![]() Klingons get the look right, and Worf even delivers a crushing fist from time to time. These lyrics could have been written for Klingons (especially the “brow should furl” line):Īnd his fist be ever ready for a knock-down blow! Worf ( Michael Dorn)’s relation to the libretto is even more specific: if the British tar described in the song is a cartoon, an impossible ideal, so too is the traditional Klingon culture on which he tries to model his life. Michael Dorn as Worf and Brent Spiner as Data in STAR TREK: INSURRECTION Though Captain Picard has a patrician bearing, and though Starfleet has a clear hierarchy of rank, the Star Trek universe characterizes its utopian future as egalitarian and meritocratic. The opera mocks the British class structure and parodies the image of a British sailor (a.k.a. ![]() Pinafore still fit the kinds of stories screenwriters were telling over a century later. The social and political messages of H.M.S. ![]() In Star Trek, ships ply the space between the stars, but the organizational structure and the spirit of the Navy have survived the transition.Ī more surprising explanation for the aria’s appearance in two modern franchise films concerns its lyrical content. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the boat Indy and Marion board is a dingy fishing vessel from the age of coal. Gilbert and Sullivan’s vessel is a tall ship of the line at the height of British sea supremacy. Naturally each of these three uses of the song pertains to ship travel. It also works thematically, even when it is transplanted from a 19 th-century Royal Navy ship to a 20 th-century pier and a 24 th-century starship. So “A British Tar” works chronologically and tonally. (So is Rhys-Davies.) Stewart is also a theatrically-minded thespian well-versed in comedic roles, and he suggested using a Gilbert and Sullivan number for the wacky opening to Star Trek: Insurrection. Enterprise is not British, but Patrick Stewart, who plays him, is. Moreover it is British, as was Egypt in the 1930s. The aria dates to 1878, so Sala ( John Rhys-Davies) could sing it in 1936 without being anachronistic. There are layers of explanation for the long, strange, blockbuster-friendly life of “A British Tar.” Let’s start with the simplest. And then there were Jean-Luc Picard, Lieutenant Commander Worf, and Data: a spacefaring philosopher, a conflicted Klingon, and an android. So sang Sala, Egyptian fixer, after American archeologists Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood escaped Nazi clutches. Thus intoned the doughty sailors of Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. His energetic fist should be ready to resist
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |