Turkey Time in Space

The other day I speculated that the 1973 Turkish Batman film might actually have been intended as a parody, but that this aspect might have been 'lost in translation' when the film was seen by English speaking audiences, who just assumed it was a bad movie, pure and simple.  The 'badness' might actually have been intentional, (although the physical 'badness' of the film - the over exposure, for instance - was most certainly not intentional).  Another Turkish film which has definitely been misinterpreted and misrepresented in the English speaking world is the so called 'Turkish Star Trek'.  I've seen speculation that it was some kind of Turkish fan film, but the reality is that Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda (1973), (Omer the Tourist in Star Trek), is the last of eight feature films based around the character of 'Omer the Tourist', an itinerant Turkish layabout who finds himself in a variety of unexpected locations and situations.  Played by Sadri Ailsik, the character was hugely popular in Turkey, but virtually unknown outside the country.  With the Star Trek TV series also popular in Turkey, it was inevitable that there should be a crossover, (entirely unauthorised on the part of Trek's copyright owners, Paramount, of course).  Meaning that the film is the Turkish equivalent to, say, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), in trying to squeeze more mileage out of two existing properties by combining them.  The thing about this film, though, (and what has undoubtedly confused some commentators as to its nature), is that for its opening twenty minutes or so it seems to be a straight Star Trek knock off, with bargain basement recreations of the original's sets and costumes.  Indeed, the script itself is taken, pretty much faithfully, from the first season episode 'Man Trap', (actually the first broadcast episode).  The set-up is the same, the characters the same, the dialogue pretty much identical.  Where it departs from the actual episode is when the professor decides to provide Kirk and co with a scapegoat for the killings perpetrated by the shape shifting alien currently pretending to be his dead wife, by bringing a man from the past (who won't be missed) to the planet.  Enter Omer the Tourist.

The rest of the film is basically the Omer character disrupting the work of the Enterprise crew, particularly Mr Spock, with his antics and interpolating himself into various scenes from the original episode, to 'comic effect'.  The film eventually departs from the TV episode when everyone beams back down to the planet, becoming almost a Star Trek 'greatest hits' homage as elements from other episodes, including 'What Are Little Girls Made of?', 'Arena' and 'Amok Time' are dragged in.  Eventually, the monster is killed and Omer is beamed back to his own time, but finds that he has imbued with some of Spock's attributes - including the pointed ears and nerve grip - to 'hilarious' effect.  If nothing else, the Omer-centric parts of the film just go to show how localised humour can be and how it often fails to travel.  The nearest equivalent to Omer in English language films would be either Jerry Lewis or Norman Wisdom, but without the child like aspect.  While he shares their physical humour, he combines it with a degree of aggression reminiscent of Arthur Haines' stage persona - he represents the 'common man' and 'common sense', supposedly cutting through the pretensions of the educated.  Consequently, he spends a lot of time trying to upend Spock's logic and driving the computer to a nervous breakdown.  Unfortunately, like the aforementioned Lewis and Wisdom, I find this sort of character simply irritating.  Subsequently, for me, the film moves from mildly amusing to utterly painful as soon as Omer arrives.  The amusement in the earlier parts derives from seeing something you know well being recreated on a budget even lower than the original.  That said, despite being made the same year as the Batman film, Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda is, on a technical, if not budgetary, level far more advanced.  For one thing, it is in colour, for another, it actually usual uses some optical effects for the phaser beams and transporters.  In true Turkish fashion, however, all the shots of the USS Enterprise in space are pirated from the TV series.  Possibly because, for the most part, the makers were working from a professionally written script, (a lot of the Omer scenes were, apparently, partially improvised), the direction and editing also look far more professional than on other Turkish films of this ilk.

The approximations of the original's sets are pretty basic looking, indeed, like something an amateur fan production might have come up with.  The costumes are, up to a point, quite accurate looking - except that instead of the original's gold, blue and red uniforms, the film adds green and fawn coloured ones, (this might have been due to the fact that Turkish TV didn't go into colour until 1981, meaning the makers might not have seen the actual colours used, or had based their costumes on the less than accurate comic strip versions of Star Trek available at the time).  It's clear that the colour coding of the uniforms was lost on the makers: Science Officer Spock wears a gold 'command' shirt rather than the correct 'life sciences' blue, for instance.  There is no attempt to cast actors who look like the original cast, (a non-Asian Sulu, for example, although their 'Yoeman Janice' (Rand) is quite a good likeness for the original and Uhura is at least black and a woman), nor do any of them attempt to imitate the acting styles of the original.  As a consequence, without William Shatner's often over dramatic playing of the character, Kirk comes over as a bland and often distant figure, while Dr McCoy lacks any of DeForest Kelley's warmth or cantankerousness.  Spock, (or 'Spak' as the sub-titles call him) comes off best, played straight for the most part but, in the film's latter section, reduced to be being a straight-man foil to Omer's tiresome antics.  On the plus side, while the interiors might betray a threadbare budget, the exterior scenes on the planet are quite magnificent.  Apparently shot in the ruins of the Ancient Greek Anatolian city of Ephesus, (now in modern Turkey), they make quite the contrast with the usually studio-bound planetary surfaces of the original TV series.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of Turist Omer Uzay Yolunda is largely going to be dependent upon your tolerance levels for the comedy of Omer the Tourist.  If, like me, you quickly find him tiresome, then it could turn into a bit of a slog.  On the other hand, it does have much better production values than other Turkish exploitation films of its era, (doubtless, the fact that it was an Omer the Tourist film meant that it had a bigger budget than them).  Conversely, the better quality of the production and the grounding of the script in an actual episode of the original, prevent it from fully taking off into the realms of lunacy one usually expects from these Turkish knock offs.  The joys of the films featuring Batman or Captain America, or even indigenous superheroes like 'Iron Claw', is the way in which they reinterpret and reinvent their source materials to meet local audience expectations, becoming uniquely Turkish in the process.  That's the problem with 'Turkish Star Trek' - despite the presence of a legendary (in Turkey, at least) local comedy character, it never really feels like a local product in the way that, say, the Batman film does.  Still, at sround only seventy minutes long, it isn't too taxing to sit through, even if you feel like strangling Omer for fifty of those minutes.