2012: the year of the Toupee Spring?

Could 2012 turn out to be the year of the Toupee Spring? A recent interview with Roger Perry, who played Captain Christopher in the first season Star Trek episode "Tomorrow is Yesterday" suggests that it may well be.

First, what exactly do we mean by Toupee Spring? The "Spring" that has been dominating headlines since last year is obviously the Arab Spring. One of the interesting and pertinent dynamics in those events is seeing the fall of a firmly established, yet rather warped, set of prejudices and black-and-white assumptions. The desperate and deluded dictatorial regimes have tried their best to suggest that you're either with them or you are with potential terrorists, rats, drug-dealing gangs, foreign agents etc.


Similarly, what we may be witnessing in 2012 is a significant weakening of the "Takei effect" - meaning that numerous figures who have crucial knowledge of the toupee and have yet to add this to the official record are beginning to no longer fear that discussion of the toupee equates to hating Bill Shatner or wanting to publically hurt or belittle him, as many believe George Takei did at the Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner (assuming the mantle from Trek co-star James Doohan: "Bill's hairpiece was being applied. The top of his head was a lot of skin and a few little odd tufts of hair. The mirrors in the makeup room walls were arranged so that we could all see the laying on of his rug").

The events of 08/20/06 led to many toupologists being unfairly compared to George Takei.

In this post-Toupee Spring world, to want to talk about the toupee does not automatically make you a George Takei-like Bill Shatner hater with "a scary glint" in your eyes.


Of course, several figures have in the past already discussed their first-hand experiences with Bill Shatner's toupee in a factual, non-Takei-like manner, for example Star Trek guest star William Campbell. While others have sought to create a friendly climate in which the toupee can openly and even comedically be referenced. But somehow these efforts were always, and rather unfortunately, overshadowed by those who sought to use a warped version of toupology to pursue an extremist agenda, for example attempting an ambush on Bill Shatner. Those events would invariably be the ones making headlines, and, as a result, other figures with crucial knowledge of the toupee would choose silence out of a fear of also being labelled as toupological extremists.

Thus, the Perry comments perhaps represent a significant evolution.

Roger Perry today (left).

Here's the crucial segment in the actor's recent interview with StarTrek.com:

Q: What do you remember of the ["Tomorrow is Yesterday"] shoot? Any great anecdote that people may not know?

Perry: The unusual thing, but I have to say this because I remember it… The very first day going into makeup I was in the makeup room and (William) Shatner was a couple of chairs down. I remember looking over and I was very shocked because they were putting his toupee on. I said, “Wait a minute. He’s a young man.” At that time he was very young and I thought, “Well, that’s interesting.” I didn’t know at that time whether they were doing it because of the character. Then I heard later on that he’d been wearing a toupee for a long, long time.

Painting glue over the lace line (more here).

It's a common gripe at journalism that interviewers frequently fail to ask decent follow-up questions of their subjects, and here too, sadly, the subject switches to something new with the next question (perhaps the old fears were present in the interviewer). What was the toupee like? What about the details of the application process? How did Bill Shatner act during the application? Was he a different person with the toupee on than off? What did he look like without it? So many important questions left unanswered...

Nonetheless, the fact that Roger Perry volunteered to tell this anecdote without specifically being asked is a highly welcome development. If 2012 is indeed to be the year of the Toupee Spring, then this interview may be remembered as a watershed moment.

Are there images of a toup-less Bill Shatner locked in a vault somewhere?

Our thanks to several of you for emailing us the tip!

"William F*#@ing Shatner!"

Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Wil Wheaton's first ever encounter with William Shatner wasn't a particularly pleasant one. The two have since made up as Wheaton notes in a footnote in his 2004 memoir Dancing Barefoot (he also mentions the toupee, which we'll get to in a moment):

"In 2002, Bill and I played together on a special Star Trek edition of the game show Weakest Link. He was warm and friendly towards me the entire time. Several months later, I asked him on Slashdot, 'Are we cool or what? I mean I always thought you didn't like me...' " According to Wheaton, Shatner replied " 'We are so cool, we are beyond cool. We are in orbit man.' "

Wheaton is also one of only a few people that Bill Shatner follows on his Twitter page.

Excuse me? Why does the Enterprise need a 14-year-old ensign piloting the ship?

But back in 1989, Wheaton was so affronted by Bill Shatner's reaction to him that he coined the phrase "William Fucking Shatner" to describe the actor. Wheaton had popped over to the Star Trek V: The Final Frontier soundstage during a break in filming Star Trek: The Next Generation. Nervous, Wheaton was about to meet a legend:

" 'Well?' [Shatner] asked.'

Oh no. He'd asked me a question, and I'd missed it. 'Excuse me?' I replied.

'I said, what do you do over there?' he asked. There was a challenge in his voice.

'Oh, uh, well, I'm an acting ensign, and I sometimes pilot the ship.' Maybe he'd be impressed that I'd already logged several hours at the helm of the Enterprise D, all before the age of 16.

'Well, I'd never let a kid come on to my bridge.' He said and walked away."

Embarrassed, angered, devastated and humiliated, Wheaton returned to the TNG makeup room, sharing his angst with the makeup lady. Later on the set, Brent Spiner (alias Data) tried to comfort the young actor:

" 'I heard about Shatner,' Brent Said. Jesus, was this on the news or something?

'Yeah,' I said.

'You know he wears a toupee, right?'

I giggled. 'I didn't know that.'

'Yep. He's balder than old baldy up there.' He tossed a gold thumb over his shoulder at Patrick [Stewart]. I giggled some more, as the stored up adrenaline coursed through my veins.

'Boy, that's pretty bald.'

'Yep.' Brent put his hands up on the console."

Humiliation turned to comfort as Wheaton learned about Bill Shatner's toupee.

There are a number of things that we can try to analyze from the above. The first, is that this is another example of Bill Shatner's occasional insensitivity to others, particularly to "lesser" actors. Yet, as much as Bill Shatner probably should have expressed this particular thought in a more diplomatic way (or just have kept it to himself), the substance of the remarks represent a perfectly valid observation. Bill Shatner certainly wasn't the only one to question the idea of a child effectively piloting the USS Enterprise in TNG. It was, arguably, a dumb idea and one that demonstrated Gene Roddenberry at his weakest - sacrificing dramatic integrity in favor of sickly utopianism (a process which began with 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture and cost him control of the entire movie franchise).

Now that the dust has settled, it is pretty evident that Star Trek: The Next Generation has not withstood the test of time the way that the original Trek has. And it certainly has not attained the same kind of iconic status (Voyager and Enterprise likely will be remembered even less, while DS9, we feel, has often been unfairly overlooked).


The kid on the bridge (yes, Shatner had a point - Kirk would not have tolerated this); the first officer who seems redundant sitting next to the captain, selectively echoing his orders and the empathic counselor ruining dramatic integrity by overtly revealing character motivations rather than allowing both the audience and the on-screen characters to discover them - TNG's character dynamics are riddled with dramatic non-sequiturs. Many of these can be directly attributed to Gene Roddenberry, who created the show. Adding to these issues was replacement guardian-producer Rick Berman, who essentially took full control of the show during its third season. Thereafter, Berman fired a cinematographer (Edward R. Brown) for lighting the emotions that a given scene suggested (precisely what TOS did). A few years later, Berman fired a talented, albeit temperamental composer (Ron Jones) for writing melodic music. Despite some excellent installments, a slow descent into blandness arguably followed in a climate that increasingly stifled bold aesthetics - the very antithesis of the insane, brightly colored, dynamically scored melodrama that Shatner's Star Trek embodied.

Bill Shatner makes it pretty clear what he thinks of the character of Deanna Troi in the 2005 documentary How William Shatner Changed the World (more here).

Bill Shatner, as an old-school kind of guy, has expressed similar thoughts about the "lesser" original cast too. Again, it has often caused offense, but yet again his arguments are valid. He believes (as do many) that the show had three main stars (Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley), not seven. "Who are these people? What do they want?" those were the kind of meaningless lines spoken by Takei's Sulu during Star Trek's run - did we really want more lines from the gang of four's largely two-dimensional characters? How much fake Russian or Scottish accents could we have withstood? And to be blunt, Sulu really was an incredibly dull character. Today, George Takei has made a career of unfairly dissing Shatner, as if he were somehow responsible for the former's tepid post-Trek career.

George "I hate Shatner" Takei

Finally, Brent Spiner's comments about Bill Shatner's toupee may have some wondering just how much he knew (was Shatner really Patrick Stewart bald?). We think that Spiner was probably just speculating. But it is interesting how the toupee, as an obvious example of a personal conceit, was the first "attack point" that Spiner found. And as Wil Wheaton notes, he was unaware of the toupee until the above encounter. Could this incident have been Shatner's Mr Miyagi "sand the floor" moment? Did he diss Wheaton in order for the young kid to finally learn (knowing that anger at Shatner often produces toupee revelations) about the secrets and power of Shatner's toupee? One thing is clear, Wil Wheaton will never forget the first time he learned that Bill Shatner wore a toup.

You can buy Dancing Barefoot here, read several extracts here and visit Will Wheaton's website here. Feel free to disagree with anything or everything we've written!

George Takei's Shatner toup references during somewhat cringeworthy Comedy Roast segment.

Roast of William Shatner
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A clip from the 2006 Comedy Central Roast of William Shatner in which George Takei takes some very direct shots at William Shatner's toupee wearing. Shats just smiles/cringes.

Is this funny or just a mean way for Takei to try to publicly humiliate Shats? There is obviously not much good blood between George Takei and William Shatner, so roasting someone whom you really don't like is always tricky as the emotions can override the humor. Plus the gay innuendo isn't really that funny. Sorry Takei, we're with Shats on this - he was the star of Star Trek - leave him alone.