Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2023 November 27

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November 27

Klingons fart in airlocks

On the Star Trek TV show (I mean the real one with Kirk and Spock), the Klingons were stereotyped as rude and obnoxious. David Gerrold (scriptwriter of The Trouble With Tribbles) famously wrote "Klingons fart in airlocks" among other nasty things they did.

In the later sequels like the one with Mr. Worf, the Klingon empire instead became a neurotic honor culture, ok fine, regular characters need redeeming virtues.

Question: did some other species in the later series replace the original Klingons as basically cartoon villains? I did watch some of those shows, but it was like the original series was a western in space, while the later ones were soap operas. Around that time I discovered Babylon 5 so mostly lost interest in ST. Thanks. 2601:644:8501:AAF0:0:0:0:6375 (talk) 23:11, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

They tried with the Ferengi, but they turned out too comical to be a true villain. Pretty cartoonish though, and with their obsession for capital more similar to modern humans than anyone else in the series. Cardassians were nasty, but quickly turned out very calculating, too calculating to call them cartoonish. Which isn't unexpected. If you want to keep a villain on the series for a long time, it has to be calculating, otherwise the villain would be boring or too easily defeated. Voyager was set up such that a villain could easily be discarded after a while and replaced by a new one. Some of those, like the Hirogen, may come closest to the cartoonish villains the Klingons originally were.

BTW, the real one? The initial seasons of The Next Generation were still made by the original Gene Roddenberry and closer to what he wanted it to be, as he got more freedom from his bosses. In the 1960s, women could only be telephone switchboard operators or nurses and the non-regular ones were guaranteed to fall in love with the captain.

PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:23, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

The Cardassians in Deep Space 9 were more like the Romulans in the original series, but they're about the closest you're going to get to Klingon replacements. Clarityfiend (talk) 14:10, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

I think Cardassians were the most interesting villains precisely because they were so calculating, while the Kazon (from Star Trek: Voyager) were the most "cartoon villain" like, and as boring as Klingons. I was glad when Voyager got out of Kazon space. --142.112.220.31 (talk) 15:45, 28 November 2023 (UTC)

I've just finished reading James Kelman's God's Teeth and Other Phenomena, which contains the immortal line "... could they not have emailed their fucking body odours to faraway lands?". This question reminded me of that. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:07, 28 November 2023 (UTC)