At first I thought the picture above (tweeted by EpixHD) was too awesome to be real, but then Slashfilm tipped me off to a documentary premiering on EPIX on July 21st 2011.  It’s called The Captains and follows William Shatner as he interviews other actors who have played the lesser Captain Kirks to his One True Kirk.  He talks with Patrick Stewart (The Next Generation), Avery Brooks (Deep Space Nine), Kate Mulgrew (Voyager), Scott Bakula (Enterprise), and Chris Pine.   So why did the interview with Pine involve an arm wrestling match?  Because he’s Shatner, of course, but we’ll let him explain it himself:

“He’s shy,” Shatner says of the 30-year-old actor who took over the role of James T. Kirk in 2009′s Star Trek prequel/reboot. “So the way I started the interview, I put out a table and chairs outside the Paramount gates, and arm-wrestled with him. That was the beginning of my interview with him. I think it broke the ice, that’s for sure.” [Canoe via /film]

No word on who won the match (we didn’t get a chance to check Shatner’s mood by the color of his shat afterwards), but we can’t discount the possibility Shatner won despite the age difference.  He’s not above stealing Nimoy’s bike or crafting a Gorn cannon on the fly.  He’s dash cunning.

In Douglas Copeland’s “Microserfs”, which is itself hilariously outdated at this point because it takes place in 1994, Copeland notes that any media about computers is almost immediately outdated. He was using the example of Time Life books, but it can apply to pretty much anything.

Like, say, instructional films done by AT&T in the ’70s starring none other than William Shatner.

What’s great about this, beyond the fact that it’s William Shatner, is the child-like sense of wonder that someday, we may use a 386 processor and it would have the power of a God. You’ve got to wonder what those Bell Labs boys with that awesome facial hair would think of, say, an Alienware PC.

Check the film out on the next slide.
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I’m just going to out myself here as a genuine, sincere fan of “Has-Been”, the second album of William Shatner. Seriously. It’s not an ironic appreciation; it’s a good album. Ben Folds does a good job producing, it includes a cover of Pulp’s “Common People” way better than the original, and there are moments both funny and heartbreaking. In fact, one track is essentially just Shatner talking about the death of his third wife.

So I’m a little torn with news that the Shat is delivering a third album consisting entirely of…ironic covers of heavy metal songs. First of all, Pat Boone and Richard Cheese have cornered the market on this. Secondly, I like sincere musical Shatner better. But at least Zakk Wylde is laying down the guitar tracks. On the next slide, have some behind-the-scenes footage of the album being made, and a selection of Shatner’s greatest (and “greatest”) hits.
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This video, like the pictures in this post, isn’t exactly new, but I love it all the same.  In this convention footage recently loaded on YouTube, Leonard Nimoy tries to explain that William Shatner is not a nice guy:

He’s mean.  He’s really mean.  I’ve been telling people this for years now.  I want you to believe me tonight.  I’m not kidding.  He’s mean.  He’s a mean person.  He stole my bicycle.

And that’s not just hyperbole.  Shatner really did steal his bicycle.  Repeatedly.  They launch into a five minute anecdote about all the bicycle-related pranks Shatner played on Nimoy while on set.  When they would break for lunch, Nimoy would bike to the commissary and be first in line so he could get back the the set early for his Vulcan make-up to be touched up without delaying filming.  That’s only logical.

Shatner didn’t like this arrangement, saying, “He’d get lunch before everybody else.  These are important things!”  And, although this next thing wasn’t in the video below, I did find an exclusive court document in which Nimoy confronts Shatner about the missing bicycle:

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Earlier this week, at the Banff World Television Festival, Canada’s Movie Central Channel announced that they would be producing a feature-length documentary based on William Shatner and that the project would be directed by, none other than, William Shatner himself. *double axe guitar swell* The project will be called Cage Match of Death: Shatner Vs. Shatner The Captains and is slated to begin shooting in July with a winter 2011 broadcast.

A feature documentary following the life and career of William Shatner, The Captains will explore Shatner’s Montreal roots and his early career in Stratford, Ontario, as well as the extraordinary change in circumstances caused by the serendipitous casting for the role of Captain James T. Kirk. The film will be directed by Shatner, who will also executive produce with David Zappone and Craig Thompson. [TrekMovie]

What can I say? Bill’s got some balls on him. I hope my own life is never the subject of a documentary. In all of these other docs they revisit the projects where the celebrities used to live and go visit all their managers from McDonald’s and sh-t. Revisiting my early career would consist of myself and a camera crew, all crammed into my parent’s bathroom, while I explain what it was like to masturbate there for the first eighteen years of my life.
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Shatner isn’t pointing at that mountain to make you admire his its natural beauty. He’s pointing it out to the work crew that’s going to carve Shatneropolis out of it.

As you might have guessed, Shatner isn’t disgustingly rich thanks to his sterling and brilliant film career, or his brilliant innovations in music, even his Star Trek money.

No, apparently the Shat was clever enough to make Priceline pay him in stock.  A share cost about as much as two candy bars when Shatner started with them, and now it’s worth $300 a share. So Priceline basically paid Canada’s finest ham nine figures (an estimated $600 million) to do this:

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