Quote from: Werekoala;394156Yes, it was Werekoala who said that the only true Klingons are TOS Klingons.

I don't care if it came from Roddenberry's own mouth, I'm not buying the "we couldn't afford it for the TV series but really, we always wanted them to look like this" excuse.

Except that they are ALL True Klingons - both the smooth headed and the bumpy-headed.

There was a fan-made story in the early 1990s by Cat Ramos that explained it very elegantly.

 The writers and producers of STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE wound up doing pretty much the same explanation.

End result?

All the Klingons we have seen are TRUE Klingons. They have just as much variety within their race as we have with ours here on Earth.

- Ed C.

In "the trouble with tribbles" mcCoy said that garvin was a klingon surgically altered to look human. This implied that a klingon would need alteration to pass as human.

When GR did "Planet Earth, I think, he had a race of mutants that looked vaguely like the new klingons, e also had more makeup money for that one.

Here's a link to the movie's info site, and it says that the "Kreeg" mutants wore an early version of the klingon prosthesis: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072000/

To me this implies that it's what GR said: They didn't have the money to do a lot of klingons the right way, so they just made them look like mongols. The TMP klingons were how they should have looked all along. When he had more money to work with, like he did on "planet earth" he came closer to his vision of what he wanted. With STTMP he got it right.

Yes, they did andorian and tellarite costumes, but how many? I think they had like at most 2-3 andorians or tellarites on screen at one time. In two of the klingon eps, they had over a dozen of the bastards on screen, and not enough budget for that many lobster heads.