Even if you’re a Trekkie, you have to admit the Gorn was a pretty silly monster. You know, the funny battle Captain Kirk had with the lizard in the loincloth.
Someone posted it on YouTube under “Worst Fight Scene Ever,” and it garnered over 12 million views. The lizard suit even wound up in a failed 1977 Gene Roddenberry pilot called Spectre. (Why throw anything away, right?)
Okay, so monster technology wasn’t as amazing then as it is today, but the green Lady from Star Trek wasn’t real high tech make-up either, and she still looks hot after all these years. Now that there’s the Star Trek video game coming on April 23, you better believe this isn’t going to be your big brother’s Gorn.
In fact, Entertainment Weekly has written about “Gorn Supremacy” on their site, and judging by the graphics, the Gorn reboot looks pretty cool. Instead of a guy in a silly suit, the Gorn finally looks like a real threat. From my point of view, they seem to have a bit of a Jurassic Park T-Rex vibe, and when you put guns in their hands, they are indeed way more dangerous than ever.
As Geoff Boucher writes, “In the original Trek series, the alien reptile hegemony was represented by but one individual, the menacing captain of a Gorn ship who tussled with Captain Kirk in a 1967 episode called arena. That was it for the Gorn on the series; the Vulcans, Klingons and Romulans showed up again and again but the Gorn never got a callback…”
So it is indeed nice to see the Gorn get a reboot. As the L.A. Times notes, “This Gorn rocks and roars,” and in addition to having a seriously dangerously villain this time out, the relationship between Kirk and Spock in this game apparently grows deeper, to the point where creative director Steve Sinclair called it a “bro-op.”
All this definitely makes us excited for the Star Trek game, which will be a really nice bridge to the next installment in the JJ Abrams series, Star Trek Into Darkness, which hits theaters on May 17. It’s now hard to believe we’re now this close to seeing the franchise revving up again for take off, and we hope it will indeed continue to live long and prosper.
