Many Generations Visit Grand Slam

Creation's 12th annual Grand Slam convention continued last Saturday with guests from several generations of Star Trek making appearances.

StarTrek.com reported on the guest appearances, which included original series performers Walter Koenig (Chekov) and William Shatner (Kirk), Deep Space Nine actors Armin Shimerman (Quark), Andrew Robinson (Garak) and Nicole deBoer (Ezri) and several guest stars.

Koenig began by asking who among the audience had watched Shatner on The Practice, praising his former colleague's performance. He also told a story about having visited the Deep Space Nine set during the filming of "Trials and Tribble-ations", the crossover episode with the original series, and how he taught Colm Meaney (O'Brien) and Alexander Siddig (Bashir) how to flip open an original communicator.

DS9er deBoer was part of a panel of stars from former Trek exec Michael Piller's The Dead Zone, currently shooting its third season. She said that after her audition for Deep Space Nine, she walked out and saw Jeri Ryan in her Seven of Nine outfit, "and it scared the [blank] out of me because I thought that was what they were looking for [the Ezri Dax role]."

Robinson and Shimerman appeared together, discussing their friendship, their esteem for the DS9 cast, their long hours in makeup and the books they each have written. Robinson said the makeup was the worst part, while Shimerman found dressing in drag in "Profit and Lace" to be particularly painful, as people kept pinching him.

The Next Generation's Wesley Crusher, Wil Wheaton, discussed his blog, his upcoming books and life as a teenager on the Enterprise-D. He said he was happy to see his TNG co-stars at events now and wasn't terribly upset when he learned that his scenes in Star Trek Nemesis had been cut.

Shatner joked about having lost his job advertising for Priceline to Leonard Nimoy (Spock) and discussed all the compromises he had to make as director of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, which he said he had wanted to be Star Trek: In Search of God. He also talked about his Hollywood Charity Horse Show on May 1 to benefit the children's charities and said he and everyone he has spoken to is "99 percent sure" that Star Trek: Enterprise will be renewed for a fourth season.

Other guests included Ron Perlman, the Reman Viceroy in Star Trek Nemesis who discussed his new film Hellboy and his old TV show Beauty and the Beast; Sally Kellerman, who played Elizabeth Dehner in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and talked about having worked with various other Trek stars in other projects; and John Rhys-Davies, Voyager's Leonardo da Vinci, who spoke about Sliders, Indiana Jones and The Lord of the Rings.

The evening ended with a dessert party attended by deBoer, Connor Trinneer (Tucker) and Dominic Keating (Reed). For more details, see the original article at StarTrek.com.

Discuss this news item at Trek BBS!
 Add TrekToday RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!