While this is strictly my opinion, I'm pretty sure that all the people in this thread who have stated that they would be able to categorically tell that the DSC Klingons were Klingons (and their ships were Klingon ships) without any context beforehand, are just stubbornly lying
I'm sorry, but accusations of dishonesty and bad faith cross the line from reasonable disagreement to pointless ad hominem attack.
because they don't want to admit that that's actually a viable line of thought.
If I'm following correctly, the line of thought you're describing here can be summarized as: "Audience members ought to be able to recognize on sight, with no other context clues, a new alien makeup design as representing aliens seen in previous productions."
I am not persuaded that that
is the only valid way to do things.
There's a bit of a difference for TMP, though. The first thing we see are the Klingon ships, and they look exactly like the ships from TOS, only much better detailed. That's pretty much a dead giveaway that the aliens we then see next are Klingons,
And the first time we see a Klingon in DIS, he's speaking recognizable Klingonese and talking about Kahless the Unforgettable and the need to preserve Klingon purity.
In both cases, a new
Star Trek production (TMP/DIS) is introducing a radically changed Klingon makeup design with no onscreen explanation for changes in previous depictions, and simultaneously introduces familiar Klingon cultural elements (the
K't'inga class in TMP, the Klingonese language and references to Kahless in DIS) to ensure we know it's the same species.
I just don't see a meaningful difference between TMP radically changing the Klingons with no explanation and DIS radically changing the Klingons with no explanation. Yet people don't mind the former and whine about the latter.
despite the bony ridge going across the tops of their heads, and their uniforms, and without any swarthy makeup, and the fact that they are speaking in their own language (which are the only things differentiating them from the TOS Klingons.)
"The only?" Those are major differences.
Here’s one thing I find odd about Discovery’s decision to rework the Klingons so dramatically: In the ‘70s, Star Wars had just changed everyone’s expectations for sci-fi, so Star Trek naturally followed suit. Trek also had the added burden of showing it wasn’t just a TV show — it needed to be big for the big screen, so the focus on sfx and bumpy-headed aliens made sense for the times. But today we live in the age of the expanded movie universe, when viewers expect consistency and world building across films and time. Yet Trek decides to disregard decades of design and world building ... I guess in a bid to draw new viewers? Even though they put the show on a niche pay streaming service, where the people most likely to watch were also the most likely to be upset? I don’t get what they were thinking.
Bryan Fuller wanted to tell a story about the UFP-Klingon War that TOS had alluded to having happened in its past, and he felt that to tell that story, the Klingons needed to look scarier and more alien. He felt the Berman-era Klingons had become too familiar and too cuddly.
that liked to decorate their ships with dead bodies and totally didn't borrow that last bit from the Reavers on Firefly.
I think putting coffins of your beloved dead on the exterior of your ship as a way to honor them, is a very different thing from putting the unshielded rotting corpses of your victims on the exterior of your ship as a way to frighten other victims. I also think these are both minor details from their respective franchises.
