Shat was perfect in this sketch, playing Kirk as straight as if he were in Star Trek. Bill may have his flaws as an actor, but his ability to memorize lines is not one of them. He is known as one of the quickest studies ever. It’s great to see an SNL host who came totally prepared and didn’t have to read off the cue cards in one of the show’s longest sketches (8 minutes).
Also …
I must have gotten a little dust in my eye while watching the great Phil Hartman, seen here as “Bones.”
Shat has never minded poking fun at himself.
I think that’s the same guy playing Sulu as in the first SNL Trek spoof with Belushi (god rest his coke-snorting soul) as Kirk.
Strange they’d pick on him for gaining weight. Scotty is the more-traditional chunking out target.
Yeah he’s played Sulu four times over the years
I wonder if that was a callback to the problems Shatner had with his weight during TOS. Between the second and third seasons he put on a few pounds too many, so they had him go on a diet, wear a girdle and he got the unpleasant nickname “Captain Fatty”. They also stopped using the wraparound tunic used in the first two seasons since it was accentuating his paunch.
Akira Yoshimura wasn’t an actor or performer of any kind. He is (or was) a production designer on SNL from the very first season through at least season 50. He famously played Sulu in The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise when Elliot Gould played an NBC executive who canceled Star Trek. I asked Google whether he had retired and found a story about how he, Lorne Michaels, and crane camera operator John Pinto were the only people on staff during the first season of SNL who were still working there in season 50. Of course, Lorne took the first half of the 80s off, so Yoshimura and Pinto were the only two people to work on each of the first 50 seasons of SNL.
When Chris Pine hosted SNL in 2017, they had Yoshimura play Sulu again. By that time, there was a lot of criticism of SNL for never having had an Asian cast member. When they finally hired an Asian cast member, Bowen Yang arguably became the funniest cast member. However, all through that there remained Yoshimura (and Pinto) working on the show.
On a related note, Lindsay Lohan was also an excellent guest host who got all her lines perfectly without cue cards. That was before she crashed.
I can also remember hearing Tina Fey talk about the fact that Lohan was highly intelligent and remarkably well-read for her age.
And then she became the Lindsay Lohan we are more familiar with.
Drugs and alcohol have ruined an awful lot of lives. My sister sort of met her at a NYC dance club 10 or 15 years ago. Lohan had come into the club completely wasted, and she squeezed my sister’s boob as she walked by. If someone is on boob-squeezing terms, that has to be considered meeting them, right?
Oh, yes. Many people here would like to meet Sydney Sweeney that way.