William Shatner is known for his eccentricity as an actor, but in the past, that’s been tempered with a genuinely funny sense of humour. Most of the time. His latest project, though, has left the internet scratching its collective head, sighing, and asking what this is all about now.
Myouterspace.com, announced at the beginning of this month by Shatner on his Twitter account, seeks to unite various persons involved with aspects of the creative industries. Participants sign up to be a part of a ‘planet’ that showcases their particular skills, be it visual effects, writing, directing, behind-the-scenes work, or any other aspect of film, television or stage production. Actual producers will captain ‘starships’, a flowery name for a project that aims to put out a production utilising this talent.
That’s the idea, anyway. Although Shatner himself says, in an editorial on the site, that they are “now interviewing Industry Credited Producers for Starship Captain Positions”, none have been listed yet. The site itself also has a somewhat amateurish feel to it. The content seems templated and incomplete – for instance, the advertising section leads in with the description: “MySiteName is one of the most trafficked sites about MySiteTopic on the web. It gets well over X unique visitors a month and close to X pageviews.” In addition, Paramount’s lawyers may well be taking a closer look at one or more of the starship designs.
That being said, the idea itself isn’t an entirely bad one, it’s just unlikely to get off the ground anywhere in the near future. Myouterspace.com seems to have just over 3,000 registered users at the time of writing, and a quick scan through Shatner’s friends list (you automatically friend Shatner when you join, which gives a decent barometer for popularity) shows very few people with more than one friend. Perhaps this is to be expected, but the site’s image certainly isn’t helped by the interesting video that the actor put up to explain just what he was thinking. Although it’s still not totally clear, as you can see here.
Good luck, Bill, but we can’t help but feel that this one is a bit of a loss maker.
