William Shatner has turned up in some interesting places since rising to outsize fame by playing Captain Kirk in “Star Trek” in the 1960s. He’s had a talk show on The Biography Channel. He led viewers through a home-repair program on cable’s DIY network. And he was the lead in a signature program of the 1980s, cop drama “T.J. Hooker.”
Now he’s heading to kids’ TV.
Shatner will narrate a new animated series about pink space creatures known as “Clangers” on Sprout, the kids’ network owned by NBCUniversal. If younger viewers want to see the aliens, they’ll have to get through Shatner first.
That’s because Sprout, in an unorthodox maneuver, won’t show the creatures until the series debuts on June 20th. In the meantime, executives are counting on Shatner to draw kids to the series through promos in which he rattles off some of the spoken-word poetry he’s used over the years in projects ranging from a 1968 album (on which he covered Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”) to a series of Priceline ads in the early 2000s.
“We are really holding back the characters,” said Jennifer Giddens, vice president of marketing at Sprout.”We are almost letting the kids drive” their own ideas of what the Clangers will look like, she said. Over the course of several promotional spots, Shatner will hint, through his spoken-word monologues,at what the creatures might look like, Giddens said. “They are going to want to see the big unveiling” when “Clangers” debuts.
