With the eagerly anticipated new Star Trek film, Into the Darkness, just weeks away, I wanted to dust off my old LEGO-constructed phaser, don my rubber Vulcan ears, and ask that all important question: would the original Kirk even like the modern Kirk?

Captain Kirk has become identified as the "cowboy" who'd never met a rule he wouldn't break or a woman he wouldn't bed. An image both celebrated and ridiculed...sometimes simultaneously. Yet equally (often in Star Trek novels) he is portrayed as an order barking martinet. Partly, that reflects the contradiction in what human culture (and especially American culture) tends to lionize: the soldier and the maverick. Two, arguably, incompatible ideals.

Yet Kirk was never quite the rule breaker he's been imagined to be. Rule bender -- sure. But many an old episode hinged on Kirk struggling with what he wanted to do...and what he was duty-bound to do. And he wasn't quite the chain-of-(his)-command stickler some imagine him as being, either. More than a few reviews of Star Trek over the years have actually criticized Kirk's liberality in allowing underlings to talk back, and for being chummy with his crew.

One could make the case the original Kirk (William Shatner) would regard the current Kirk (Chris Pine) with some skepticism. Now, due to the alternate reality paradox of the 2009 movie, arguably the current Kirk isn't the original. And he's a brash, youthful Kirk. Yet there were clues in the original series that Kirk had been a dour young man.

You could argue the character dynamic of the original series was never meant to be emotional Kirk in contrast to logical Spock. Rather, Kirk was the Mama bear bridging the extremes of Spock's logic and Dr. McCoy's passion. The lesson being moderation in all things.

Likewise, was his now notorious libido simply a reflection of the 1960s Mad Men/James Bond ideal of what a "man" should be?