A Tourist On The Enterprise: The Turkish Spoof Of Star Trek
Image Source: CultureSlate
Stop us if you’ve heard this before. The Starship Enterprise is in orbit around the planet M-113. They are there to provide supplies and medical exams to the two inhabitants of the planet, Professor Robert Crater and his wife Nancy, an old flame of Doctor McCoy’s. However, unknown to all but Crater, “Nancy” is an impostor. The last of an alien race of shape-shifters who feed on salt, who killed and replaced the original. It begins killing members of the crew, draining their salt, while Professor Crater pulls a Turkish hobo named Ömer the Tourist out of his time zone to pin the blame on him.
That’s right, we’re not watching “The Man Trap”, the first broadcast episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, we’re watching Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (Turist Ömer Uzay Yolunda), a Turkish spoof film from 1973. Ömer the Tourist was a Turkish comedy character played by Sadri Alışık. Much of the humor revolved around him getting into “fish-out-of-water” situations, and his observations about the people and situations he encounters. The Enterprise was a very exaggerated take on this. Much of the humor in this film is based around Ömer’s antics on the Enterprise and irritating Spock in particular.
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Star Trek wouldn't premiere in Turkey until 1973, under the name Uzay Yolu. This premiere was what inspired Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek, and as stated before, the plot takes much of its beats from the episode “The Man Trap”, which was the first to be broadcast, but not the first to be produced. To pad out the run time, sequences from other episodes are added in, including androids from "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" and "I, Mudd", the Gorn fight from “Arena”, and the famous fight between Kirk and Spock from “Amok Time”.
One noteworthy thing about Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek is that despite its lower budget, it still looks like a Star Trek episode. Television shows in Hollywood as a result of lower budgets, are usually shot on sound stages. This controlled the settings and ensured that the budget stayed low, though budgets have gotten higher, and more on-location shooting has taken place. Yeşilçam, on the other hand, basically had no studios, so to keep costs down, all footage had to be shot on location. The film was shot around the ruins of Ephesus, with all sound added in later as was typical of the Yeşilçam style. The scenery looked close enough to the actual episode, despite the film’s lower budget.
Image Source: Letterboxd
Another common aspect of Turkish films is the way they shoot the dialogue. In Hollywood, filmmakers shoot one actor's part of the dialogue, then reverse the shot to shoot the other actor’s lines. In Turkey, both actors face the camera and speak their dialogue in the order it was meant to be. This save on film stock, which was expensive and hard to come by, at least compared to Hollywood.
Unlike say, 3 Dev Adam, Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek isn’t so much an unlicensed knockoff as much as it is a spoof. The filmmakers might not be able to get away with something like this now, but it could probably make a decent claim towards fair use. Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek belongs in any library of Star Trek spoofs, as Ed Glaser put it, “It’s Swinging Sixties Sci-Fi, with a Turkish sense of humor.” If you’d like to learn more, there are a variety of essays about the film, including Ian Robert Smith’s (no relation) “Beam Me Up, Ömer”.
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