Cremated Clingons

Author Commentaries

John

Cremated Clingons is interesting, because even though it takes place second in the chronology of the Lame Trek universe, it was actually one of the last stories to be written.

Sort of.

Cremated Clingons, as it now exists, is the second version of the story. The first version was lost before completion, and the story was begun again, after the completion of all the other stories except Lame Trek IV.

It should be fairly obvious, but many of the environments in this story were derived from the sixth Star Trek feature film, The Undiscovered Country. The Clingon detention planet of DaQrah Pagh is based on the Rura Penthe location from that film, and the trial at the end of the story is meant to take place in a setting identical to that of the trial of Kirk and McCoy from STVI.

"Mung" makes its first appearance, chronologically, at least, in Clingons. The whole idea of mung, and the various forms it takes in our stories, came from a Saturday Night Live "Wayne's World" sketch in which Wayne and Garth read down "the top five worst things to get in your Halloween bag". Mung was number one on the list, if I remember correctly.

Far from being the only SNL reference in this story, the majority of the crew members of the various Lamefleet ships are classic SNL characters. Captain Farley of the Cool Guy is of course named after the late comedian Chris Farley, who was still living at the time this story was written. His character is based off the role Farley repeatedly played in the SNL "Bill Swersky's Sports Fans" sketches. Other SNL "guest stars" include Ensign Independent Widow (Jan Hooks), Hanz Schwarzeneggar (Dana Carvey), Lieutenant Linda Richmond (Mike Myers), Commander Rich Mann (Rob Schneider's "copy guy", Mr. No Depth Perception (a one-time character portrayed by Tom Hanks), Lieutenant Commander Pat (Julia Sweeney), and Mr. Subliminal (Kevin Nealon). Then there's Homey the Clown, who showed up from In Living Color.

Captains Krieger, Boser, Heglund, and Lloyd are all named after college roommates of Gordon and myself. Clingons and Lame Trek IV were both written after we graduated from high school, and were in our first two years of college. Scott Krieger and Ken Boser were both roommates of Gordon whom he "honored" by writing into the story, and naturally I followed his lead by putting my two roomies, Andy Heglund and Brian Lloyd, into it as well.

With very few exceptions, every Clingon in the Lame Trek universe has a name beginning with K.

The whole Kobill shooting Koolaid over and over and over again is based on the scene in Star Trek III where the Klingon captain, Kruge, vaporizes his gunner for destroying a Federation vessel instead of only disabling it as ordered. Kobill inherited Kruge's legendary bad temper, but at least he usually leaves his disruptor set on stun...

Speaking of Clingons... the Brothers Kobell make their debut (again, chronologically) in this story. Kobill, Komark, and Korhett are derived from three actual brothers by the names of Bill, Mark, and Rhett Bell. Bill was a classmate and friend of Gordon, Ben and I in high school, although he never participated in our story-writing. (The other member of our little high school gang was Korbet Finley, who made his first story appearance in Stranded.)

In the second paragraph on page two, where Captain Kanost goes on the rant about the crew needing adventure as a cure for boredom-- those lines were based on a scene from the beginning of the film Never Cry Wolf where a pilot, played by Brian Dennehy, says nearly the same exact thing before climbing out of the cockpit of his plummeting airplane to fix the broken propellor.

Gordon

I believe the only concepts in Clingons that made it over from the original text John and I began writing in high school was the title, that it dealt with Clingons, and that Captain Kanost started off a captive of the Clingon Empire. I’m not certain, but I think that the detention facility DaQrah Pagh was invented in that draft as well, although the actual appearance of the location was vastly different than the vision for the second go-round. As we wrote the newer version of the story, we were drawn inexorably toward the similarities of Kanost’s detention at DaQrah Pagh to Kirk and McCoy’s detention at Rura Penthe in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, and it was all downhill from there. This is also chronologically the final "short story" in the Lame Trek collection. I have always viewed the first three works in the series similar to television episodes, and everything from Lame Trek: Adventures in Space on as movie screenplays.

One thing that is pretty noticeable (to me at least) is that this is definitely a story that was written in a more established Lame Trek universe than has been seen up to this point. The mainstay Saturday Night Live references are not only present; they show up in force. The concept of the McPeople makes a huge leap from the previous story, going from a single annoying representative to three different characters as well as having mention of an entire race of Big-Mac loving clowns.

The logistics of writing this story were probably the most complex of any short story John and I have ever done, before or since. Cremated Clingons was started during my Freshman year in college, before e-mail became commonplace. As such, each installment was written on standard notebook paper as we always had done, and then snail-mailed to the other author via the good-old US Postal Service. Initially, this meant a roughly 200 mile one-way trip for our little story from Cleveland to Dayton or vice versa. To make matters worse, John then left for college himself the following year, and the traveling distance for Clingons increased to about 950 miles one-way (isn’t Yahoo! Maps great??), from Cleveland, Ohio to Pensacola, Florida and back. To cut down on shipping costs, John would remove all but the most recent installments from the story when he received it, and I would photocopy any new material when I received it. Sadly, none of those photocopies survive, as I threw them out when I got the re-written and illustrated "Bic" copy from John sometime later.

The only other reference made in this story not covered by John that may be a bit obscure is the Dr. Frankinshteen bit. That is pretty much a direct lift off of the Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein, where Gene Wilder's character makes the same admonishment upon the mispronunciation of his name.

Check out: Cremated Clingons

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