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February, 2001, LOS ANGELES - I continue to be captivated by the popularity and the longevity of the Star Trek phenomenon. It remains a pervasive factor in my life, whether professionally, personally or in my public service activities. And this gift has serendipitously expanded my horizon and enriched my life.
A direct professional tie-in can be viewed on February 18th when an episode of "V.I.P." starring Pamela Anderson is aired on the Fox network. I play the voice of an omniscient super computer that was programmed by a brilliant techno-genius who is a fervent Captain Sulu fan. Hence, my casting as the voice of the computer.
The Star Trek conventions, of course, keep on trekking. My first convention of this year was in the charming city of Portland, Oregon. It was a lively gathering on a cold, damp weekend. Long-time fans mingled with a growing number of young, first-time conventioneers. And, as well, the con gave me the chance to indulge my preservationist interest and again explore the imaginatively restored turn-of-the-century historic district of Portland.
I did voice work last week on a feature film project, cryptically titled, "Noon Blue Apple." I play a mysterious voice that haunts the mind of the lead character. No direct Star Trek connection here other than the fact that the director knew of my work from the original series.
But Star Trek has also afforded me the opportunity to contribute more effectively in a myriad of other areas not related to my professional career. This month, I was honored to serve as the star of a fund-raising dinner to help build a planetarium on the campus of Long Beach City College. With this facility, young students will be able to expand their study of the heavens and let their imaginations soar to the stars. Clearly, without the Star Trek association, I would not have been able to support this important cause as effectively as I was able.
On another occasion this month, I addressed a group of young interns at the Japanese American National Museum on volunteerism. Here again, I was able to connect with them more successfully as Captain Sulu of Star Trek than as the Chairman of the Board of the Museum.
We have a mayoral election coming up this spring in the city of Los Angeles, my hometown. I am supporting the former Speaker of the California Assembly, Antonio Villaraigosa. I know that I was asked to speak at his press conference largely because of the draw of my Star Trek linkage. As well, when I spoke at the Japanese seniors' intermediate care facility, Keiro Services, Star Trek combined with my association with the Japanese American National Museum, were the factors that attracted the large audience of seniors. I chatted with one lady who was 104 years old. She was born in 1896 - having lived in three centuries! In so many unexpected ways, my association with Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's visionary creation has opened doors that have expanded my life horizon.
But when any hint of self-importance might begin to creep into me and I start believing that my Star Trek association is free entrée to anything, a humbling reminder always seems to bring me back to reality.
This month, my niece, Akemi Takei, sportscaster for KING-TV in Seattle, got married to David Louchheim, a radio sportscaster, on a beautiful beach in Maui, Hawaii. It was a singularly romantic affair, the bride and groom barefoot, with waves crashing in on lava rock outcroppings behind them. The reception was held at a hilltop restaurant overlooking the Wailea Country Club and the turquoise blue Pacific beyond. As we sipped cocktails, nibbled hors d'oeuvres and waited for the sun to set, I slowly became aware of a generational divide. The parents of my niece and David's friends were thrilled to meet me. They were eager to have their pictures taken with me. They told me they were long-time Star Trek fans from back in their college days. The young people, however -- Akemi and David's friends -- were gracious and friendly but rather blasé. In fact, some weren't really that familiar with Star Trek. They, I realized, were the post-Star Trek generation. The passage of time brings with it the larger context of life.
I was forcefully reminded again of the larger context of life on a hike into the crater of the now-dormant volcano, Haleakala on Maui. The crater is vast. And it is heart-stoppingly beautiful. There is a narrow, lava gravel trail that leads down to the bottom. It was irresistible. I had to go down into it. As I tramped down the sere landscape, rich with the burnt colors of inert lava, I imagined what this scene must have been like millennia ago. It was, we were told by a ranger, an inferno of blasting, bubbling, molten red lava. For centuries it spewed up flaming magma from the belly of the earth forming the island of Maui. This place was a hellhole of exploding liquid fire. But now, it was dead calm. Only this scorched and arid crater of unearthly colors remains.As I huffed and puffed my way back up to the volcano's rim - 10,000-feet above sea level -- I thought of the ardent excitement of the middle-aged Star Trek fans of the evening before, and, in contrast, the nonchalant affability of their children. Intense fire and cool, youthful calm. There didn't seem to be that much difference between the human generations and geologic time.
March, 2006 It is hard to believe, but in September 2006, Star Trek will be 40 years old. Most of the fans of the show are younger than Star Trek. In fact, many were born after we were cancelled in 1969. That was the year that Astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. I remember thinking we, the actors who played the characters on Star Trek, were "beaming down" onto planets three years before that. Armstrong's moon landing looked so bulky and old fashioned. We were so much more futuristic. On Star Trek, we talked to each other on our "communicators" as we walked around the corridors of our Starship Enterprise. That was amazing science fiction - then. Now, it is a commonplace reality. We talk on our cell phones as we walk down the sidewalk. What was once eye-opening science fiction has now become reality. Today, Blackberry isn't just a fruit; Spam isn't just canned pork; I-pod isn't the husk of some exotic vegetation. They are just a part of the vocabulary of our everyday techno-world. Increasingly, the 23rd century envisioned by the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry, is becoming the recognizable society of our times. So much has happened to change the world since that September night in 1966 when Star Trek, with its shiningly optimistic view of the future, made its debut on our television screens. America was so different forty years ago.
I remember the horror of a fiery night in August when the south central area of my hometown exploded in angry rioting. Years of racial injustice and despair suffered by African Americans ignited the southern skies of my beloved Los Angeles in black smoke and enraged flames. While the fires of race riots were breaking out in many other major American cities across our country, internationally we were frozen in the coldest of cold wars with another great world power, the Soviet Union. We lived in fear of a red button being pressed by either the President of the United States or the Premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that could end civilization as we knew it. It was to that society of racial strife and global tension that Star Trek brought an idealistic picture of a starship in space with a crew made up of the many peoples of the known universe working as a team, "boldly going where no one had gone before." Of course, that was science fiction - then. Today, we have in fact a craft in space called the International Space Station with a crew made up of people of many races, citizens of many nations and - of all things - Americans and Russians working together in concert. Today, we have an African American woman serving as the Secretary of State of the United States. An African American man preceded her. There are two Asian Americans currently serving as Cabinet Secretaries. These are phenomena hoped for but quite implausible just forty years ago. So much has changed in forty years.
Those changes didn't just happen. They were the results of bold initiatives taken by venturesome people. Whether in the arena of politics, or the research laboratories and test chambers of the sciences, or the marketplace of entrepreneurs, or the streets of our cities by social activists, changes happened because of the energies, ideas, and imagination of dedicated people - optimistic people with a vision of a better society.
There will always be the Klingons, the adversaries of change. There will always be some setbacks. Today, we live with another kind of terror, both domestically and globally. There still is a racial divide in this nation - as we saw so distressingly during the Katrina hurricane disaster. Yet, look how far we have come in forty years - in our lifetime. Optimism, imagination, and hard work trump obstacles and setbacks. We have made amazing progress.
As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Star Trek with a host of conventions throughout the world, I will always be mindful of the fact that we, at the same time, celebrate the genius of the optimistic mind. We celebrate the science fiction world transformed into our very real society today by those visionary minds.
We celebrate the people, the fans, who connected with that positive vision of Gene Roddenberry. In September, on the 8th, the birthday of Star Trek, I will be joining the fans at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle for a big 40th Anniversary Convention. Then, most excitingly, I venture forth on a project I had never imagined in my wildest dreams. I begin filming a new manifestation of Star Trek - this time to be accessed only on the Internet! This miraculous rebirth of Star Trek called, Star Trek: New Voyages, is the brainchild of a venturesome young fan, James Cawley. James is an extraordinarily enterprising fan "boldly going" where no fan had ever gone before. He has already produced two Internet episodes, one with Walter Koenig, who spoke highly to me of his experience on the show. For mine, titled, "World Enough and Time," James Cawley has gathered a remarkable pool of veteran Star Trek talent. The gifted team of Marc Zicree and Michael Reaves are currently busily at work on the script. Marc will also be at the helm as director of the film. Ron B. Moore, a good friend and veteran of "The Next Generation," "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager," will be doing the visual effects. In addition, playing the heroic Captain Kirk is the truly heroic James Cawley. He, in fact, personifies the adventurous spirit of Star Trek.
On this propitious fortieth year of Star Trek, we, most of all, celebrate the spirit that looks to the challenges yet to come - that vast unknown with such intriguing mysteries yet to be explored. I look forward to sharing that journey into our common future as we "boldly go where no one has gone before" for many more years.
December, 2004, LOS ANGELES - I hope you all enjoyed a happy holiday season. We celebrated Christmas with family and friends up in my cabin on a ridge overlooking the pine forest of the White Mountains of Arizona. On the day after Christmas, as we were relaxing after the day of merry making, news reports of a huge earthquake off the coast of Indonesia flashed on the television screen. The initial announcement was that it was an 8.9 tremor. We Californians immediately recognized that as a giant quake. Thankfully, we were in Arizona, where earthquakes hardly ever occur. The damages and fatalities in Indonesia must be horrible, we all speculated. Then, the toll of lives lost was reported to be in the thousands. It sounded terrible. Soon, more pictures appeared on the screen. We saw scenes that seemed like something out of a science fiction movie. Vacationers on the beach calmly watching in fascination as the waters strangely ebbed out to sea revealing boulders and rocks as an enormous wall of water loomed up in the distance. Then, the odd phenomenon growing and growing more ominously as it approached closer and closer to the beach. Then the monstrous mountain of water crashing down in a gigantic cataclysm engulfing everything in its path - people, boats, houses, buildings. Everything. Anything in its path was swept up, mangled up, and washed away. It was devastation on a scale beyond belief. This was what is called a tsunami - a Japanese word for massive killer waves produced by great undersea disturbances. The earthquake off Indonesia had produced deadly tsunamis that ravaged all the South Asian nations along the Indian Ocean and as far away as the east coast of Africa.
The Richter scale number has now been revised up to an incredible 9.0. The death toll numbers have also continued to climb - tens of thousands at first, then fifty thousand, then a staggering seventy-five thousand. The enormity of the number of human lives lost became inconceivable. As I write this column, the number of fatalities is at 155,000 dead and countless more are missing.
Now, the challenge is to help the survivors. The lack of food, water, medicine and the danger of disease spreading have become the great perils. This is a human calamity of inconceivable proportions.
We must do all we can to help in this global catastrophe. I immediately connected with the American Red Cross and made a financial contribution to the International Response Fund. I urge you all to pitch in and support the many proven humanitarian organizations that are working to help the devastated people of South Asia. Please know the history of the group to which you make your contribution. Make sure that they are experienced and established aid organizations. This is the time of year when we celebrate by sharing our blessings. We are so blessed and the survivors of the tsunami are so overwhelmed. I hope our compassion can swell to tsunami proportions to help these desperate survivors. Please send money to aid them. From what I have learned, money is the most effective way of sending aid. Donated clothing, blankets, and canned foods, as generous as they may be, require the additional cost of transportation and the logistics of distribution. Contributions of money can cut through all that. It will buy the most needed aid in the regions of need and cost-effectively deliver them to the survivors. The compassion from our heart should be expressed with the good sense of our minds.
When we witness random horrors like that of the tsunami, we have to be so grateful for the blessing that we enjoyed during a safe holiday season. I thought of the blessing of my December spree in London preceding the holidays. I appreciate so much more now the familiar sight of the giant Christmas tree dominating Trafalgar Square - always there, always sparkling, always welcoming me to a Dickensian holiday in London. I love and savor so much more now, the holiday hubbub in the London air; the delight on the faces of the people in the galleries at the National Gallery, where the admission is always free to see some of the greatest works of art in the world. As I take that bracing walk across Waterloo Bridge over the Thames, I enjoy more deeply now the spectacular vista of the London skyline from St. Paul's Cathedral spanning all the way over to Big Ben and the Parliament Building. Even as I approach the ugliest building in London, the National Theater on the South Bank, I'm comforted by the thought that the best theater in the English language is housed in that hideously menacing concrete fortress. And, as wonderful a theater town as London is, it can also palm off some of the worst productions that I have ever seen - on this trip - of all plays - "Romeo and Juliet" by William Shakespeare! I also saw the most theatrically imaginative production of Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeny Todd." At the curtain call, I found myself leaping up and enthusiastically joining in shouting, "Bravo, bravo, bravo!"
A special blessing I squeezed into this London trip was a quick excursion to Paris by Eurostar. The three-hour train dash through the chunnel never fails to impress me. To cross the English Channel by a manmade underwater tunnel, the impossible dream of many centuries, always thrills me.
Paris is to me the greatest urban achievement of humankind. I love the grand boulevards as well as the narrow cobbled alleyways. I love the regal orderliness of the Tuilleries Garden as well as the tiny courtyard gardens. I thrill at the grandeur of the Beaux Art palaces as well as the charm of ancient buildings that seem to lean over from the weight of centuries.
Most of all, the great pleasure of Paris - dining - whether at premiere gastronomic temples like Ledoyen or small family-run brasseries on I'lle St. Louis, is always unsurpassed. It seems impossible to get a bad meal in Paris.
We are so blessed. We share our blessings with loving family and friends during this holiday season. It is heartbreaking that there are so many people in South Asia who have lost so much - they even lost their family and their friends. Let us share our blessings with our larger human family. Let us give generously. The need is so great.