Category:Videos

Can Kirk make the Federation safe for $10 wine by destroying the Cheap Wine Eater?

The Doomsday Machine, better known to the crew of the USS Enterprise as the Cheap Wine Eater, is trying to premiumize every wine in the Federation. Fortunately for wine drinkers from Vulcan to Rigel to Tellar, James Tiberius Kirk has a plan — overload the impulse engines on the damaged USS Constellation to destroy the Cheap Wine Eater.

This parody comes from “The Doomsday Machine,” the sixth episode of the second season of the original series. It has many of the bits that made “Star Trek” so much fun — a plot lifted from great literature (in this case, “Moby Dick”); an over the top performance by guest star William Windom, who does Ahab via Humphrey Bogart in “The Caine Mutiny;” Scotty in a Jefferies tube; and William Shatner’s impeccable Kirk, wearing his green wraparound tunic instead of the standard uniform top. And I can hear Kirk saying, “Premium-eye-zation” just the way he says, “Civil-eye-zation,” with that touch of a Canadian accent.

My apologies to all in the cast featured here, as well as to the late Star Trek impresario Gene Roddenberry. A tip o’ the WC’s fedora to Mike Leo on YouTube, where I found the original scene, as well as Star Trek Transcripts, which has the original dialogue. And all silliness like this owes a debt to WineParody, whose Robert Parker epic is the standard by which these efforts are judged.

Make sure you turn captions on when you watch the video; you can make the captions bigger or change their color by clicking on the settings gear on the lower right.

Churro, the blog’s associate editor, contributed to this post

More wine and film parodies:
• Robin Hood
• Enter the Dragon
• Shaft