Werewolf By Night's Kirk Thatcher Wrote The Funniest Line In Star Trek IV
Kirk Thatcher might not be a name you recognize, but he likely had a hand in making something you care about. He's been involved in the visual effects for movies like "Return of the Jedi" and "Robocop 2." He wrote the screenplay for "Muppet Treasure Island," and directed several Muppet movies like "It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie" and "The Muppets' Wizard of Oz."
Most recently, Thatcher was seen in the MCU's Halloween special "Werewolf by Night," where he plays one of the villains, Jovan — a character he knew so little about prior to filming that it wasn't until the cameras had started rolling that he realized he was supposed to be the bad guy this time around. "We knew we were there to honor the death of Ulysses, but I thought that was it," Thatcher explained in an interview with Collider. "I didn't know there was a monster hunt, and I didn't know we'd be killing each other. ... I thought it was basically a funeral and a wake. We're all going to drink and have a good time, so I'm kind of more jovial. Then, when we're sitting there, they're like, 'Oh no, you're all fair game, and you're going to go hunt this monster, and whoever gets the Bloodstone ... ' So suddenly, I'm like, 'Oh, okay.' Then I turn into the bad guy."
Oh, and of course, he was the "Punk on the Bus" in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," a film that he also served as an associate producer on and even wrote and recorded the song the punk plays on the boombox himself. And he got to do even a little more than his job title called for, as he wrote one of the best jokes in the whole movie.
The just okay computer
In another 2022 interview with Collider, Kirk Thatcher explained that he had a lot of jobs on the set of "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," with director and star Leonard Nimoy relinquishing a lot of duties to him. "He said, 'I want you to deal with all the technical stuff with effects and sets, and all that, because I want to focus on the story,'" Thatcher recalled.
Thatcher even got to write a few scenes here and there, and he explained that he wrote the famous scene in which Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) tries to speak to a computer in the 1980s. "I wrote that gag, that he talks to the mouse, because I had just gotten an Apple 512 Mac, and so the whole thing was, they said, 'Well we're going to have the design thing done on a Macintosh because it's a graphic computer.' I said, 'Well, then Scotty should sit down ... He should talk to the computer because he doesn't know. He'd just be like, 'Hello computer,' it doesn't do anything.' And then Alex Henteloff goes, 'Well use the mouse.' So he thinks it's a microphone because they look like a microphone. So that was my gag that got in the movie, and Leonard loved it."
According to a 2016 article in Inverse, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos spoke at the Washington Post "Transformers" conference and said that he had been inspired by "Star Trek" to create the Alexa interface for the Amazon Echo because of a lifelong dream to create a voice-activated system just like the one in "Star Trek." So, it would seem that Thatcher's joke has become a bit dated by virtue of technology catching up with "Star Trek."