As you know, this has been a year of me getting caught up on going to the dentist after several decades out of the game. With each visit I made, I was impressed by the advances in technology that had been made since my childhood, but all the while I felt like something was missing.

Where were the Gleam Team?

I strongly remembered a team of anthropomorphic dental superheroes that existed on stickers and posters and stuff, but searching the Internet I could find nothing about them. Not even people thinking back about them and asking whatever happened to them.

Well, they existed, and today I did a deep dive into the files (aka pile of papers and binders) that I have kept since my childhood and I found the proof!

A sticker showing the team charging out of… a pocket I guess? Like, is it a dental hygienist’s pocket? I guess so. If you’d asked me to describe the team, they would have basically been thus, though in my mind I think they had donned capes, making them more like traditional superheroes. We’ve got a big molar guy, a floss guy, a toothbrush girl, and a toothpaste guy. Probably they had names, though I don’t remember them. Let’s ignore how most of them are tools and one is an actual tooth and just respect them for trying.

Maybe this will end up like my post on Strand-Man, where my site is seemingly the only information on the topic and it gets more hits than anything else on here. Or maybe nobody but me ever had any memory of these guys to begin with. Either way, I’m doing my part. Certainly the fact they were apparently produced by the Nova Scotia Department of Health and Fitness suggests a more limited reach than a product that was probably sold across the country and maybe beyond.

I’ve said before that I’d like more interestingly-designed aliens in Star Trek and I’m about to do it again.

Early in my days as an uncle I bought many books for the kids. I want them to enjoy books. That included some sort of Alphabet of Star Trek book. It wasn’t a great book. The art is wonderful! Colourful and fun. But the text is boring. They don’t even make the effort to rhyme or anything. It’s certainly not a great introduction to the franchise for children.

But remember, an important thing about me is that I like aliens. That’s a big thing for me. So when I got to the page for letter S, which is about Starfleet Academy, and found this gang of student waiting for me, I was pleased.

Sure, I’ll admit that they aren’t EXTREMELY alien aliens. They basically fall in line with Trek’s preference for humanoids with little difference, but the differences are significantly bigger on these ones than they are on Vulcans or Betazoids or whatever. More eyes. Fewer eyes. Fancy skin tones. Gills. It’s not much, but it’s something (after all, we are meant to understand that these are aliens who can exist easily on Earth and could serve on Federation ships alongside their more well-known species). These ones look like something I’d find in a Space Quest game, which is a compliment for sure (and it would be nice if the franchise had aliens as cool as its parodies).

So obviously, we need to make these aliens canonical to the Star Trek universe. Certainly it’d be harder in live action than on a cartoon, so do it in a cartoon. And you could even staple it to the existing lore to help a sense of verisimilitude. On Deep Space Nine we got a mention of a Doctor Trag’Tok, who had three eyes, but we never saw him. He could easily be the same species as the blue cadet there.

Also, I’d want the two one-eyed cadets to be two examples the same species. There are big differences between them, sure, but not so big as we can find between humans. Let the aliens have some diversity for once.

Now, you might say “PDR, you only want to see these aliens used again because they were in a book you gave to your niblings.” and I would say “Yes, that’s correct. But also, all that stuff about how I want Trek to have better aliens on top of that.”

Gonna do one of those obscure easy ones today. Scott (no last name provided) is the narrator of a horror story called “The Queen of the Zombie Bees” by someone going by the handle Reene Writes. It’s a very short piece in the Creepypasta style, so we don’t get a lot of depth, but that will never stop me.

Scott is a Beekeeper and genuinely seems to love bees. It doesn’t seem like he is an apiarist professionally, he’s only got one hive I guess, but he enjoys it and respects them as animals. This causes problems between Scott and his neighbour, Miss Simpson, who hates bees and wants him to get rid of the hive. That status quo is broken when Simpson tries to get rid of Scott’s bees herself and she winds up possessed by the queen, who puppets Simpson’s corpse around and uses it as a hive for a colony of big fat bees making a strange blood honey. In spite of being described as nearly lifeless, these bees seem to be having success, they even manage to create another hive (presumably also “ruled” by the queen in Simpson’s body, I guess?) outside of Simpson’s house.

Scott sees that second hive and that’s what gets his attention. In spite of the animosity between him and Simpson, he suits up and goes over to investigate and try to help, though it is too late. He discovers the weird “zombie bees” and that the queen is puppeting Simpson around, the understandably flees and calls the cops. The zombie bees and their corpse-riding queen are suddenly nowhere to be found.

It’s like this, though: how did the bees do this? Is this level of supernatural talent in the bees a result of Scott being very good at beekeeping? It could be. In any case, the bees never did this to Scott. Maybe they respected him too much, but saw Simpson as a threat? It could very well be that if they had not been met with the hatred of Miss Simpson, their powers would have manifested in some less-icky way. Whatever the case, if they did care for Scott, it seems to have ended with this strange transformation, given that when he discovers what happened to Simpson, they attack him with pretty vicious intent.

Two Honeycomb out of Five. Any potential supernatural bonus points he gets are lost because, you know, he didn’t keep his bees. That’s a big part of it. But one thing I can’t take from him: the events of the story are said to happen the same day he narrates it, but that doesn’t stop him from opening with bad bee jokes.