I’m a little late to this party, but I take things as I find them. I’m confused, however, how to “take” an Elvis impersonator who’s built an exact replica of all the original Star Trek teevee show sets in an abandoned dollar store in Ticonderoga, New York, and sort of inhabits them.

For all of you with, ahem, suspicious minds, I assure you I didn’t make this up:

James Cawley really liked Star Trek. Really really liked Star Trek. By the power of Landru and re-runs, (he’s younger than the show is), he was hooked on a show about bombing around the galaxy and groping green chicks, while listening to logical advice on why you shouldn’t, and doing it anyway. You know, because Shatner.

Cawley has built his own Desilu Xanadu, using mostly his own money, money earned as an Elvis impersonator.

Why would an Elvis impersonator build Star Trek sets? I dunno. You’re asking the wrong guy. I don’t know why an Elvis impersonator would do anything, including impersonating Elvis. I can’t visit that mindset without pharmaceutical help, and a fried banana and peanut butter sandwich. But Cawley knew what he was about. He wanted to make his own Star Trek episodes, and did it:

I suppose I could jest about it, but it does have a million views on YouTube. I was a little kid when Star Trek first came out, and I’m not sure a million people watched an episode back then. Everybody was watching Bewitched or something. Star Trek was “out there” in more ways than one, and not everyone wanted to see a doughy Canadian actor with a Christopher Walken delivery wrestle a guy in a dollar store tyrannosaurus Halloween costume over a patch of unpaved Burbank backlot. But give it its due: it spawned a zillion imitators.

However, sooner or later, the suits come for you. CBS/Paramount at one time looked the other way when people made fan-fiction type stuff, like Cawley’s bargain basement Enterprise enterprise, but eventually they cracked down on the whole scene. It wasn’t Cawley’s fault. He was doing it because he loved it. But others tried to make real coin with Star Trek homages, and they pissed in the whole Gene pool.

But the Elvis gene runs deep. The King don’t quit, until he makes it to the bathroom, anyway. Kirk has any number of Kobayashi Maru tricks up his sleeve. And Cawley is both of them, remember? He figured if he could make deals with Klingons on his show, he could certainly make deals with Gene Roddenberry’s copyright successors. So he did.

After a long lunch with more than a few Romulan Ales, no doubt, the salt vampires in the legal department at CBS/Paramount decided to let Cawley have his fun. In return for a cut of the action, I’m sure. Why not let Space Elvis Cawley give tours of the stomping grounds of Space Elvis Shatner? So they do. And now that real money is involved, real Shatners are involved, too.

It’s a Corbomite Maneuver for money for a lot of people now:

Hey, don’t sleep on Clint Howard, just because captain Kirk is holding court on the bridge with all the high rollers. Howard appeared on The Andy Griffith Show, Star Trek, and Seinfeld. Even Spock couldn’t compete with that, although inventing Uber and driving the Bangles to Liverpool was a strong career move, you have to admit.

Teevee and movies and other media masquerade as entertainment, but there’s a lot more going on there. Half-hour situation  comedies like Andy Griffith and Dick van Dyke are closer to Aesop’s Fables than jokes stapled onto depictions of quotidian life. They usually contain little parables, and become a form of guidance for the general audience. They normally contain a morality test of some sort over trivial affairs that the characters work their way through in 24 minutes or so. Homily-length redemption ensues with 6 minutes of soapsuds commercials mixed in. Women start dressing like Laura Petrie and men start acting like Rob Petrie even though they might not be aware they’re doing it. That’s why teevee got so destructive, as the ghouls who make the shows looked for new thrills to peddle. Gilligan found himself in desperate straits, but he didn’t start cooking meth in his hut to get by.

TV shows like Star Trek are a form of replacement for passion plays for a couple of generations who thought the Beach Boys were an improvement on Giuseppe Verdi, and Andy Griffith was John the Baptist. Real passion plays, or pageants (paging Cecil B. DeMille), were:

The Passion Play or Easter pageant is a dramatic presentation depicting the Passion of Jesus Christ: his trial, suffering and death. The viewing of and participation in Passion Plays is a traditional part of Lent in several Christian denominations, particularly in the Catholic and Evangelical traditions; as such Passion Plays are often ecumenical Christian productions.

Passion Plays have had a long and complex history involving faith and devotion, civic pageantry, religious and political censorship, large-scale revival and historical re-enactments.

In a very real way, the entertainment biz replaced all forms of religion in American life. Newspapers, a form of entertainment, killed the Catholic church dead, for instance. And remember, the government is just showbiz for ugly people. It wasn’t a unanimous move into another thing, of course. There’s some overlap, but there’s a definable Star Trek sect, with schismatics taking their hyperdrive schematics and forming a Star Wars splinter denomination. In old-fangled passion plays, Jesus has to work through some things in Gethsemane. If you boldly go where no man has gone before, you have to be tempted by a hot galactic strumpet with a bouffant and a Reynolds Wrap bikini before you get down to brass tacks and dilithium transubstantiation and kick some Klingon ass. But it’s all wrapped up in an hour, and everyone goes home blessed.

So I guess it’s not all that odd that a prophet in a spangled jumpsuit and pompadour would appear out of the wilderness of upstate New York to become the patriarch, an interstellar Billy Sunday, for the one true religion that America has produced: Elvis in Space.

Wait a minute; yes it is.