Nimoy's role as Mr. Spock, in Star Trek, lent him the allure of logicality and SCIENCE that the series never really had. The show had evolved from a series of films re: the unexplained, that had been hosted by Rod Serling, of The Twilight Zone fame.
While initially made for television, in many poorer neighhborhoods, like that I grew up in, these films were actually screened in theaters, and I recall looking up at grainy footage of UFOs, and one particularly compelling image of a Mayan warrior supposedly depicted in what was claimed to be an Apollo-like space module. It was all nonsense, of course, but the In Search Of... films wer merely one of a wave of documentaries released in the early 1970s that pushed the bounds of the medium. The best and most famous one of all, of course, was none other than Orson Welles' F For Fake.
As I said in my review of that film:
'In a sense, its closest cousin was the kitschy old 1970s television ‘documentary’ series In Search Of… with Leonard Nimoy, wherein Star Trek’s once and future Mr. Spock would explore the ‘scientific verities’ of such things as the Bermuda Triangle, ghosts, and Judge Crater’s disappearance. Welles’ last finished and distributed film is really a filmic treatise on art and truth, and, given Welles’ voluminous intellect and dazzling talent, it’s a near-masterpiece, and very close to being the ‘new kind of film’ that Welles claimed it was. Of course, its closest antecedent would not be in film but in the supposed ‘nonfiction’ literary works of Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) and Marcel Proust (Remembrance Of Things Past).'
Naturally, I was right, but these films, or mockumentaries (of a sort- they differ from the Christopher Guest version of that genre), do have a place in film history, if for no other reason than that they were heralds of the mass media saturation and dumbing down of culture that the ensuing decades have wrought. Information that is dubious is treated as if it were gained from on high, and credible science is treated with a skepticism bordering on the manic. That's you Fox News.
But, in looking back at these shows, all these decades later, the kitsch value not only survives, but thrives, and as a time capsule of Americana it is invaluable. Not bad for crap, eh?
