This comes from a hard-core original fan who loved the show way back when, and I can't tell you how amazed I am at the level of subliminal brainwashing and mind manipulation to which we have all been subjected for decades now:
"Leonard Nimoy, 83; was TV’s iconic Mr. Spock" by Ty Burr, Globe Staff February 27, 2015
Leonard Nimoy, a son of Boston who created one of the most enduring and beloved characters in modern pop culture, the half-human, half-alien “Star Trek” first officer Spock, died Friday in his home in the Bel Air section of Hollywood. He was 83 and the cause of death was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to his widow, Susan Bay Nimoy.
Mr. Nimoy was many things in life. He rose from poverty in the long-vanished West End neighborhood of Boston to become an actor, film director, pop singer, poet, and art photographer; he devoted much of the last three decades to the latter pursuit. But it was as Spock that he burst upon the scene, and it is as Spock that he will forever be remembered. The character has entered the common cultural consciousness, where he stands next to figures such as Sherlock Holmes, Chaplin’s Tramp, and Mickey Mouse; he seems never to have not been there.
Yet when Gene Roddenberry’s science-fiction TV series premiered in 1966, the show flew in below the cultural radar; critics gave it mixed reviews, and Variety opined that it “won’t work.” “Star Trek” attracted a rabid fan base, though — the first stirrings of what we now celebrate as “nerd culture” — and Mr. Nimoy’s Spock was a large part of the reason.
I wonder if Spock would have analyzed things in such a way.
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Lanky, ramrod straight (Mr. Nimoy himself tended to slouch when out of character), and coolly logical no matter what interspatial melodrama the crew of the Starship Enterprise encountered, Spock became a breakout character early on. The week after the premiere, 35 letters came in to the producers praising the character. The second week, the tally doubled. Within a few months, the pro-Spock mail was up to 2,700 letters per week.
Soon, Mr. Nimoy was beaming down to planets alongside star William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk. Hipsters started wearing buttons that said “I grok Spock” while imitating the character’s split-fingered Vulcan salute and all-purpose sign-off: “Live long and prosper.”
A 1967 Boston Globe article called it “Spockmania,” and Mr. Nimoy, then 35 and married with two children, professed to amazement. “A total shock. I didn’t expect it at all,” he told the Globe, while allowing that he found his character “a pretty groovy guy. . . . He’s very compassionate, intelligent, curious, logical.”
Indeed, Spock was an alluringly cool figure in a hot cultural era. He was a superior being who kept his head when Kirk and Scotty and Bones were losing theirs, yet his human half, with its pesky emotions, made for fascinating flaws. When Spock cried in one early episode, or, later on, professed his love for a woman while under the influence of alien spores, the effect was both charming and alarming, like watching your favorite professor get tipsy.
“I loved him like a brother,” Shatner tweeted Friday. “We will all miss his humor, his talent, and his capacity to love.”
Mr. Nimoy’s long-term response to his fame was mixed. As a working actor who had grown up in poverty and struggled for years to put food on the table, he was ecstatic to be an overnight star. He was nominated for an Emmy each season “Star Trek” was on the air, and, in keeping with the times, both he and Shatner recorded albums of pop songs, all of which are marvelously dreadful period artifacts.
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“Star Trek” was canceled due to low ratings after three years — a write-in campaign had kept it going for the final season — yet the show proved unstoppable in reruns, where it influenced a generation of viewers and filmmakers while becoming, with 1977’s “Star Wars,” the ur-franchise of today’s science-fiction/fantasy entertainment culture. Mr. Nimoy acted in other TV shows (he had a two-year run replacing Martin Landau on “Mission: Impossible”) but found it hard to shake his “Trek” character. He confessed in 2001 to having struggled with alcohol while making the series. In 1975, he published an autobiography titled, “I Am Not Spock.”
Yet he ultimately came around to the mythology that had spawned his character and that refused to die. Mr. Nimoy appeared in the first “Star Trek” motion picture in 1979, and directed the third and fourth installments, 1984’s “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock” and 1986’s “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” the latter with an ecological theme that was close to Mr. Nimoy’s own heart.
Both good films, but their last film was the best of them all. That film dealt with false flags and assassination just about the time JFK came out. Truly going where few in Hollywood have gone before.
That led to a brief directing career, a rapprochement with “Star Trek” fans, a deeply touching return as an older Spock to Zachary Quinto’s junior version in the 2009 “Star Trek” reboot, and one more autobiography in 1995. This one was called “I Am Spock.”
Reboot sucked and was not true to the original (Spock's parents did not die until later).
Leonard Nimoy was born March 26, 1931, to Max and Dora Nimoy, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Ukraine who had settled in Boston’s West End, where Max set up shop as a barber. The family was poor and hard-working; young Leonard hawked newspapers on a corner of Boylston and Arlington streets from an early age. In a 1995 Globe interview, he remembered “selling papers on Dec. 7, 1941, screaming ‘Japs Attack Pearl Harbor.’ That was the headline on the old Boston Record. People were going crazy, and I didn’t know why.” The dimes from his sales went into a college fund cookie jar at home.
But Mr. Nimoy was also drawn to the stage, to the consternation of his family. As early as 8, he was performing in plays at the Elizabeth Peabody settlement house in the West End. At 17, he played a role in Clifford Odets’s “Awake and Sing” that hardened his resolve and made him realize, according to a 1988 New York Times interview, that “I’ve got to do this for the rest of my life.”
After an Army stint, Mr. Nimoy wound up at the Pasadena Playhouse in California, which led to a low-burning film career that included small roles.
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In the decades after “Star Trek,” Mr. Nimoy gradually stepped back from acting. He hosted the paranormal series “In Search Of . . . ” in the late 1970s, and memorably played a villainous psychiatrist in the 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
Was a huge "In Search Of...." fan way back when I believed. More of a skeptic now on Nessie, Bigfoot, and the UFOs, but ISO did tackle Kennedy's killing.
Raised speaking Yiddish as a second language, Mr. Nimoy wove Judaism through his life and career in surprising ways. There was the “Shekhina Project,” of course, but there was also Mr. Spock’s Vulcan salute, designed by the actor and, as he told The New York Times in 2007, representing the Hebrew letter “shin,” “the first letter in the word ‘Shaddai,’ which means God.”
So Spock was a Jew, huh?
Of course, logic would dictate he be a secular atheist, wouldn't it?
Mr. Nimoy was flashed that salute wherever he went in life. He spoke of receiving it from Timothy Leary and from President Obama; he got it from truck drivers while crossing the street. It endures whenever Jim Parsons’s Sheldon — a sci-fi fanboy with “Star Trek” encoded in his DNA — flashes the Spock salute on CBS’s hit show “The Big Bang Theory.”
Not one of my favorites even when I'm forced to suffer through it by friends.
Wherever and from whomever he saw it, Mr. Nimoy understood the grateful message being sent his way: Live long and prosper....
And to clear the record, I wish that for all readers and people, including Jews.
As for the elite crowd that has and does while ruining it for the rest of us, well, a jail cell for eternity would be fine.
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Of course, Starfleet was at its core a MILITARY ORGANIZATION, wasn't it?
Looks like we haven't gone where no man has gone before even in the 23rd century.
UPDATE: Leonard Nimoy’s son makes Spock documentary to honor father
