Vintage Roddenberry-Shatner Interview
2 min readAn eight-minute interview taken from the 1976 Inside Star Trek LP is available at Roddenberry.com
In 1976, Inside Star Trek was released, which was a look at the development of Star Trek as well as the story of Gene Roddenberry. One of the tracks on the album, “William Shatner meets Captain Kirk,” can be heard at Roddenberry.com and has Roddenberry and William Shatner asking each other questions and answering the questions posed by each other.
To access the interview, go to www.genesjournalcomic.com, and enter the following “Konami Code” (classic gamer’s code) on your keyboard: up arrow, up arrow, down arrow, down arrow, left arrow, right arrow, left arrow, right arrow, “B,” “A” and then hit “enter.”
Some of the questions asked by Roddenberry were:
- How much of Bill Shatner is Captain Kirk?
- How did Captain Kirk the character, the strong, the usually wise commander of the vessel, how much did that influence you and your personality?
- If we went back and did Star Trek on television over again, what things would you like to see changed?
- How come Captain Kirk gets a new girl every week?
Roddenberry also asked about the rumors of trouble on the set of the original series, specifically trouble between Shatner and co-star Leonard Nimoy.
Shatner had questions of his own:
- What were the differences between the first, second and third seasons?
- Why did you leave before the third season?
- What would you do if you had to do it over? How would you fight the fatigue?
The LP is hard to find, but the Star Trek: The Motion Picture Soundtrack audio CD box set is available here. The first disc of this set is the soundtrack to Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and the second disc is Inside Star Trek.
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