It would seem that he has been too busy cultivating his music career to care about the widely hailed new "Star Trek" film.
Yes, you read that right. Captain Kirk of yesteryear has a discography spanning 40-plus years.
He even collaborated with Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock in the original series, to produce the album "Spaced Out: the Best of Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner" (1997).
Before you're sold by the corny but endearing pun in the title and rush out to buy "Spaced Out," or any other Shatner-Nimoy creation, I'm afraid I have to burst your bubble. It may come as a shock, but neither Shatner nor Nimoy can sing to save their lives.
Shatner prefers to label his music "spoken word," a misleadingly drab euphemism for talking ominously over spacey sound effects.
Beam me up Scotty, and get me away from this God-awful racket.
Nimoy seems to have a penchant for butchering classic songs such as "I Walk the Line" and "If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)."
To be fair, neither of the "Star Trek" actors' voices are absolutely wretched, but their aesthetic of Sonny and Cher meets Peter, Paul and Mary meets space-age synthesizers is too schizophrenic to be tolerable.
In Shatner's cover of the Bob Dylan classic, "Mr. Tambourine Man," he narrates, "Take a trip / On your magic swirling ship / My senses have been stripped." The track is terrifying, alienating and more than a little irritating.
Ultimately, one cannot help but wish that Nimoy and Shatner performed in the vacuum of space. After all, sound cannot travel there.
