CINEMA SEEN - "A Noble Enterprise"
By William Margold

     Bandit was an enormous black-and-white cat.
     The formidable feline waddled into my life in 1964, and spent over six years providing me with numerous memories...mostly having to do with his seemingly bottomless pit of an appetite for anything that I or my roommates at a tree house like apartment on Second Street just off Montana Avenue in Santa Monica were eating. Indeed---his uncanny ability to tempt the fates of the roaring flames of our oven’s broiler (the door of which fell off and was never replaced)--- and deftly extricate a hot dog, a chicken thigh...or even a small t-bone steak...and then find a secluded hiding place behind one of the many holes that led to the rafters behind our walls to polish it off, were the stuff of legend laced with laughter.
     And anything, including sour cream and chive stuffed baked potatoes, pieces of bacon, and even pieces of butter soaked and maple syrup drenched French toast, placed on the kitchen table was always fair game.
     Finally, if our meals did manage to survive long enough to be carried into the living room, Bandit was always in position for that opportune moment when one of us was distracted, and then he would grab our most delectable looking item, and head toward sanctuary in the rafters.
     I guess that it was fitting then that early one eerily cold and foggy morning in 1970, I found Bandit dead---his massive head immersed in the trough-sized porcelain food bowl that he would converge upon regularly, and literally protect with his enormous paws while he voraciously devoured his own daily ration of kibble, pausing only to growl and clutch it even tighter if someone ventured too close---apparently the victim of a heart attack.
     However...all of Bandit’s eating escapades pale into comparison to the cool September evening in 1966, when he decided to join a couple of us just as the first episode of a new TV show on NBC called "Star Trek" was about to come on. Eyeing the big black metal box that was our Admiral television, and realizing that it would be nice and warm if he could figure out a way to jump up and sprawl out on top of it, Bandit began to prance about at its base like an anxious athlete...taking in modulated amounts of air before hunching as low to the ground as his rotundity would allow...as he tensed up for the leap.
     Then, expelling a grunt that sounded like a meow mixed with thunder, he propelled himself upwards, his claws scraping hideously against the metal side of the set, and landed on top of the box with a thud, positioning himself so that a couple of his oven mitten sized paws and his bushy tail hung over the edge of the set, thus managing to obliterate a considerable portion of the flickering screen in the process.
     And that’s how "Star Trek" (starring William Shatner as Captain Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock) along with a crew of special supporting players "enter-prised" its way into my life. And through the three years of the original TV series...and many films (concluding with a final "full regular cast sign-off" in 1991’s "The Undiscovered Country")...they would become iconic as well as comforting presences.
     Thankfully...I didn’t have to contend with any furry distractions during my first viewing of J.J. Abrams’ magnificent STAR TREK...the film that I have anointed as not only the Best Film of 2009...but also as my Favorite Film of the last decade. And after three more visits to what Master Abrams has wrought, my passion for the production only continues to magnify in its appreciation of the fact that I am very much looking forward to watching it again...and again!
     Resonating with the glorious vibrancy of friendship, loyalty and honor, the early adventures of Kirk (an excellent Chris Pine) and Spock (an evocative Zachary Quinto) abroad the U.S.S. Enterprise, along with a new crew of familiar characters (particularly enjoyable is Karl Urban as Medical Officer Leonard "Bones" McCoy), made me feel like the torch that the series creator Gene Roddenberry ignited back in 1966, had been handed over seamlessly, and that while "Space (may well be)...the Final Frontier"...the future bodes well for all involved in this new enterprise...on both sides of the screen.
     Only problem is that it’s going to be awfully difficult for my current cat companion, Samson---although nowhere near the size of Bandit---to figure out to how to lie on top of a plasma TV set.      end
     NOTE: Originally published in LA Xpress, April 1, 2010, issue.

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