The first thing Buddy discovers is that he has the potential to be a star, but it’s completely foreign to him because that whole celebrity culture doesn’t exist on his planet. He comes from a repressive planet where everybody is meant to be similar and flattened and so he starts to discover the power of being a star, and also the vicissitudes, the difficulties of what comes along with celebrity.
He realizes, he finds out, that the avocado is very, very important to his health. That the avocado contains everything that he needs to exist in, or it has something that was on his planet but he could never find it, he didn’t know it here. So he loves guacamole, so do I, I love guacamole.
And he has to keep his true identity secret because if the world were to find out that he really is an alien, then his whole purpose of being on earth, which is to experience life as a human, would be changed. He would be sought after, he would be experimented with, he would be pursued. So he has to keep that secret and that’s hard, it’s a little hard to keep secret when you have seven fingers and suction cups on your feet and your skin is cobalt blue and you have six eyes…
And you bleed purple.
And three lungs and two stomachs.
And you don’t speak Hungarian, I’ll tell you.
He has, with his grandmother, Grandma Wrinkle, who is 987 years old, he, you know he’s, she has helped him create a human skin that he can keep when he’s not playing the character for only a little while.
He has to rejuvenate himself by soaking, water is very important, otherwise it starts from his suction cups and now he’s a quarter alien and the rest is human. He makes some friends, how will they accept him? How will they accept him if they know the truth? And so that is a dilemma that I struggled with and that I would imagine a lot of children struggle with.
It’s also, it’s also a commentary on our age of quick celebrity. Where people become celebrities not necessarily from talent, just because celebrity is a thing. So he has to kind of wrestle with that in terms of, and our readers get to wrestle with it, what actually makes you a celebrity? And then when you are a celebrity what that life is like, what you sacrifice in terms of privacy, the strain it can put on friendships.
So all of those are really important themes, meanwhile it being basically a comedy about an alien living in an alien world and what could be more alien than the backlot of Hollywood. His best friend is a stroller in the guise of Frankenstein, there’s a Woody Woodpecker stroller, there’s an overbearing agent manager.
A stroller is someone who wears the costume and walks around the backlot and takes pictures with people. The Woody Woodpecker stroller has a big, big problem because the beak is very irritating on the inside and scratches his nose at all times.
So there’s a lot of fun, there’s a lot of the fun of touring a backlot. But one thing that’s great is when he’s walking around in his alien self on the backlot he’s completely accepted as normal, because people assume that that’s one heck of a costume. Even when his sensory enhancer goes nuts, which it does frequently because when it detects a great aroma or great music, something that involves the senses…
Or Skittles.
Skittles. It has kind of a life of its own and so he has to come up with ways to explain why his costume is overreacting.
