This is totally a real thing

It’s a widely-held kind of common knowledge that William Shatner is completely in on the joke of his own rep. Everything he does now, from shilling as the Priceline Negotiator to scene-stealing as Denny Crane, is to some degree a bit of self-parody. And of course this is hardly an exceptional case, but rather a common incarnation of the Circle of Showbiz Life. An actor starts out earnestly trying to make a name for himself, gets a big ego which amplifies his quirks, gets typecast, gets bitter, gets over it, and gets into lampooning himself to the amusement of all us hipster douchebags who appreciate his excesses ironically.

That’s the theory, at least, which makes it easy to take the pattern for granted. And sometimes you might find yourself wondering if it really happened that way. Star Trek is pretty well embedded in the collective consciousness, and Priceline commercials are somehow still on tv eight years after the dot-com bust, but what about that middle part? Was there really ever a time when Bill Shatner was stuck making gloriously terrible movies, after leaving the Enterprise and before his self-referential resurrection? Or do we just pretend that’s what happened to fill in the middle section of the story?

Sometimes I wonder about stuff like that, and then sometimes I look over the new DVD releases. Although I am an amasser of many things, I am not the kind of cinephile geek who goes to Best Buy every single week and buys at least one or two movies to pad out an ever-unwieldier collection. But if I were, this would be on my shopping list today:


A late 70’s Jaws-esque freakout starring William Shatner … and buckets of actual live spiders. COME ON.

(Yes, it has been added to the Sisyphean slope that is my Netflix queue. Maybe I’ll actually get around to watching it some time this year. But once again this is just something I’m happy exists in the same world as me.)