And that’s the pulse-pounding finale to another year of Phone Guys! What will the future bring?

This one still technically has to do with the depiction of aliens on Star Trek, but it isn’t about my craving for better designs. This one is about places where multiple species of aliens hang out.

Now, I’m not talking about places like Starfleet ships that are 80% human, 15% aliens that look human, and 5% the occasional cool alien. I’m taking about places where humans are strictly in the minority but there is a wide variety of aliens on display, making for an exotic locale. You can usually find these in the forms of shady businesses where a cadet might get stabbed in the heart, bars where greedy business owners illicit deals with shady alien traders, and neighbourhoods where idiot Boimlers can bumble around and not know the right way to deal with the people there. The idea generally is that if you’re in one of these racially-(specially?)-mixed areas, you’re somewhere seedy. I think a lot of it is an attempt to recreate the feel of the Cantina scene in Star Wars. Which, sure, if you want to create a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but the United Federation of Planets is meant to be a near-paradise of dozens of worlds, working together, right?

I admit, we’ve had a few good scenes of aliens in, like, military meetings and stuff (generally in the movies and usually with plenty of humans still there), but apart from that, even Star Trek’s places of mixed species company are seen as bad neighbourhoods where “decent human folk” should fear to tread.

I demand that Star Trek show us some scenes that are as diverse as a Mos Eisley drinking establishment, but are wholesome. Give me an alien crowd in a library or a farmer’s market or something. Show us that aliens can get along without it being a threat.

I first got into Star Trek when I was around ten years old. So this was after I played the Space Quest games and experienced world with truly weird aliens. This was after I watched that Star Wars documentary about how they made all the alien puppets. This was possibly even after I read collections of Marvel’s pre-Fantastic Four sci-fi stories I got from the library with Kirby and Ditko-designed aliens abounding. What I’m saying is that, even though I came to love Star Trek, I was disappointed with the aliens on the show since Day One. That’s why so many of the Trek Thoughts I’ve posted have been about that.

As a child new to Star Trek, I responded the way a PDR responds to everything. I wondered what I could do if I got to make Star Trek. I daydreamed about a type of alien I would make. Well, today, more than three decades later, I finally got around to putting ink to paper:

This is the one. It’s nothing radical by the alien designs I prefer, but by Trek standards, it’s some unknowable beast. I pictured them being about half the size of humans (probably E.T. sized, if I’m looking for more of my likely inspirations), and in closeups I assumed they’d be worked like puppets, or more specifically Muppets given what I watched back then. But the real innovation that little PDR had was how we’d show this alien get around the ship in wide shots. The reason the alien is designed with the big dress is to hide the remote control car that lets it move!

Now, keep in mind that as a ten-year-old I did not assume that they would build some remote-controlled wheel system or whatever, I assumed they would need an entire remote control car under there for it to work.

Remote control cars are peak technology to ten-year-olds.

I accept that would probably not be how they do it now, but I’d still want keep the dress for the design. Just assume there’s some alien business going on under there. Anything that makes them less humanoid.

Now, a full-grown PDR would have named the species and thought up stuff about their homeworld and all kinds stuff. Little PDR didn’t do that. He just thought that this little design deserved to be represented in Starfleet. Well, Old PDR can agree with him on that.

You know Spider-Ham, right? Somehow we’ve become a world where I can reasonably expect that casual audiences might know Spider-Ham and that is not weird. Anyway, you know how Spider-Ham is from an alternate universe of cartoon animal people? Well, they’ve got a Rocket Racer equivalent over there don’t ya know? Let’s take another look Into The Rocketverse and see what he’s all about.

So we know this much: he’s a rat. That is all. And this is literally all we get to see of the guy. in this story Spider-Ham is all powered up and goes on a rampage of beating up his foes and the Rocket Ratser is one of them. We have to assume that, by the naming conventions of that universe, his real name is like Robert Furrell or something. And if the Ratser is still considered a “supervillain” at this point, we have to assume that either he hasn’t the nuances of his human alternate, or Spider-Ham in this story is just being pretty indiscriminate about whom he beats up. Honestly, either is likely.

For the record some of Bob’s known affiliations are also glimpsed. The Tinkerer equivalent is the Stinkerer, a skunk. Sandman is Sandham, presumably a pig. The Prowler is the Prowler, an owl. And the Will-o’-the-Wisp is still called that and is just seemingly vapour. Easy enough.

Anyway, let’s stick him in a movie and call it a day.