The one and only William Shatner — Captain James T. Kirk, T.J. Hooker, Denny Crane, even leisure-suit enthusiast Matt Stone to you — is coming to MegaCon this week to meet his fans and hold court as only he can on Thursday and Friday at the Orange Country Convention Center. We were granted a few minutes to interview Shatner but our questions went right out the window as he held forth engagingly on a half-century of singing Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” owning property in Orlando, his schedule at MegaCon, the power of science fiction and his advocacy for the environment.
So kind of jumping right in to my first question …
You know I’m coming to Orlando? March 19 and 20, the Thursday and Friday of this week? You’re aware of that?
We’re excited about it!
Well, I am really looking forward to it. It so happens that on the outskirts of Orlando, I own a really nice piece of property, along with a friend of mine.
Oh?
Yeah, so I am sort of connected more, more fully than you realize.
That’s amazing.
It is a lovely area. I am very happy to be there. So we invite the people to come to the event, and I have a busy weekend, so I’m coming in on Thursday and Friday. I won’t be there Saturday or Sunday, but I’m looking forward to meeting with all the people in Orlando who will come and visit with me.
So, if you want to bring something to be signed, or you want to buy something there that I could sign, or take a picture with me, or I can even get on stage and talk to you on Friday, I think. I enjoy getting up there and talking to you and answering your questions and perhaps making you laugh, so I’ll be doing that, I believe, on Friday.
Are there any specific experiences that have kind of stuck out to you from the past MegaCons that you have attended?
Well, last night, I was at an award show. I got an award last night, the award was the science fiction award from the, what do you call them? The awards were the Saturn Awards last night, and I told them the story of the first Saturn Awards 50 years ago that I was invited to. They gave me the award, and then they said, “Hey, will you sing ‘Rocket Man’?” I said, “What are you, are you kidding?” They said, “Well, we have the mic, and it’s not being recorded,” and so I said OK. I had the lyrics in front of me and a band, and I started singing, “Rocket man, rocket man, rocket man,” the way what’s-his-name did it.
So I thought, OK, I have done them a favor. And the next day it was on television. They had recorded it, and for the next 50 years, it has followed me around! “Oh, listen. Here you are singing ‘Rocket Man’.” So last month, I was on board a cruise ship, and they said the only thing I had to do over the next three days, “before we let you go home,” is sing “Rocket Man.” So I thought, “I’m not going to sing ‘Rocket Man’ the same way that what’s-his-name did. … So, I looked at the song very carefully to see if I could find what actors call a throughline. What is the character signing? What is he signing about? And so I look through all of these weird lyrics, and all of a sudden, the word sticks out to me: “alone.” So I say to the band members, “OK, let’s make this song about being alone in space.” And I work on it with the band and the musicians, and again on a Saturday night, I perform the number, and 4,000 people stand up and applaud “Rocket Man.” And they won’t let me off the stage, again and again. Four times, I get a standing ovation, wild.
And that’s the progression for me, of science fiction for me, as exemplified by this song. The song went from superficial to something of depth and meaning. And although it was the same lyrics and the same melody as it was 50 years ago, it touched people enough for them to stand up and applaud, and I realized that is the story of science fiction. That, 50 years ago, I was asked to come up and do “Rocket Man,” and 50 years later, it is a meaningful thing, and science fiction with all its great technology has evolved into great storytelling that reaches people in a manner that is very difficult for other types of drama to do. And that is what happened yesterday.
Star Trek has touched many people decades after airing. What do you think the main message of Star Trek is, and why do you think it resonates with watchers so long after it first started airing?
Star Trek at its best tells human stories; they just happen to be set 400 years in advance. The humanity of it is the same, and those are the stories that really work, and that I really enjoy performing.
We’re talking a lot about sci-fi and space, but you actually went into space. How do you think you saw the world and humanity differently once you landed back on Earth after seeing the world from a whole new perspective?
Well, I have been an ecologist for many years. Rachel Carson wrote a book called Silent Spring 60 years ago, and I read it. I became convinced that what she was saying was true, that we were on a path of destruction, and I’ve urged against it all of my adult life. And what happened to me in that spaceship up there is, I saw it. So clearly. I saw the vulnerability of the planet so clearly, and I came down, and I got off the ship, and I was moved. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was crying, and I didn’t know why I was bawling, and I had to go somewhere and sit down to realize that I was in a state of grief for our planet.
The Orlando area is so beautiful, and yet the lemon trees are dead. The Okefenokee is flooding. There are all kinds of weird animals there that don’t belong. They are destroying the [inaudible] of Florida. I mean, it’s a mess, and we have so little time to clean it up, and we can clean it up. Right now, the big move is plastics. The microplastics, bits of plastic that are everywhere, in the air, in the Earth, and in the water, and they’re floating through our blood, and they are going to kill us, and we are not doing anything about it. We can do something about it. There are solutions around, but it requires will, and that’s what I was sad about.
MegaCon: Thursday-Sunday, March 19-22; Orange County Convention Center; 9800 International Drive; fanexpohq.com/megaconorlando; $28-$600.
