Washington, May 20 : Canadian actor William Shatner, who played Star Trek''s Captain Kirk, has now decided to explore another frontier-the world of cartoons.

Shatner, 78, is directing his new YouTube cartoon, ''The Gavones'', and is also doing the voiceover of Don Salmonella Gavone, who is struggling to pick an heir from his four misfit sons.

The pilot episode has just been posted, with the next instalment due out within a month.

Shatner says that the Gavone family is somewhere along the lines of the-Sopranos-meets-Hollywood.

"It''s the mafia in Hollywood trying to make a hit - and half the family think it''s murder and the other half thinks it''s a movie," People magazine quoted him as saying.

"It''s a comedic Soprano family," he said.

In the pilot, Shatner used friends and family to voice the characters, and he has revealed that cartoon characters with Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Martin Scorsese''s faces are likely to appear in the future.

"We can get anybody we want with the flick [of a pen]," he stated.

Shatner, who most recently starred in Boston Legal, has revealed that the reason he turned his hand to animation was because of the fun.

"I decided a cartoon on YouTube would be really fun," he said.

"All those media forms like Facebook and Twitter, we don''t know where they''re going to take us; certainly YouTube is unique in its form. So it seemed like a good idea to investigate how to do entertainment on it," he added.

Priceline is sponsoring the series, which will comprise 6-7 episodes and run twice a month. (ANI)