Up Till Now: The Autobiography

someone asking me once, “Don’t you worry about overexposure?”
    To which I’d responded honestly, “Not as much as I worry about paying the mortgage.”
    Like our universe itself, Star Trek continued to expand throughout the television world, growing more popular and successful each year. With that success came recognition for the cast, but especially for myself and Leonard. For some reason I became strongly associated with real science and technology. Producers began hiring me to host specials, documentaries, and limited-episode nonfiction series about science and technology. I was even hired to do one of the very first commercials for a personal computer. It was strange. I’d played numerous doctors but no one expected me to give medical advice; I’d been a prosecutor and a defense attorney numerous times but no one asked me for legal advice; I’d been a homicidal maniac several times but no one ever confused me with a professional criminal. Yet for some reason I had become television’s go-to host for anything to do with science or technology.
    It had little to do with reality. As a student in Montreal I’d shown very little aptitude for those subjects. They just hadn’t interested me. But even before I was hired by Gene Roddenberry I’d discovered the great science-fiction writers; I’d gone from reading the pulp magazines to all the great novels. And then I’d actually gotten to know several of these people, writers like Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon, while we were making Star Trek . I certainly understood why people would associate me with these subjects, but I also believed that on some level of the public’s imagination it was not Shatner the actor hosting these shows, who most certainly would be an expert in all of these areas, it was Captain James T. Kirk.
    So it was quite natural that, for example, when home computers first became available to the public, I would be hired as thespokesperson. At that time I was one of the very few people in the world who had any practical knowledge about computers, having worked with the plywood and cardboard props aboard the Enterprise for three seasons. “Why buy just a video game from Atari?” I asked viewers in what may be the first TV commercial ever done for a computer. “Invest in the wonderful computer of the 1980s for only three hundred dollars. The Commodore Vic-20. Unlike games it has a real computer keyboard. With the Commodore Vic-20 the whole family can learn computing at home—plays great games too! Under three hundred dollars, the wonder computer of the 1980s. The Commodore Vic-20!”
    Honestly, I knew nothing about computers. I had seen the huge mainframes at NASA, but I’d certainly never used a computer at home. I didn’t even know how to turn one on. This was long before the Internet existed, so computers were basically glorified calculators and word processors. Mostly people used them to play video games like Pong. Legally, though, anyone endorsing a product is supposed to have some experience using it. So Commodore shipped two Vic-20s to my home, where they remained untouched in their boxes. My attorney insisted I take them out of the boxes and plug them in. That way no one could claim I didn’t even know how to plug one in. So that was the entire range of my knowledge of computers: I knew how to plug one in.
    The television shows and the movie documentaries I hosted or narrated literally went from the bottom of the world to the ends of the universe. They included the syndicated series Secrets of the Deep and Inner Space , both of which explored life in the deep oceans, and the syndicated special Space Age , which featured all kinds of futuristic gadgets like a home laser and the incredible—in 1973— nineteen-thousand-dollar electronic typewriter. In 1976 I narrated the theatrically released documentary Mysteries of the Gods , based on Erich von Däniken’s bestselling book Chariots of the Gods , which speculated that beings from outer space had visited Earth millions of years ago and influenced the Mayan civilization. Universe was an animated short documentary sponsored by NASA that explored theuniverse from subatomic particles to deep space, beginning with the Big Bang—and was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Short Documentary. We didn’t win, though. The Magic Planet, which I narrated in 1983, was an early look at how changing weather patterns could affect the Earth’s very fragile ecology.
    I had become