have been trying to figure out a way to live blog or make a podcast out of it.  Because of this I have purchased multiple copies of the Shatner mask that the Michael Myers character wore during the Halloween movies to allow for anonymity during the video.  This is an indication that ShatnerKhan has now descended into the madness that we knew it eventually would.  But since the food is well worth it, we expect to continue the series well into double figures.

And as promised I’m recruiting some other writers for the site.  And I like the change.  Not only because it takes some of the pressure off me to write but also because other voices make the site more interesting and generally better.  And I’m still looking for more writers.  If you or someone you know has some content to share leave a comment here or send an e-mail to orionscoldfire “at” charter.net and let me know.  And don’t restrict yourself to politics.  Anything interesting will be considered.

ShatnerKhan II – Pastrami in the Time of Plague

photog Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F TV Show Reviews, Star Trek, TV Reviews , ,

Several weeks ago, and in a mysterious half-mythical locale like Middle Earth or Camelot, but with better Wi-Fi, I attended the second annual ShatnerKhan.  As was specified in my contract, there was New York pastrami and other deli selections to make bearable the task of viewing an intense selection of Shatneriana.  Up front I will state it was barely sufficient to cushion my system from the brutal shocks of what was to come.

After the rigors of ShatnerKhan I, I had assumed that the membership would have retreated from the danger zone of forbidden Shatner and played it safe with an agenda restricted to Star Trek and Twilight Zone standards.  That was not the case.  Like the fictional Gamesters of Triskelion these risk takers wouldn’t settle for trifles like quatloos or CBS science fiction episodes.  They were hunting for big game.  And they started it off by firing with both barrels.

In my youth I remember seeing a commercial that featured a young-looking William Shatner dressed up as Alexander the Great.  Even as a child I knew there was something wrong with that picture.  Luckily, I was spared finding out how wrong it was until ShatnerKhan II.

I don’t remember if this was a CBS or NBC made for tv movie.  Whatever it was I can tell you it was awful.  It was as if the producers were looking for the perfect formula to guarantee that this project would crash and burn like nothing before or since.  Think of it, they teamed up Bill Shatner and Adam “Batman” West and put them in dresses, really embarrassingly short dresses.  Then they had them riding around on horses and generally pretending to fight a war.  They threw in John Cassavetes and Joseph Cotten just to try to butch it up a little but after twenty minutes I begged for mercy.  It was just too horrendously bad.  I asked for some kind of change of pace just to help me shrug off the effects of that nightmare.  I was allowed to choose “The Doomsday Machine.”

Here my feet were back under me.  I had just reviewed the show recently and felt like I was back in the company of an old friend.  I could hum along to the danger theme of that episode.

Dahdunt, dahdunt, dehdunt, dehdunt

Dahdunt, dahdunt, dehdunt, dehdunt

Dahdunt, dahdunt, dehdunt, dehdunt

Dahdunt, dahdunt, dehdunt, dehdunt

Dehduntduntdunt, dehduntduntdunt

Duhdeduhdeduhduhdehhhhh!

 

There was the Bill Shatner I was comfortable making fun of.  There was Bill Shatner wearing pants.  Sure, he might take his shirt off once in a while or have it ripped off of him in a fight but he was consistently dressed like a man.  With everything back to normal I declared a break and we broke out the vanilla ice cream, Mounds Bars and salted cashews.  This provided just the right amount of sugar shock for us to actually discuss what we had watched without really caring what we were talking about.  It was a great success.

With the last of the cocoanut and chocolate washed down with crème soda I thought I was ready for whatever would be next.  After all, having survived Alexander the Great I didn’t think there was anything left in Shatner’s resume to worry about.  Boy, was I wrong.

Shatner is known for talk-sing covering songs by other singers.  But I had never heard him in a duet.  I wish I could still say that.  I was bombarded by something so pathetic that I can’t even describe it.  Words fail me.  You’ll have to judge for yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J648lr8cjuw

It was like some kind of Lovecraftian horror that leaves you gibbering and disoriented.  I just sat there and let the rest of the group steer the choice of videos without me.  I think we watched Amok Time but I’m really not sure.  It was all hazy.  I was like some kind of disaster survivor sleep walking through the wreckage of my mind.

When I finally started to come around, I was sitting at a table with a cup of coffee and a slab of ice cream cake.  The world started to come back into focus.  When the discussion returned to Shatner, I noticed that there was no mention of what we had witnessed.  I could tell that none of us wanted to acknowledge that we had allowed ShatnerKhan II to overstep the bounds of sanity and even break the bonds of normal space-time.  We had let it get away from us and we all knew we had been lucky that we hadn’t summoned up some horrible presence from “out there.”  Sitting here in the safety of my living room I can contemplate something like that but what if it had happened?  What if a fat Korean guy in a bowl haircut and ancient Bill Shatner sweating and talking into his wireless microphone had broken through the space time continuum and suddenly appeared before us singing, “A Total Eclipse of the Heart.”  Very probably the whole multiverse would have exploded forming a big bang across all the universes there are.  I can’t be responsible for that.  I can’t let that happen, not on my watch!

I’m going to need a kill switch for ShatnerKhan III.  That’s the only way it’s going to happen.  And I’m going to need a lot of corned beef and mustard too.