Posted 9:47 AM by Angie Schultz

Turkey Trek

I want you to know I struggled for just minutes wondering which brilliant title to put on this post.

This is just breathtaking. The reviewer says it's a Turkish remake of Star Trek but I'm going to boldly go where I've often been before and declare that he's mistaken.

The reviewer, Seanbaby, does not speak Turkish, and the video is not subtitled. So it's hard to know what's going on, both for him and for us.

Well, I was going to speculate here, but I decided to put my mighty Google skills to use and maybe I'd actually find out something (NOTE: this is why I don't have a position in humanities at an Ivy League university), and I uncovered the following info.

As I suspected, this film is actually one of a series about Turist Omer:

"Turist Omer" is a series of films about some idiot in a poor excuse for a cowboy hat, who always winds up in bizarre situations. This time around, Omer gets mistakenly beamed aboard the Starship Enterprise, where he's dropped right into the middle of a Turkish rip-off of "Star Trek" episode "The Man Trap." If you're familiar with this episode, then you shouldn't have any problem following the film without blowing a vein in your forehead, but if you're not, then it's just a bunch of rampant idiocy with this Omer weirdo not helping the confusion any.

According to several sites, Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda means Tourist Omer in Star Trek.

See here for the poster for what looks to be the original Turist Omer; note that he's getting married here as well. (Dig that great font at the head of the page.)

Some confusion about the theme music. This site says:

The filmmakers have even been so bold as to use the original opening sequence from the TV series (tinted yellow, in the hope that no one would notice), although they use a surf guitar version of the TWILIGHT ZONE theme instead of the famous STAR TREK theme!

Whereas this site, at the delightfully-named www.revengeismydestiny.com, says:

The plot swipes from Man Trap, Amok Time and Tomorrow is Yesterday and they went so far as to just outright steal the opening credits from the series, replacing the music with "Out of Limits" by the Ventures!

It also looks (from the screen shots on The Wave) like it parodies "I, Mudd" and possibly "Arena" and "A Private Little War".

Note: If you want to be ahead of the pack like Colby, this site sells this movie on DVD-R. Be sure and read their DVD-R page before thinking about buying. It also has the Turkish Star Wars that Seanbaby mentioned.

Various sites give the date of the movie as 1973, '74, or '75, so it's not like this is new. Many of the sites I found were in Turkish.

This is probably the sort of thing that I would have already known about had I stayed on my original career track of Hopeless Trekkie. But back in '79, that really didn't look feasible. Neither did female fighter pilot (subject of a Post to Come). Little did I know!

UPDATE: Doh! I forgot! Found via the Queen of Spleen.

UPDATE: Jeremy Walker writes in to tell me that "Out of Limits" by the Ventures is basically a surf-rock version of the Twilight Zone theme song. (You'd think they'd save that for a version of the Outer Limits theme song, except that I don't remember what that sounds like.) Apparently it's not a direct cover, because their album The Ventures in Space has both "Out of Limits" and "Twilight Zone" on it. Unless, of course, their "Twilight Zone" is nothing like the TZ theme. I don't know, because couldn't find on-line copies of those songs in the little googling I was moved to do.