What do you get when you cross a science fiction legend, civilian space flight, and a billionaire that launched a video entity where no company had gone before? You get Shatner in Space, an Amazon Prime documentary about William Shatner’s flight aboard Blue Origin. Shatner, 90, is best known for his portrayal of Captain James Tiberius Kirk in the Star Trek franchise.
On October 13, Shatner became the oldest person to go into space. After the flight Shatner was visibly emotional, describing the journey as “unbelievable.”
“Everybody in the world needs to see it,” Shatner said after his journey. “I hope I never recover from this. I hope I can retain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”
The documentary will contain new footage of Shatner’s journey, including views from the spacecraft that far outdo anything Hollywood could create with a green screen and animation.
Many of the fans of the sci-fi icon were impressed by the actor’s profound amazement of the view from the spacecraft. Shatner described the view as moving and called for renewed efforts to protect Earth from human-led environmental damage.
For the unfamiliar, Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home involves an alien probe that visits Earth ostensibly to find out why communications have ceased. It turns out that the probe has returned to Earth to communicate with humpback whales, a species that was extinct by the 21st century. The alien probe is destroying the Earth’s atmosphere when Kirk and his crew initiate time travel aboard a stolen Klingon cruiser, traveling back to the planet in the 1980s to acquire a breeding pair of humpback whales and bring them back to 23rd-century Earth so they can communicate with the probe and ostensibly save Earth from destruction.
This is not the first time Shatner has used his celebrity for ecological causes. In the 1980s after the release of Star Trek IV, the Voyage Home, Shatner recorded a series of broadcast public service announcements urging people to be mindful of pollution and species degradation.
The Blue Origin flight lasted a total of 11 minutes. Long-time fans of Shatner are already speculating on how an 11-minute flight can be turned into a documentary-length video. It’s been suggested that Shatner’s well-known staccato delivery of lines will be employed to lengthen (insert pause) the (insert pause) video (insert pause) and (insert pause) add (insert pause) to (insert pause) the (insert pause) dramatic (insert pause) effect.
Shatner in Space will be available on Amazon Prime in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia and New Zealand on December 15. The video will be released for the rest of the world in 2022.
