Retconning a well-known, often seen (roughly 400 episodes) race to such a large degree makes it harder for me to fit this into the Prime timeline.
Well, when you think about it, TOS never referred to itself as "the Prime universe", so how canonical can the designation be?
As has been pointed out already, this change does not retcon away all Klingon hair past, present, and future, since the sets and props include carvings of Klingons with their "traditional" hair. Kor
Actually, as far as I remember, none of the props do depict klingons with hair. It's just that the face and ridges (on the knife and the sarcophagus) tend to look more similar to traditional klingons. But I don't think they specifically had hair, beards or eyebrows...? I'm not 100% sure though...
I thought the sarcophagus that they showed a few months back in one of the trailers appeared to have some kind of stylized hair sculpted into it - looked a lot more like the classic Klingon than these guys do. Update: Here it is: There look like strands of long hair flowing over the "shoulders" sculpted onto the lid. I suppose they could be interpreted in other ways, but it looks like hair to me, FTIW.
Well, there is not much of a noticeable physical difference between the redesigned Klingon genders... I'm also curious why Vox's casting hasn't been announced yet.... A familiar 'Klingon' alumni Trek actor maybe? Michael Dorn? Tony Todd? Is he an albino Klingon? An ethnically diverse 'white' Klingon perhaps? Most interesting! Maybe we will learn that the Klingon Empire was once diverse before 'ethnic cleansing' by the more familiar 'Viking' Klingons which we only seem to see represented in the future series?
I can't see either accepting given the makeup probably takes 2-3 times as long to put on as the original Klingon makeup.
Plus make-up techniques have changed a lot, it seems. When I commented on the intricate make-up on background characters in Beyond, it was pointed out that they use much easier materials and processes these days.
Something I never thought of, but could the loss of hair may have been political correctness? Could it be that Fuller really wanted to go back to allegories and metaphors within the stories (like TOS did so often), and that he wanted to use the Klingons as an allegory for ISIS/radical extremists..? Everything we know so far seems to confirm this: these Klingons follow this ancient path and these ancient rules, and they want this brought down upon the other houses (a sort of Klingon jihad)... Somehwere along the line, perhaps Fuller thought: if they still have beards, I'm going overboard with the allegory and it might come across islamophobic or something. Maybe he thought it would be wise to just get rid of all hair to prevent any heavy parallels. Could I be right about this?
Actually, no, it doesn't. A full head prosthetic allows full coverage of the actor's hair, and there is less concern about skin matching. Blending can be a lot easier to do as well. And I was just working with amateur productions.
Dazzling new Klingon promo https://twitter.com/startrekcbs/status/901127180180115457 https://twitter.com/StarTrekNetflix/status/901134702622367748