| Frankly,
I still have no idea what a Bugblatter Beast of Traal should look like.
The novels, like the
radio play, only mention the creature in passing. The most famous and
outstanding parts being that bit about using
a towel to avoid the gaze of a Bugblatter - and thus avoid being
eaten. For non-readers of the book, GO READ IT! NoW!! Go down to your
local library and look for a copy. If they don't have a copy, DEMAND that
they place an order for one as soon as possible, and cry that it is an
outrage and a disgrace for a public library to be caught without a copy of
the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
That being said, the
only other references to the ravenous Beast (daft as a bush, but Very Very
Ravenous) are the ones about the typo in the Guide (Not the novel, the
book! ....just go read the novel...things will make a lot more sense) and
the mention of Zaphod getting eaten by a Hegunenon, which is
high-evolutionary being, that was playing at being a BugBlatter Beast of
Traal. Which was actually a scene that only exists in the radio play
version. Come to think of it, it was just mentioned, so it didn't actually
happen.
The long and short of
it was that I didn't really have a description to go on. All I knew was
that it had eyes. And probably lots of teeth. |
Working sketches of a
Bugblatter...lots of teeth.
Click to zoom |
I tried looking to the Role
Playing Game version. I mean, the Star Wars RPG gave faces and names to minute
aliens, so maybe the HHGG version would have something. Not much luck finding
information on that. I then tried looking at the BBC TV series, which I think
had a small picture of the Bugblatter in one of the animated Guide entries. No
luck either, for my local libraries had gotten rid of the only copy of the BBC
series I had access to (Along with many other great VHS tapes) and dedicated the
shelf space to books on Jennifer Love Hewitt. It's an outrage and a disgrace, I
tell you.
In the end I just used my
imagination. Lots of teeth, eh? What's the toy with the most amount of teeth
that I can get at the lowest price? The Phantom Menace Fishie!
Remember these? Tons of them at stores and no one wants them. Perfect.
Now I wanted it to be somewhat
mammalian...there's a glut of dinosaur-like figures already out there. Fur would
be nice. So that's more or less how the design turned out. I adapted a few limbs
from a Godzilla toy, reworking the parts so that they'd not only fit, but hold
up the weight of the fish, yet allow the biting mechanism to work. The entire
fish face was covered and sculpting of a new face was done, with more mammalian
features, horns and the like. And goofy, buggly eyes. I very nearly wanted to
give it Cookie-Monster eyes...
Finally came the fur. Initially
I thought a nice unfamiliar colour like Purple would be interesting to try (The
name :Purple People Eater kept bouncing around in my head). I had, in fact,
purchased an old Care Bears ripoff plush to shred up for purple fur, but one day
I found that I had some nice brown furry material in my stock of leftover
fabrics from other projects. I tried it out with some scraps and it seemed to
bring out the "beast-ness" a lot more than the purple care bear fur
did.
photos and pictures featuring the Bugblatter figure
