Klingon in ST:TMP
- Thread starter JJohnson
- Start date
Your use of "mooted" threw me for a moment, until I remembered that you are in Australia, and it's a British English usage and not the American one.
Dutch meaning: a thick slice of (usually) fish.
I think Mark Lenard was excellent in every role he was given. It's too bad that the Klingon Commander didn't get more time, he seemed much better than the vikingbikers that came later. He was menacing but not moronic, I think the Klingons in the 24 century must have painted their cribs with lead paint.
Well, you know, all that stray Praxis ash in the air. You can clean the atmosphere up well enough for life again, but it still takes ages to recover fully.
Yes, he was a worthy successor to the Klingons on the series.
I think the viking biker-gang stuff started with TSFS.
Kor
No, it was TNG that radically changed the Klingons from ruthless to honor-bound. TSFS gave the TMP Klingons more depth (which was pretty easy to do), and were truer to TOS than not. Aside from Kruge telling Valkris she will be remembered with honor before blowing her up, there's not much of that to be found in their actions.
In fact, TNG completely reversed the characteristics of Klingons and Romulans from TOS.
I didn't mention the concept of honor at all. We saw plenty in later Trek that Klingon "honor" doesn't necessarily mean what we think it should.
I found Kruge to be rather cheesy and comical (maybe it was the choice of Christopher Lloyd as actor), and his crew to be a bunch of brainless viking biker-gang thugs.
Kor
If you think about it, background Klingons in TOS were also brainless thugs (just without the biker attire). It was really only the main characters -- Kor, Kang, Marla -- who were developed in any significant way. They were scheming, diabolical, and ruthless, which is more or less what can be said of Kruge.
I think the difference comes from (a) the actors' interpretation and their acting methods, (b) the era of the shows (acting in the 60s was much more 'theatrical,' whereas it had evolved by the 80s).
TNG drastically changed the Klingons with the emphasis on the honor thing, which was previously the domain of the Romulans in TOS (and it made the Romulans in TNG to be the ruthless ones).
I've never bought this as we only see the Romulans twice in TOS. ( plus their ships in a third episode.) I don't think honor comes up in either episode. The Romulan Commander in BOT is engaged in violating a treaty and testing a new weapon in a sneak attack. Sure, he's not happy about igniting a war, but it seems his leader is rather fond of the idea. Orders are orders. In TEI, the Romulan Commander is eager to turn Spock against the Federation. Of course the Enterprise is in violation of the treaty in that one and engaged in espionage against the Romulans. Not much honor on either side.
The "honor" stuff was bequeathed to the Klingons from ST III onwards only because early drafts of ST III had featured Romulans on a Romulan bird of prey. The aliens were switched to Klingons probably because then no explanatory background needed to be made so that new-to-Trek audiences would be able to tell Sarek, Saavik, Young Spock and T'Lar from the pointy-eared bad guys.
And they had lots of Klingon costumes left over from TMP.
But it did become a big part of "fanon", one of those attributes developed in the fanfic and licensed tie-in novels of the day, such as "The Price of the Phoenix", "The Fate of the Phoenix", "Web of the Romulans", "The Romulan Way", and the slash zine, "Courts of Honor".
Were Kruge and his cronies more honorable as Romulans, than they were as Klingons? I don't recall them being honorable there. What with the stealing of Genesis, killing David and such. But hey, Kruge used the word.
Not a fan of groundless fanon.
People who say they are honorable are sometimes not being honorable at the time.
Didn't say you had to be a fan of it, but all those fans and professional writers, drawing from the same scant canonical source material, somehow all managed to attribute a code of honor to the Romulans of TOS.
There was also the TAS episode, "Practical Joker", in which a Romulan crew were prepared to suicide over a loss of face when tricked by an inflatable decoy starship.
Not saying you did. Just giving an opinion
Runs counter to what we know, IMO. It's taking Lenard's Commander as the "typical" Romulan when BOT makes it clear he's not.
The Romulans are quite keen on suicide, as BOT tells us.
They still are a hundred years later. Admiral Jarrok, for instance. And the officer that Geordi has to get help from to escape that planet with the bad weather actually asked his superior officer if he could while on the bridge of the Enterprise, but was told no.
Starborn Dragon
Captain
For those who don't know, it was James Doohan that invented the Klingon language.
Anyone watch the NATO trailer for TMP?
Star Trek: The Motion Picture NATO Trailer
Jump to 1:14 and you can hear some raw takes of the spoken language. One notable difference occurs when the Klingon Commander orders "Visual. Stand by on Torpedoes."
Final Version: Cha heegoosh!
NATO Trailer: Weecha Heegosh!
They took out the "Wee" portion of the spoken word even though the Commander does mouth it.
And the other bit of spoken Klingon dialect that we never hear sounds very different. Starts out with a very sad sounding "Chaaaa".... and than back into his serious tone with "Mishmash". This is obvious footage used for the Epsilon 9 terminal, but the sound is much more clearer.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture NATO Trailer
Jump to 1:14 and you can hear some raw takes of the spoken language. One notable difference occurs when the Klingon Commander orders "Visual. Stand by on Torpedoes."
Final Version: Cha heegoosh!
NATO Trailer: Weecha Heegosh!
They took out the "Wee" portion of the spoken word even though the Commander does mouth it.
And the other bit of spoken Klingon dialect that we never hear sounds very different. Starts out with a very sad sounding "Chaaaa".... and than back into his serious tone with "Mishmash". This is obvious footage used for the Epsilon 9 terminal, but the sound is much more clearer.
Very interesting! I've never seen that before.
I believe that sentence may in fact have been split into two different lines in the final cut. Using Marc Okrand's (retconned) translation:
wIy cha'! ("Show tactical display!")
cha yIghuS! ("Ready torpedoes!")
OK, I'm glad it was explained in the text description for the video, because I was trying to figure out why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization would need its own TMP trailer!
Similar threads
