NOOOOoooooo........ I used to work with a guy named Wayne. Neither of us liked Wayne's World, but that didn't stop everyone from telling us all the Garth & Wayne jokes they could think of.
You think you have it bad. The overwhelming majority of serial killers in the twentieth century all had the middle name Wayne. That's my cousin's middle name, and was almost mine. Sometimes I worry about my cousin.
Ouch. Of course, I get all the Garth Brooks jokes, too. It's okay because I happen to like country music. And I like to tell people "He's named after me." What? Really? Sure. I'm a few months older; I was here first, so he was named after me. Besides, that's actually his middle name. Guess it was so cool, he just had to go by it instead of his given name.
FWIW, there is an account of Axanar in the CBS-licensed book The Autobiography of James T. Kirk, which was published last year. This account, like Axanar, said that Captain Garth fought the Klingons over Axanar, which in this account was an alien planet occupied by the Klingons (similar to the Cardassians and Bajor). While the Autobiography does not provide an exact date for the battle or the war, it states that Garth commanded the USS Constitution, which presumably means it had to be post-2245, when the Constitution-class was launched.
If Axanar had been made, as a FASA fan, I would have been interested to see what they would have told, script leaks aside. It would have been their interpretation of what FASA reinterpreted from the original series. In Day of the Dove, Chekov says that his imaginary brother was amongst the 100 killed at the Arcanis IV research outost. But Prelude says that over the last 100 years, the outpost had grown into a modern city, with thousands killed in the Klingon attack. I can't remember off the top of my head the exacct details that the FASA soucebook said about the incident. My two nitpicks about Prelude were the Klingon cruisers in atmosphere (I thought the same with the Republic cruiser in the Star Wars prequels!), and the way Tony Todd mispronounces Inverness (it sounds like he says 'Inn-Verne-es' as opposed to 'In-ver-ness'. But I suppose he's in good company, compare how William Shatner pronounces 'Orion' in the animated episode The Pirates of Orion against his original in Journey to Babel! ('Or-ih-on' as opposed to 'Oh-rye-on'!)
Todd also mis-pronounces "Robau" as "Rabau", which is how they incorrectly spelled it in their script.
What Prelude describes is pretty much avoiding all the pitfalls of canon. It makes use of the little-explored 2240s, shows an explicit pre-Enterprise Starfleet with hardware that justifiably looks different, and only recycles characters whose role in pseudohistory was ambiguous. Is it "realistic" in Trek terms? The ship battles we see appear to take place in extreme slow motion, at very close ranges. We've never quite seen the two together before, but both are fixtures of Trek as such. The D7 makes an appearance, but it could be Starfleet falling into a Klingon propaganda trap that the heroes think it makes an entrance - mirroring Garth's trap in the other direction. Is it "realistic" in RW terms? The way Klingons fight the war is quite Klingon: why aim at military targets when the very point of the entire campaign is to kill stupid humans en masse and spread terror? There is no military opposition to the Klingon offensive, so no need to target such opposition - Peters makes that an explicit plot element. The characters "interviewed" sound fun enough. Should they be the leads of the movie-that-would-have-been? Naah... There could be more interesting angles to the pseudohistory through entirely different types of "supporting" characters. Bit players, the sort that would only get an interview when Ken Burns runs out of material for Episode 47 in the documentary, would be the meatiest. That bit about Kharn being taken prisoner and forced (by the already mad and cackling Garth whose Antosian cure is making him all grey and wrinkled) to watch the trap being sprung is hilarious enough on its own, but might also give rise to more. "My son allowed himself to be caught alive? I have no son. Let my s- uh, let that wretched disgrace of utter non-Klingonhood now be known as Kharn the UNDYING!" Timo Saloniemi