In 1997, Patrick Stewart took me on a voyage through the stars from the comfort of the family computer room. An interactive expansion of a 1993 video cassette, Nine Worlds allowed you to travel the solar system, pick up gift shop postcards, scientific and cultural history of each neighboring planet, all accompanied by bombastic (and slightly compressed) renditions of Gustav Holst’s famous celestial suites. And of course, with the guided audio tour from Stewart himself, whose impassioned chronology of Mars only netted me a C+ on my homework.
“To the Romans and Greeks, it was the god of war,” orates computer Stewart, “to others IT WAS THE RED EYE OF THE DEVIL HIMSELF!”
In the days since his shocking passing, fans have found themselves with so much to parse from the multifaceted thespian. Of course, to most, he was the eloquent, insightful Captain Jean-Luc Picard, whose fascinations of the cosmos led the crew on Star Trek: The Next Generation. To others he was the fatherly Professor X across the sprawling X-Men films. He was also a master of stagecraft, an outspoken advocate, a baker of erotic cakes, and a Beavis and Butt-Head superfan.
To those of a certain age, he was also an educator. Or, more specifically, an edutainer. Following Myst’s bank-making showcase of what CD-ROMs were capable of, classrooms and home computers experienced a surge of educational software. There had long existed Math Blasters and illustrious typing teachers, but with the assistance of compressed video and tinny audio, publishers sought to bring the classroom experience home.
While most celebrities needed to be charged on a DUI to edutain, the Next Gen crew seemed eager to moonlight as teachers. Of course, LeVar Burton had long hosted Reading Rainbow by the time he donned La Forge’s visor, setting some precedent. While Riker was elsewhere teaching celebrity poker, Patrick Stewart captained numerous suites of multimedia CD-ROMs.
Sure, narrating a cultural history of our solar system makes sense given his resume, but Stewart was also recruited to guide young users in Compton’s Interactive Encyclopedia, a literary play-by-play of the Titanic’s final hours, among many other loose discs. His outstanding voice, powerful but kind, made him an ideal messenger for worldly information. It was an era where people were still learning how to use these machines, never mind learn from them. And in this brief era of scholarly CD, Stewart passed on the fascinations exhibited by his most famed performances.
While it didn’t do me a ton of good on my immediate school work, many of these pieces of software imparted some deeply rooted pieces of information, continuing to rattle around my skull. As someone who would later on adore passing out to Carl Sagan, I didn’t fully appreciate the psychic history of the Red Planet offered by Stewart. But the amount of context and culture squished into a meager disc is a fascination of its own. Where and how kids learn from computers going forward might be dubious, but there was an era of enthusiasm to reimagining games and education. When we aspired to reach higher, Stewart found himself a star there too.
