Friday, October 31, 2014

Invid's Guide to the Star Wars Universe: Alien Species (#137)

The Massive Index (Posts #1-#100)
The Less Massive Index (Posts #101-#110)
The Second Less Massive Index (Posts #111-#120)
The Third Less Massive Index (Posts #121-#130)

(If I don't bite the bullet and just do this, it'll never happen.

Also, oh joy today we go deep into the "U" section of unidentified species. This wouldn't be a problem in and of itself, but...



...this is what my tab bar looks like right now. I can't tell what I'm looking at. It gets microscopically better when the tab bar is less full, but only by enough for me to see one letter of the next word.

Skipped "unidentified Asmeru species" and technically "Unidentified Alzar species," which I actually covered under "Alzarian" years ago. New tidbit on the Alzarians: Apparently the Stenax killed a bunch of them, which feels like an active effort to pick on a hapless species from a silly story.)

1361. Unidentified alien species (pyramidal starship). These guys use pyramidal starships that more or less did Force-based teleportation. One could take this to mean that there's some kind of link between them and the Aing-Tii, who likewise bopped around the galaxy in Force-teleported starships. However, their sole identified action sounds like a piratical activity, and so I must be inclined to say that they and the Aing-Tii would not get along, seeing as how the Aing-Tii are badass tentacle-worm monk guys who mercilessly slaughter bands of slavers without permission from anyone.

Rating: 2/5, because their existence raises interesting questions.

1362. Unidentified alien woodsmen. Hilariously, the entry makes it sound like this entire species descended on Endor in a swarm to cut down the local trees; near as I can tell, there were only two of them.

They tried to enslave local elephant/dinosaur things to help them.

...So you went to the planet of Ewoks and ticked off a bunch of elephant-things with big heavy tails in addition to their trunks?

If that hadn't been in a kids' comic, nobody would ever have found those guys' bodies.

Anyway, they're just generic green aliens of the sort that are a dime a dozen in science fiction.

Rating: 1/5.

1363. Unidentified alien's species (desert cave). This species might have appeared in A New Hope, but didn't; it did, however, appear in a commercial for the surely delicious and not at all a ripoff of any other cereal Kellogg's C-3PO's cereal!



Inspired by and modeled after the less popular major droid character (because seriously, R2-D2 has no competition)! Get yours three and a half decades ago!

Rating: 1/5.

1364. Unidentified arachnoid species. They apparently are big hairy spider people who have human faces, even human teeth, and creeped the heck out of Han Solo.

Hahahahaha that's awesome.

Rating: 3/5.

1365. Unidentified assassin's associate's species. Well that placeholder name is a mouthful.

Anyway, all we really know about the species is that they're red-skinned and somewhere between draconic and demonic.

Rating: 2/5, because they look kinda neat.

1366. Unidentified Betshish species. There was going to be a colony built on Betshish, but when the colonists arrived, they discovered the survey had missed these guys and that they had to find a new location by some law or another.

Betshish apparently is very swampy, so at least one dude associated with the event was glad to be away from it.

Rating: 1/5.

1367. Unidentified Black Fly species. No idea what's up with that capitalization, I just left it in because I'm not bothering to correct it after the copy/paste operation.

Anyway, a pair of members of this species were students of Luke Skywalker's at his Jedi academy. For one scene of one book, and nothing more.

Rating: 2/5. It actually was fairly common for there to be one-shot mentions of stranger alien Jedi students in the novels, often in small groups of the same species, but we invariably never see more of them later. This is disappointing and probably why they didn't get a slightly higher score.

1368. Unidentified blue-skinned short-legged species. Oh, for-"blue-skinned short-legged?"

Some podracer was a member of this species, which was sometimes red-skinned in concept art.

The only reason it's really worth bringing up, though, is that its page is an awful mess.



I mean, I guess the actual alien design isn't so bad when it's not a crummy low-poly model, but... Ick that page.

Rating: 2/5.

1369. Unidentified blue-skinned species. This species is made up of rather attractive blue-skinned people with what are either tattoos or unusual natural markings on their foreheads.

Their planet was apparently the site of a spaceship crash at some point, and the ship's crew became angry ghosts who eventually were released from their torment by Han Solo and Chewbacca of all people.

Rating: 2/5. I've mentioned before I'm kind of a sucker for attractive blue people.

1370. Unidentified Buoyant species. Resist obvious joke.

Resist obvious joke.

Resist... obvious... joke...

So they're good at floating? HA HA H-Ow.

No, Buoyant is the name of a planet (...huh?), to which this species was native. They apparently did a lot of experimenting and importing machinery and foreign animals to their world, which together with the changes to their planet's rotation that they enacted couldn't have been good for the ecosystem in the slightest.

The planet being a bit dodgy due to their influence is presumably why Darth Plagueis and Darth Sidious used the place as a Sith training ground.

Rating: 2/5. Incidentally, they're implicitly extinct. Apparently they weren't good at floating.

-Signing off.

No comments: