Dr Touplittle - he talks to the animals!

Bill Shatner has always been a lover of animals, keeping both dogs and horses (maybe it's their manes he so appreciates), while also working as a tireless environmentalist. It seems that the toupee also plays a role...

A while back, we brought you a potential thwarted toupee snatching courtesy of Koko the Gorilla. This time, we have something considerably more moving from the animal world - a Killer Whale jumping above Bill Shatner's head and perfectly mimicking the shape the actor's toupee (the arch, the lace flaps - it really is incredible!):



The incident is briefly descibed in Bill Shatner's autobiography Up Till Now and based on toupological factors, likely occurred sometime in the late 1980s. Was the whale thanking Bill Shatner for bringing the plight of whales to the public's attention in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home? From the look on Bill Shatner's face, it is evident that the actor is both delighted and moved by the whale's mimicry of his toupee.

Watch the segment below from a Canadian documentary on Bill Shatner, recently uploaded to YouTube, to see the actor's love of animals:

Koko the toupee snatcher?

Not only has Bill Shatner invented his own acting style, but he has pretty much invented his own style of martial arts. Remember the Captain Kirk drop-kick, double karate-chop to either side of the neck followed by a throw to the floor? Well, those finely-honed Jackie Chan-like reflexes can be just as geared towards toup protection as anything else. Case in point: "In 1988, to help the Gorilla Foundation encourage Californians to contribute to its Endangered Species Campaign, I was permitted to visit Koko the Gorilla in her quarters. Koko was an extraordinary animal who had learned to communicate with human-beings." (From Shats' autobiography Up Till Now).


This was a very moving/terrifying experience for Bill Shatner and he recalls it in detail in his autobiography. But something else happened that isn't mentioned in his book. Below is a video that features an interesting clip of the encounter, narrated retrospectively by Shats for the audio version of Up Till Now. If you study the footage at 1:00 minutes, you will see a finely-honed toup-protecting block from Shats. Thankfully, Koko was likely not making a move to pull off the strange creature nested on her new companion's head, but rather simply giving Bill a warm hug. But Shats' instinctive move to prevent a potentially humiliating scene is highly evident in the clip.

By the way, we promise we'll look at the underwater stuff from Star Trek IV soon! And thanks as always to our readers - a mistaken attribution from the previous post has now been corrected.