William Shatner and the Flip Phone
I don’t recall exactly where I heard this story… it might have been at a trade convention in Las Vegas in 2000 where I saw William Shatner across the way.
The storyteller was sitting at a coffee house, chatting with William Shatner in about 1998. Shatner’s cellphone rang, and he opened his StarTAC phone with the exact same motion he’d used 30 years earlier with his Star Trek communicator. The same dramatic snap, the same effortless cool. Only this time, it wasn’t a prop. It wasn’t science fiction. It was real. The storyteller sat there, stunned. And the punchline? Shatner didn’t even notice the magic of the moment. To him, it was just Tuesday.
I think a lot about how in just 30 years, absolute science fiction was turned into an everyday item!
For reference, the most modern phone available when Captain Kirk was cruising the stars in 1966 was this Western Electric Rotary Desk Phone.
1966 Western Electric Rotary Desk Phone
1999 StarTAC phone
2266 Star Trek communicator