Comments (0)William Shatner
Final Frontier?
May 20, 2009
A lot of folks always thought that William Shatner was a cartoon character. That voice, those mannerisms, that ego! Now, the original Capt. James T. Kirk is making it official.
Mr. Shatner, 78, stars in and directs “The Gavones,” a YouTube cartoon. He plays Don Salmonella Gavone, the patriarch of a family who has four goofball sons. The first installment just began airing, and the next one is due out within a month.
”It’s the Mafia in Hollywood trying to make a hit – and half the family think it’s murder and the other half thinks it’s a movie,” Mr. Shatner said of the show. “It’s a comedic `Soprano’ family.”
Why animation? Doesn’t Bill Shatner have enough to keep him busy, what with “Boston Legal” and Priceline and “Star Trek” royalties?
“I decided a cartoon on YouTube would be really fun,” he said. “All those media forms like Facebook and Twitter, we don’t know where they’re going to take us. Certainly YouTube is unique in its form. So it seemed like a good idea to investigate how to do entertainment on it.”
The series will run twice a month for the next three or four months.