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Adam Nimoy, the son of Leonard Nimoy, otherwise known as “Star Trek’s” original Spock, is watching his Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary about his father tick down to its conclusion. And though it has garnered a lot of attention, not a lot has been coming from Silicon Valley, oddly enough.
Odd because Spock is beloved by the geeks and nerds who populate the tech industry.
“People have expressed admiration for Mr. Spock because he was a nerd and a geek, and he was cool,” Nimoy, who was in San Francisco for the Grateful Dead show this weekend, told Re/code in an interview. “We have heard from NASA scientists and engineers who were inspired to go into their fields because of Mr. Spock.” But he hasn’t noticed a whole lot of participation from Silicon Valley corporations or the tech sector in general, he said.
Well, at least there’s Woz. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is a high-profile fan — this video (starting at about 17:30) shows him unabashedly geeking out at the actor, and the two then excitedly discussing how Google Translate is the modern-day Universal Translator, the one piece of tech the actor wanted from the show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsKQUsI8lLs
The documentary, “For the Love of Spock,” was originally meant to be an exploration of the character’s effect on pop culture, set to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the original series in 2016. But since the elder Nimoy’s death in February, it is expanding into a biography of the actor as well.
But it’s as a pop culture icon that the tech community has valued the Enterprise’s science officer. “The geeks, the nerds, the loners, the shy people — we can all find something in Spock that we can relate to,” said the younger Nimoy.
And, of course, there is the effect that the series as a whole had on the imaginations of inventors and scientists. Nimoy will be part of a panel sponsored by NASA at the upcoming Comic Con, discussing the many actual tech innovations inspired by items like the tricorder, phaser, cloaking devices and Nichelle Nichols’s brassiere.
But the Kickstarter ends July 1, and is still $67,000 short of its $600,000 goal. Does Silicon Valley skew too young? Or is it just that coders are better at doing things at the last minute? Well, in this case, all Spock fans can do is hope that the needs of the many will coincide with the needs of the few — or the one, Adam Nimoy.
(Full disclosure: I backed this project with my big forty dollars.)
You can view the Kickstarter pitch here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLuU8v81EOw
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
