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Kaidan: I haven't spent much time with krogan before, Wrex, and I have to say, you're not what I expected. Wrex: Right. Because humans have a wide range of cultures and attitudes, but krogan all think and act exactly alike.
On their Wagon Train To The Stars, our intrepid heroes come across a planet with a single defining characteristic. Everybody is a robot, or a coward, or a gangster, or a Proud Warrior Race Guy, or a Corrupt Corporate Executive, or wearing a hat.
Earth itself is sometimes portrayed as a Planet Of Hats. The defining human characteristic is often "pluck" or "sheer cussedness" and sometimes even "diversity", though "bastardom" is common in more misanthropic works.
Writers love to use the hat planet to represent controversial issues in society whenever they can. This way the show's characters can take a thinly disguised public stand on an issue that the network execs would otherwise consider too taboo to openly discuss. We can't have our heroes discussing euthanasia, but should they stumble across a Planet Of Hats where everyone who gets sick is put to death, then it's okay. Eventually the plots will run out with an entire race of identical people so one or more of the species will have their hat fall off, declaring My Species Doth Protest Too Much. For maximum typing, the characters can also be physically uniform, as in People Of Hair Color.
The Planet Of Hats may also be an unintended result of a Character Exaggeration -type Plot Tumor applied to an entire race, when the audience had previously only seen a single representative who the writers now wish to market.
See also Rubber Forehead Aliens, Intelligent Gerbil, Scary Dogmatic Aliens. May result because Apathy Killed The Cat. Serious Business is what happens when the show's setting gets a hat. This trope in itself is a good example of Unfortunate Implications and Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense Of Scale. See Single Biome Planet when the planet is unnaturally uniform physically.
Examples
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Anime
- In the Cowboy Bebop episode, "Mushroom Samba" (itself the name of another trope), the crew of the Bebop finds that the terraformed moon Io has developed a culture apparently inspired by 1970s Blaxploitation films.
- Bebop used the different planets as either Fantasy Counterpart Culture or a planet of hats. Venus was US-run, while Mars was Asian, the Jovians were mostly European, and Earth was SE Asia.
- Mars is arguable - they seem to be a regular cultural kitchen sink - quite understandable, since it's supposed to be the new center of human civilization. There's such things as Moroccan Street next to Manhattanesque neighbourhood, while Chinese Triads hold power in other parts. Callisto, on the other hand is a stereotypical Russian setting, modelled after a popular perception of a Siberian industrial city.
- In Kino's Journey, each individual country is a separate Planet Of Hats, such as a country devoted to nothing else but the construction of a tower or is inhabited by people who do nothing but secretarial work.
- Most amusingly is the town who doesn't have a hat, and is trying desperately to get one. They show off some different 'ancient tradition' to every traveler to come by. Kino remarks that this is their hat.
- In the manga Aria, Mars has terraformed into a water covered planet. Earth obviously took the liberty to turn it into the Venice planet; from the architecture to the gondola-use.
- In fact, the abundance of water is an accident (They found more water than they thought); and only a town is a reconstitution of Venice, while the rest seems fairly different.
- In the Manga Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle by CLAMP, the characters must visit different worlds in search of Princess Sakura's feathers. Roughly every world they visit will be a Planet of Hats (although some of them aren't as easy to notice).
- In Vandread the two main planets are Taraak (the planet of men), a barren world where the locals are concerned with things like uniforms, practicality, appearing manly, and eating nutrition pellets (think hamster food), and Mejere (the planet of women), which looks like Las Vegas and has locals concerned with appearing nice, who eat foods that are basically dessert.
- There's a darker side to this as well, as every inhabited planet was marked by a unique physical trait representing which organ was supposed to be harvested by Earth. Taraak and Mejele were male and female reproductive organs respectively.
- Not as major as other examples, but the people in Scrapped Princess seems to suffer bad artist hat.
- The three Invading Countries (actually planets) from the second season of Magic Knight Rayearth. Autozam is all about the mental power-based technology, Fahren is a thinly-veiled Fantasy Counterpart Culture for Ancient China, and Chizeta's culture is entirely Arabian Nights-based.
- Common in Galaxy Express 999.
- Used quite literally in Panyo Panyo Di Gi Charat.
Comic Books
- Top 10 (by comic book genius Alan Moore) takes place in a city where everyone is a superhero or some other "science hero" trope. This does have lots of room within it, however, as the titular team has a talking dog in an exoskeleton, the world's only Yazidi superhero, and a sarcastic Mazinger Z, amongst others. Did I mention it's a police procedural?
- In the Legion Of Super Heroes, most planets are like this, with their "hat" being related to their super-power; Naltor, planet of precogs, Titan, planet of telepaths, Colu, planet of geniuses, et cetera.
- They also have two characters from Winath who (at least some of the time) share a superpower, but that's not Winath's hat- twinning is normal there and in some media, the whole planet is devoted to farming.
- Ultra Boy comes from Rimbor, which is The Planet Of Dark Alleys and Biker Gangs.
- This is all brilliantly justified in Legion of Super-Heroes Annual #2
 , which shows that all of these planets were specifically colonized a thousand years earlier by advanced humans with similar power-sets after Invasion! happened.
- Also occurred at least once in a Superman comic in which Jimmy Olsen is transported to the Planet of the Capes. I kid you not.
- Lobo from 'DC Comics' occasionally encounters hat planets, such as planets made entirely from highway (in the Lobo comic series), a vacation planet (The Last Czarnian mini-series), a planet populated by religious fundamentalists who immediately explode upon contact with any infidels by triggering an apparently inherited power through pushing down their head onto their shoulder.
Film
- Not quite as obvious in Star Wars, but quite present: all Twi'lek girls are exotic dancers, all Hutts are gangsters, all Bothans are spies, all Ithorians are pacifists, etc. (see also Single Biome Planet). Of course, almost any species, Hatted or not, may show up as a Jedi (Even a Hutt or two), and there are numerous other exceptions. In recent years, some writers grew tired of these stigmas and began lampshading and subverting them — for example, showing a couple of Ithorian criminals in one of the KOTOR comics and claiming that Ithorians "stay all peaceful and polite" by "throwing guys like these out". In many cases, the hats in Star Wars seem to have been placed by the fans or EU writers. The films indicate that at the very least, nearly every species in the galaxy has senators. Gungan society shows a diversity, featuring overbearing rulers, knuckleheaded outcasts, and courageous soldiers. Of course, they do all seem to hate and fear Jar-Jar...
- If hating Jar-Jar Binks fits this trope, then the entire Star Wars galaxy and all of Real Life would wear the hat.
- KotoR lampshades the sharing of hats (Mercenary/Bounty Hunters) between 3 races at one point, with one of each race pointing out the differences between them.
- Also in KOTOR, one twi'lek on Taris was an entrepreneur in the upper city who commented that her business doesn't do as well as it should because people there expected her to wear the dancer hat... or something... it's been awhile since I played that game.
- KOTOR does, however, play the Wookiee life-debt hat absolutely dead straight with Zaalbar, and Hanharr has one but is filtering it through his Axe Crazy Chaotic Evil psychosis into an obsessive desire to kill the object of said life debt.
- The Expanded Universe also subverts/averts the Hats, having Twi'leks reveal that they have a unique culture, complete with their own Proud Warrior Sect. Not to mention a Twi'lek who put the 'slave dancer' phase far behind her, and a Bothan who is surprisingly honest. At least one book mentions that Jabba the Hutt was a common smuggler before being a Mafia Don, which is almost the Hutt's hat.
- Corellians as Never Tell Me The Odds: Lampshaded regularly, particularly Corran Horn and Cor Sec. Twi'leks as exotic dancers: Averted once, with Aayla Secura. Wookiee life-debt: Averted in KOTOR. Mandalorians as cold-hearted mercenaries: Both played straight and averted by any of Karen Traviss's work. Evil Sith were averted by the Jennsaarai. Even the New Republic's "good guy" image was averted in the Jedi Academy trilogy, when they debate whether or not to turn the Sun Crusher on The Empire.
- Well the Twi'leks did sell themselves into slavery in order to get off Ryloth (as they lacked starships) so that hat is at least semi-justifed.
- The Expanded Universe has even given us a Hutt Chancellor of the Republic, who is noted to have been a fair, honest, popular leader.
- There's also been somewhere (in The Planet of Twilight) a Hutt Jedi called Beldorian or Beldorion (darksider, but still greatly untipical for a Hutt).
- One of the novels, Starfighters of Adumar, takes place on a (human-occupied) planet whose Hat seems to be reverence for starfighter pilots combined with blood sport and melodrama. In time we get to see that these traits are more a specific country's Hat, and intelligent people from said country can be made to doubt their convictions with relative ease.
- Interestingly, some of the human planets get Hats too. Especially Corellians (the planet of Never Tell Me The Odds) and Alderaanians (philosophical pacifists).
- Tatooinians are all excellent pilots. Rogue Squadron actually has a sixteen-year-old Tatooinian as Rogue Five. Lampshaded by the fact that when he wants to ask Corran a question about inter-species relationships, Corran thinks he does't know what sex is.
- The Disney film Meet the Robinsons contains, as an Alternate Universe, a literal Planet Of Hats — where all humans are controlled, as zombies, by intelligent, spider-like bowler hats.
- The evil hats have appeared in other Disney works — at least one episode, possibly two, of Darkwing Duck, for example.
- Does Disney know something that we don't? Food for thought.
- I know I'll hesitate before I ever don those mouse ears again...
- It's possible they got it from the children's novel When the Tripods Came (and sequels), in which the titular aliens issue Caps that control people's minds.
- In Mom And Dad Save The World, the title characters get kidnapped by (and save the world from) an Evil Overlord from a planet where the hat is... mind-boggling amounts of stupidity. As an example, one of the deadliest weapons on this world is called the light grenade, which instantly disintegrates whoever picks it up. And how does this decimate an entire army? It says "Pick Me Up".
- The American Astronaut has the Venusians, which are all Southern Belle and the people from Jupiter who are all miners, the later is justified since it's implied they are hired from all over the galaxy.
Literature
- Nations characterized by a single trait have been a staple of travelogue-style fiction for centuries. The academics-obsessed people of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels are a good example.
- And the ancient Greek tales of Hyperborea, Atlantis and other allegorically intended foreign lands.
- Semi-subversion: Janet Kagan's Hellspark is a multiple-culture universe where each of the cultures has a single quirk — one considers feet obscene, one duels at the drop of a hat, one considers telling the truth (speaking accurately) a basic requirement, etc... and each of these people are individuals who incorporate their cultural quirk into their individuality.
- Larry Niven's Known Space deals with this trope. Pierson's Puppeteers are cowards to the point that only insane specimens are willing to deal with other species, kzinti are all Proud Warrior Race Guys, and humans may or may not have a trait for genetic luck. Humans are also apparently obsessed with sex; in Ringworld, the puppeteer Nessus says to Louis and Teela, "No known species copulates as often as you do", and The Ringworld Engineers features many species with the same ancestry as humans whose politics revolves around ritual inter-species sex. Further, at various points in the series, Niven will go into the details of how these hats are worn, via the various mechanism that produced the human traits, and the evolutionary imperatives that effect the ongoing makeup of the various species. At one point in Ringworld, a kzin sets a human off on a logical analysis of the instability of Kzinti aggression in the context of an enemy race that they can't easily beat. Whether this is a Lampshade Hanging or a justification is left as an exercise for the troper.
- There are plenty of exceptions of course. The Kzinti have the least, but that's justified with them genetically engineering themselves into a 'heroic' race. They were at best bronze age technologically when taken by another species to use as troops. They rebelled and overthrew their masters, using their technology with most of them not truly understanding it. They tinkered a hell of a lot with their own genome, with one of the offshoots making their women non-sentient and playing with their sex drives and aggression. The Puppeteers don't even have sex as we understand it, reproducing with a female of a separate species that actually gestates the young until the child eats its way out...
- Justified on The Little Prince since every planet is inhabitated by exactly one person.
- Animorphs mostly averted it (Hell, even the Yeerks are morally conflicted about what they do), but book 26 had the Iskoort, whose Hat was guilds — there was (in order of introduction) a Trader Guild, a Criminal Guild, a Warmaker Guild (though it quickly becomes clear the Iskoort were not cut out for combat), a Superstition and Magic Guild, a Shopper Guild, and even a "News, Gossip, and Speculation Guild." And all the Traders were the most annoying salesmen imaginable. (The others were annoying, too, but they ran into Traders the most.)
- The Vogons are a race of Obstructive Bureaucrats.
- This trope dates back to at least The Skylark of Space, the very first Space Opera. It was taken to such an extreme that the heroes would cheerfully commit genocide on species they disapproved of, rather than try to change them.
- In the comedy science fiction stories about the Hoka written by Poul Anderson and Gordon R Dickson, the Hokas' "hat" is that they are entranced by fiction. Give them a story and they will start to live it out, believing (or at least acting) as if they are in it. They have whole cities based on various periods of human history, with Ancient Rome, Victorian England, American Wild West and other places. One of them believes he is Napoleon and has an entire city of Hokas willing to follow him as leader of "France". Actually, a better way of saying it is that their hat is following tropes, as they tend to act out the trope more than reality. Luckily, they are non-violent, so they tend to just fake the wars and other violent parts.
- The trope also occurs in Gordon R Dickson's Childe Cycle, better known as the Dorsai series. Humanity has separated in various splinter cultures who specialize in one area. Dorsai have the best professional soldiers. Newton and Venus have the best scientists. Coby the best miners. The Exotics the best psychologists and philosophers. The Friendlies focus on religion, as well as cheap but poor mercenaries. The trope is justified in the larger frame of the Cycle.
- The alternate worlds or "planes" in Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin are often like this; each one features a more-or-less humanoid alien race with a special ability, psychological/biological quirk, or universal tradition — such as sharing dreams, seasonal migrations, near-constant anger, becoming silent at adulthood, and extreme devotion to apparently meaningless architectural projects.
- In the Belgariad series of novels by David Eddings, each of the nations of the West has its own hat. To a first approximation, based on the characters encountered: All Sendars are farmers, all Drasnians are spies, all Tolnedrans are merchants, all Chereks are Viking warriors, and all Nyssans are drug-addicted poisoners.
- Most of the 'hats' are actually fantasy archetypes based on Earth cultures — the Chereks are Vikings To The Max, the Algars are the Mongols likewise, the Drasnians appear to be a Renaissance Italy stereotype transplanted into a different geographical setting, the Tolnedrans are based on the Roman Empire (hence both their mercantile aspect and their obsessive road-building and disciplined legions), the Arends are medieval high chivalry myths taken to the point of self-parody, etc. The unflappable demeanour, their courtesy, and the general obsession with propriety of the Sendars seem to be more English than anything.
- The Eastern nations started out as pretty hatty, too. But then, they were under the control of an insane god for millenia. Eddings
recycles revisits those themes in the Elenium and Tamuli novels: All Styrics are self-pitying magicians, all Atans are warriors, All Tamuli are polite to a fault, etc.
- That the Angarak nations are hatty is justified, in that the tribes of Angarak originally were the CASTES of Angarak, and that Torak mistook their differences for tribal rather than professional distinctions after being away doing god-stuff for a couple thousand years.
- In the novel Design for Great-Day by Alan Dean Foster and Eric Frank Russel, a spiderlike species is mentioned whose hat is... hats. Nice ones.
- Both used and averted in The Edge Chronicles. All of the Slaughterers are hunters and butchers, all of the shrykes are slave-trading warriors, and all of the trolls are lumberjacks. This even extends to occupations: the Leaguesmen are corrupt, the Sky-Scholars are evil, and the Earth-Scholars and Sky Pirates are good. However, oakelves, goblins, waifs, and (of course)
humans fourthlings can be anything, and quarter-masters are either traitorous or fiercely loyal (sort-of hat).
- In L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, the Selachee, a race of sharks who have feet, can "live anywhere, breathe any atmosphere and eat anything," and while they did have Selachee who are engineers and other professions, their planet's exclusive profession is banking.
- In CS Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the entire race of Dufflepuds play Captain Obvious, with such astute observations as water is powerfully wet.
- Although this is justified in that "the entire race" is one small tribe of (originally) dwarfs who were given to the wizard Koriakin to oversee in order to teach him humility, so their stupidity is presumably a design feature. (Koriakin is literally a star, on enforced sabbatical for some fault that Man is not meant to know about.)
- In Alan Dean Foster's series The Damned, all of humanity wears the Blood Knight hat once an interstellar war lands in our laps. And it's a good thing, too, because every other species in these novels either wear the Programmed For Pacifism hat or the Reluctant Clumsy Warrior hat, and being good at killing things is our only hope to survive in the face of technological superiority. Well... that and being immune to telepathy.
- Lois McMaster Bujold's Barrayar books are made of this trope. The Beta Colony wears the "uber tolerant libertine" hat. The Jackson's Whole wears the "Wretched Hive" hat. Cetaganda wears The Empire hat. And the titular Barrayar wears the Proud Warrior Race Ruritania hat.
- Tanya Huff's Valor series has the Taykans and the Krai whose hats are sex and food respectively.
- John Varley's short story "The Barbie Murders" features a cult of humans nicknamed "The Barbies" who are obsessed with conformity. They have each been modified to look and sound identical, down to the last tiny detail. They have no names or personal identities, and each takes responsibility for the actions of all the rest. This makes finding a murderer in their midst rather trying.
- In the Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant, the Haruchai are a race of stoics. The Insequent are a race who Walk The Earth in search of knowledge. The Elohim wear a selfishness hat. All the Ramen (people from the Plains of Ra, not noodles) care about are their horses. The Stonedownors are obsessed with stone while their cousins the Woodhelvins are obsessed with trees.
- Enders Game has planets that were colonized by a single religion or country, and for some reason the Fridge Logic was the idea to encourage diversity of humans among the stars. Never mind the fact that if, say, all the other planets got destroyed, humanity could end up being represented by the single planet of hats- from what we've seen, Chinese Confucists, Catholic Portuguese, or the small society that lives on the planet of pig-tree freakbabies. It's also never stated how many planets of Chinese Confucists are out there, so once that one goes...
- Looking at the worlds that don't have single religions or cultures (ie. globalisation taken to extremes), it seems to work well enough in-universe.
- Jerry Pournelle's Co Dominium is similar for a justified reason; colonies are expensive, and require sponsors who obviously choose who populate them. America and Russia have filled the galaxy with clones of themselves, and every industrial power has at least one colony; all are meant to be examples of the superiority of their given culture. Religious and political nutcases with sufficient funds have attempted to do the same, but are often subject to the titular Amerusski Pact dumping criminals on them, meaning that almost every planet that isn't populated by Hats is a Crapsack World.
- Depicted in The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy as one of the ways a civilization can be wiped out. The example given is a planet's entire economy being dominated by shoe stores.
- Walter Moers applies the principle to several cities in his Zamonia novels, most notably Bookholm (everything revolves around books) and Sledwaya (everything revolves around illness)
- This is a common theme in Robert Asprin's MYTH series, with the characteristic of residents often being puns on the name of their "dimension." For example, residents of Deva (Deveels) are all aggressive merchants, while male residents of Trollia are trolls and female residents, trollops.
- In the To The Stars trilogy by Harry Harrison, EarthGov has not only terraformed Single Biome Planets, they've also created a unique culture for each in order to maximise their control. For instance the agricultural planet the protagonist has been exiled to in "Wheelworld" is populated entirely by peasants and mechanics, ruled by a group of autocratic Familys.
- In old science-fiction novel ''Star Surgeon'' by Alan E. Nourse, Humans have the hat of being doctors, to the point that Earth is called "Hospital Earth". Apparently nobody else ever really got into the whole "cut people open to make them better" thing. (At the time it was written, open heart surgery was a new, exciting thing.)
- In Pandora's Planet, the Alien Invaders are dull and gullible enough compared to humans that once we start going out and proselytizing they become more convinced than the proselytizers. A whole planet briefly bans everything artificial. Mention is made of a low-gravity world colonized expressly for the purpose of horse racing.
Live Action TV
- The Star Trek series are actually the prime examples of this trope, nearly every species having one defining trait:
- "A Piece of the Action" is interesting because the culture's true hat was mimicking others — their entire society had been built around a book about 1920s gangsters in Chicago.
- As revealed by the comics, after being visited by the Enterprise they experienced a cultural revolution and became an Original Series Star Trek planet.
- The Vulcans are all logic all the time.
- Brilliantly subverted in the Expanded universe book "Spock's World", where logic is shown to be the state religion, and emotional control a natural extension of the planet's telepathy. A shame that it was relegated to discontinuity by Star Trek V. Star Trek never was good at controlling the Expanded universe's continuity.
- The Klingons are all war all the time. (They'd tell you their true hat is honor, but that's not what you get in practice, to protagonist Klingon Worf's disillusionment.)
- Moq'bara is the martial art practiced by Klingons everywhere, because while a peaceful society like the Federation will have hundreds of styles ranging from kung fu to boxing, a warrior culture will clearly only have one.
- The Romulans are all intrigue all the time.
- The Ferengi are all profit all the time.
- The Cardassians are all Magnificent Bastardry all the time.
- Tellarites "do not argue for reasons, they simply argue." Spoken by a member of a species that apparently doesn't have such great relations with the Tellarites, but eventually proven true once we get to meet more. Negotiations are often opened by trading insults.
- Conformity as a Hat has been done a few times, most notably with the Borg.
- Cheron in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" is (or rather, was), supposedly, a planet of racists. (They are black on the left side. We are black on the right side!)
- The Deltans' hat was going to be sex, but that Wall Banger in the making thankfully never came to pass, as the "Phase II" series never happened. However, Lt. Ilia from the first movie (adapted from what was to be the pilot; Ilia was to have been a main character) does mention having taken a vow of celibacy before coming aboard.
- Taking place clear across the galaxy from these others, Star Trek Voyager has its own hat species, such as the Kazon (society revolves around infighting between the various rival groups), the Vidiians (society revolves around medicine and organ-stealing due to the disease they have), the Hirogen (society revolves around "the hunt"), and Species 8472 (society revolves around eradicating lesser, "weak" species.)
- At least the Vidiians claim to have had a very different culture before the phage came.
- Humans don't quite have a Hat, and — especially in the Gene Roddenberry days — were sort of the anti-hat: Having finally gotten it right, humanity's made a perfect future for itself, finally free of the undesirable qualities that some of the other species represent.
- Then again, being "perfect" eventually became humanity's hat, until the DS 9 era, where that hat was rather rudely yanked off, set on fire, and thrown into a wood chipper.
- On Star Trek Enterprise, Vulcan Ambassador Soval complains at length about humanity's lack of a Hat: "Of all the species we've made contact with, yours is the only one we can't define. [...] One moment you're as driven by your emotions as Klingons, and the next, you confound us by suddenly embracing logic!" He goes on to explain that pre-logic Vulcans were similarly hatless in a way that now scares them.
- The Expanded Universe novel How Much for Just the Planet?, by John M. Ford, features a world whose hat is comedy routines. It eventually turns out that they're just putting it on to keep their visitors off-balance.
- An alien on Voyager once used this trope to describe different species - his own species' hat was an inherent understanding of languages, while humanity's was "a great generosity of spirit." However, it turned out he was buttering the Voyager crew up so he could get revenge on them for indirectly causing his own species' extinction.
- The episode "Patterns of Force" has the Nazi Planet. (Not their native hat, it was imported by a Well Intentioned Extremist historian from Earth).
- The Yridians are all information dealers.
- The Denobulans are all doctors.
- The Redeemers are all religious fanatics.
- As noted above, there are actually several episodes with planets whose inhabitants made their hat by copying something from Earth — gangsters, Nazis, ancient Greeks ...
- The Redeemers of Tulaan IV in Star Trek New Frontier are the most prominent hat-wearers in the series. Their hat is extreme religious fanaticism. Think the worst of the Christians during the Inquisition, the worst Muslim fundamentalist terrorists, every cult you can think of, mix them up, and then crank them to eleven, and you might have a sliver of the fanaticism that the Redeemers have.
- A Star Trek spinoff novel lampshaded this one by explaining that on most planets, war and oppression and genocide have had a homogenizing effect on sentient species. Humans figured out how to live together peacefully before that happened to them. As a result, Earth has a far greater range of cultural and ethnic diversity than can be found on most other planets.
- In Babylon 5, the Narn start off as the Proud Warrior Race, the Minbari as Elves, and the Vorlons as Mysterious Elders and the Minbari as the declining Roman Empire. The Narn become Warrior Poets, the Minbari lose all hats due to a civil war, and the Vorlons gain a Law hat. The Shadows also happen to gain the Chaos hat, the Drazi steal the Proud Warrior Race. The uniformity of the alien cultures compared to humanity is lampshaded in the episode "The Parliament of Dreams," where each of the major races puts on a display of their global religion, while Sinclair arranges dozens upon dozens of people to represent humanity's multitudes of religions. Ultimately humanity's "hat" is explicitly defined (by Delenn) as community-building — humans automatically and unthinkingly weave together disparate groups into communities.
- Lidsville takes the concept to its furthest extreme — a world entirely populated by actual anthropomorphic talking hats.
- Farscape had an episode on the planet Litigara where roughly 80% of inhabitants were lawyers and the remaining 20% servants who ran the various non law-related services.
- It could be said it was a planet of balacavas since that's what the lawyers (which most of the population dreadfully enough were) always seemed to wear. Also the Judge wore a hat that was a mix between a sombrero and a dinner plate and whose uniform (and hat) was a colour that looked like Dolores Umbridge had picked it out.
- Parodied in the new Doctor Who season four opener: Donna brings a hat box on the Tardis... "Planet of the hats? I'm ready!"
- This is then referenced in a short strip in Doctor Who Magazine, where the good and bareheaded Doctor is set upon by hatted aliens ("His head is naked!") with Donna looking smug and hatted nearby.
- Also subverted in Aliens of London/World War Three where the Slitheen reveal that it is not their species, but their surname. As opposed to representatives of their race, they're actually a family of crime lords and wanted criminals in their culture.
- The Twelve Colonies of the new Battlestar Galactica occasionally fall into this, in function if not in populace. Aerilon was the breadbasket of the colonies, and everyone from it is perceived to be some sort of hick (which is why Baltar adopted a more upper class accent). The Gemenese believe in the literal truth of scripture. Sagittarons are downtrodden, and mad about it. Taurons are stoic and traditional, and have a mafia equivalent. Capricans have it made - their planet is the center of art, culture, science, and politics. There is, however, no physical look specific to the people of any planet. Hopefully, this means that Single Biome Planet is avoided.
- In the Stargate SG-1 episode "2001", the Aschen are described as: "They don't get excited in general, General. It's like an entire planet of accountants."
- In fact, particularly in the earlier episodes, nearly every planet the SG-1 team visits is based off of a particular human culture. There are the Middle Ages, the Norse, the Greeks, the future, and, of course, the ancient Egyptians, among others.
- In Stargate Atlantis, the Wraith are apparently a race, consisting solely of warriors who live to eat. Their society is never shown even once.
- Of course, the Wraith have insect qualities, complete with queens and (literally) faceless drone soldiers, so this isn't totally unreasonable. Meanwhile, however, we also get a Star Trek-ish 1940s Planet, complete with snazzy uniforms.
- Stargate SG-1 also had the Nox, who in addition to having extreme pacifism and irritating arrogance as their 'hat', were also a literal Planet Of Hats: They were nothing more than humans with Bizarre Alien Biology and funny hats.
- Earth has its own hat: Genre Savvy. SG-1 is the most Genre Savvy of them all, but most other minor characters show at least some signs of this trait.
- Red Dwarf had Rimmerworld, a planet populated by Rimmer clones. The population idealized the core aspects of Rimmer... which happens to be being cowardly, backstabbing, snotty, arrogant, and power hungry. Those that deviated were hunted down and executed.
- The Neighborhood of Make-Believe segment of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood deconstructed this trope, in a child-appropriate way, with alien visitors from the Planet Purple. Everyone from this planet has purple skin and hair, they dress in identical purple clothes and speak in a monotone voice, and all the boys are named Paul and all the girls are named Pauline. They were used to illustrate how boring the world would be if everyone was the same.
- Largely averted in Power Rangers, as alien cultures rarely seem to reflect aspects of earth society, the exception being planet Onyx. Its hat is the Wild West, existing largely as a place for the Evil Monster Saloon to be located.
- An unusual example is Inquiris. Little is known about the planet, save that the natives, for whatever reason, cannot make declarative or exclamatory statements. Yes, a planet who's hat is literally a specific type of sentence.
Newspaper Comics
- Brewster Rockit: Space Guy! has had several. Possibly justified in the case of the Zombie Planet.
Radio
- An episode of X! Minus! One! featured a reptilian alien coming to a mining planet for one of their workers (basically a milder version of a Furian). The reptile alien's hat is that they Can Not Tell A Lie (although they don't have to say the whole truth either) while the "Furian's" hat is being Hot Blooded. Lampshaded by the "Furian": "You know how they say we're all good at bar fights?"
Tabletop RPG
- 4th Edition Dungeons And Dragons splits the old traits of the elf race into two new races called "elves" and "eladrin". Because, you know, you can't have a single species wearing the intellectual hat and the close-to-nature hat at the same time.
- Hmmmm. Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future.
- Hard to write down spellbooks in the middle of a forest with presumably no paper or parchment (or at least it being a rarity for nature lovers).
- Elves all being nature lovers and living in the forest is a perfect example of this trope in and of its self.
- They already drew a line between High Elves and Wood Elves (and also Grey Elves, Dark Elves, Wild Elves, and Aquatic Elves). They took a bunch of Cultures of Hats and turned them into Races of Hats for apparently no other reason than to fit the trope better.
- Humanity's hat in 4th edition is being driven, ambitious, The Determinator, and being able to learn things faster than other races because of their shorter lifespans.
- Many worlds in Warhammer 40000 are characterised by this — everyone from Cadia is a soldier, everyone from Krieg (German for "war") is an exceptionally grim and dour soldier in a longcoat, everyone from Catachan is Rambo. To be fair, they come from a planet sitting at the gates to a Negative Space Wedgie from hell, a (self-made) radioactive wasteland, and a Jungle Death World full of carnivorous plants and even worse animals respectively. The hats are likely survival mechanisms.
- Well except you do see people from different worlds being different, but in a table top battle game, they are in uniform. There is actually a special character in the Catachan books that is names "Sly Marbo" an obvious lampshade of Rambo. And the Eldar have an over arching culture, but are divided into Craftworlds, each embracing a certain aspect of Eldar culture as a whole.
- Let's face it, pretty much every Imperial Guardsman is some form of cannon fodder. Except the ones who aren't. And even they suffer some serious attrition. One which note, every Tanith is a Scarily Competent Tracker, even the ones who also have other specialities. They're also all generically celtic (a mixture of Irish, Scots and Welsh influences).
- Eldar
- Everyone from Ulthwe is a Chessmaster.
- Everyone from Saim-Hann is an arrogant and aggressive barbarian on a jetbike.
- Everyone from Alaitoc is a hooded loner with a sniper rifle.
- Everyone from Biel-Tan is a disciplined and merciless, if highly specialized, warrior.
- Everyone from Iyanden is dead.
- Space Marines
- Every White Scar is a futuristic Mongol on a bike.
- Every Blood Angel is an idealistic White Haired Pretty Boy vampire with anger issues.
- Every Ultramarine is The Mario, Roman and follows the Codex Astartes fanatically.
- Every Imperial Fist enjoys their own pain and is an expert siege engineer.
- Every Salamander is a Scary Black Man with a flamethrower, hiding a Gentle Giant underneath.
- Every Raven Guard has a jetpack and lightning claws.
- Every Space Wolf is a certified Badass Viking with a fondess for wolves.
- Every Dark Angel is The Atoner and sworn to secrecy about their chapter, apart from the ones who they're sworn to secrecy about, who they spend an enormous amount of time and resources hunting down...
- Every Grey Knight is Incorruptible Pure Pureness incarnate, psychic, and a religious fanatic whose faith is their chief weapon; and a daemon hunter.
- Every Black Templar is, as the name suggests, a religious crusader.
- Every Iron Hand is a cyborg Determinator.
- Chaos Space Marines
- Every World Eater is an incarnation of Ax Crazy, and/or a Blood Knight.
- Every Emperor's Child is Nightmare Fuel Unleaded with a killer guitar (apart from Fabius Bile, who is a Mad Scientist).
- Every Death Guard is an implacable bag of walking filth.
- Every sentient Thousand Son is a mad wizard in power armor. The others are all ghosts.
- Every Iron Warrior is a master siege engineer.
- Every Night Lord is a psychotic serial killer akin to a Chaotic Evil Batman.
- Every Alpha Legionnaire is a Magnificent Bastard. They are also all Alpharius.
- Every Word Bearer is an insane and unrelenting dark priest.
- Every Black Legionnaire is out for revenge for the death of Horus.
- For Space Marines and Chaos Space Marines, this is largely justified due to the fact that they all share genetic material with the primarch of their chapter - essentially, they have all been deliberately modified to be the same.
- Orks
- Every Bad Moon carries BFG's.
- Every Blood Axe is a Kommando.
- Every Death Skull is a looter.
- Every Evil Sun likes to go fast.
- Every Goff is tougher than the average Ork.
- Every Snakebite is more primitive than any ork.
- Tau (technically not a hat for the whole culture, but every caste has a specific purpose, and you're born into your caste, with crossbreeding between castes illegal. To be fair, the ethereals are breeding the perfect warriors, builders, diplomats etc... and even though they've only had a few thousands years, they may even technically be different species by now.)
- Every Ethereal is a ruler of some sort.
- Every member of the Fire caste is a warrior.
- Every member of the Earth caste is a builder.
- Every member of the Water caste is a bureaucrat.
- Every member of the Air caste is a pilot/navigator.
Video Games
- The various alien races from Star Control come from different varieties of Planet Of Hats. The Spathi are cowardly to the point of paranoia, the Pkunk are hippy-dippy psychics, and there's three species each of Scary Dogmatic Aliens (the Ilwrath and both breeds of Ur-Quan) and Proud Warrior Race Guy (the Thraddash, the Shofixti, and the Yehat).
- Lampshaded in Mass Effect. Kaidan comments that Warrior Poet Wrex isn't exactly what he was expecting from a krogan, to which Wrex dryly replies, "Because humans are all different, but every krogan is exactly alike." Kaidan hastily shuts up.
- Wrex has a response for Garrus when he confronts Wrex with the same observation: 'I suppose it was easier to unleash a genocide virus on the krogan when you thought we were all mindless monsters, Turian.'
- According to aliens, humanity's Hat is that they're a bit of a loose cannon.
- Also, we seem to be evolving towards a monoculture with minimal racial differences due to globalization - we just haven't gotten quite as far as the other races, yet.
- It is, however, a fairly diverse culture as it's stated that some Turians have picked up things like Buddhism or what have you. Nevertheless, most of the 'bad guy' races tend towards this trope - the Batorians, the Geth, etc are generally all X.
- In addition, one codex entire paraphases the current state of humanity's society. National countries and global organizations still exist and have their own independence. The Alliance is a multi-national independent entity spawned out of various national space programs and given the power to rule and be the face of humanity in space. The Alliance is, essentially, the UN in space with actual political power as far as space is concerned.
- One of the main features of Mass Effect was that although each race has a hat (Turians are militaristic and duty bound, Asari are confident and slightly arrogant), the characters from these races in the player's team do not act like this. Garrus wants to do things his way, and doesn't care much for rules and regulations, Liara is an Asari, but is shy and unsure of herself. Although the player does run into plenty of NP Cs who wear their hats proudly.
- The computer game Spaceward Ho! gets a honorable mention. It's a light turn-based strategy affair and doesn't have culture, but planet ownership is indicated by hats. A variety of cowboy hats worn by the actual planets. Santa hats if the game is played on December 25th.
- In Spore, when your race reaches the Space phase, they are assigned a hat based on their actions up until that point, which usually falls into the standard sci-fi racial norms.
- This actually makes a bit of sense: until space-travel, members of a race would have to fill all the economic niches necessary for survival; once there's easy star-travel, specialisation would be possible. See: finding a cheap toy made in the U.S., post-{globalism and Chinese capitalism}.
- Earth has become this in Megaman Star Force, with the hat being The Power Of Friendship. People even get significant discounts and increased political rights as they become popular.
- In Startopia, the alien races are each suited to one specific task — OK, two related tasks for the blue-collar Salthogs. Karmarama are purple four-armed hippes, they plant seeds. Turraken are two-headed nerds, they're all scientists. Sirens are sexy winged humanoids, and the only aliens in the game with obvious gender dimorphism, and they "love" others. And so on. The most specialised are the Grekka Targ, who are solely employed to run your communications gear.
- In Chronomaster, you play a retired designer of Planets of Hats. The mini-universes you end up visiting include a hypermilitant world, a space casino, and a Cloudcuckooland. To top it off, one world that you never even see is implied to be pop Jung-themed, and solving an optional puzzle requires you to warn somebody who's going there of the inevitable Evil Twin threat.
- Lego Star Wars lampshades the Planet of Hats, by using actual hats. There are machines around the various levels that will stamp a Storm Trooper helmet on your head. It does not fit on Chewbacca's head, and rests at a jaunty angle. No matter who is wearing the helmet, and how badly it fits, or what else the characters are wearing, Stormtroopers will not fire on them, and they can access Stormtrooper only areas.
- Unfortunately, Leia will refuse to wear the Stormtrooper helmets, so real troopers will target her, and if Luke/Han/Chewy accidently takes crossfire, they lose their helmets and the gig is up.
- The world of Loom is divided into xenophobic guilds, each with a specific craft, e.g. Weavers, Glassmakers, etc. Each guild's citizens seem to all bear the characteristics of their guild. For instance, the glassmakers value traits such as clarity and beauty, and have names like Luscent Bottleblower. Somewhat justified in that the thing that defines them is what their community was formed on in the first place.
- Touhou takes this trope litterally, because 99% of the characters wear hats. One can also talk about the Planet of Badass Lolitas.
Web Animation
- Parodied in the Flash series Burnt Face Man. In the conclusion of episode 7, Bastard Man (yes, that's his name) steals all the world's air with a vacuum cleaner (yes, he did that) and tries to sell it to a "planet of shifty characters". Everyone on the planet is wearing a large overcoat and hat or they are hidden in the shadows, the main shifty guy telling Bastard Man that they might not pay him for the air because they're all "a bit shifty".
- I'm guessing that's Flash the computer program, not the comic book character?
Web Comics
- Melonpool's planet Melotia is a planet of couch potatoes. There's a Bizarre Alien Biology explanation, with their antennae resonating to Earth television broadcast frequencies.
- In Sluggy Freelance the residents of the Dimension of Lame are all incredibly sweet, nice, rice cake-loving pacifists. The most deranged psychopath among them suffers an incredible bout of guilt after slightly bruising the toe of a murderous demon. Even the rules of the universe conform to this Hat: the sewers smell like flowers, fermentation doesn't exist, and all swear words are automatically replaced with a "bleep" noise.
- Goats's Multiverse has entire Dimensions of Hats, such as Topeka Prime, the farm dimension, complete with cow computers. Each dimension, however, has a pub.
- This strip directly discusses this trope.
- Curvy invokes this; every Earth explicitly has a gimmick, and ours is apparently "Boring World".
- Parodied in this episode of Mountain Time, as the astronauts are all too eager to attach a gimmicky label to a newfound planet.
- Some of the aliens seen in Buck Godot seem to fit this trope, with all individuals seen having similar behaviour or jobs. However, just as many are as varied as humans both in behaviour and appearance.
- Subverted in Quentyn Quinn, Space Ranger! Groonch the Gnorch, a parody of Worf from Star Trek, says that despite being raised with the ideals of another alien race, he strives to be the kind of noble warrior honored by "the Gnorch peoples." Quentyn asks, "Which peoples?" Groonch then learns, to his complete surprise, that the Gnorch species is rather culturally diverse and only a handful of ancient tribes were as warlike as he thought. His own outfit is an odd cultural mishmash.
Web Original
- Limyaael discusses this in her Avoiding gimmick-worlds rant here.
- Associated Space has Sarmatia, the planet of Space Amish nomadic horse warriors, and New Tau Ceti, the planet of religious fanatic sheep-men.
- Played straight in some of the more comedic episodes of AH Dot Com The Series, when (much like Star Trek) this week's timeline is simply a planet-sized Town With A Dark Secret. More usually averted, as after all all the planets featured are variants of Earth and often feature several power blocs facing off.
Western Animation
Real Life
- This is arguably a reflection of Truth In Television (if you can work that out) as most cultures on Earth, as viewed by other cultures are often viewed in only a couple of simple terms as it's too difficult to view every other culture in its entirety.
- Case in point: Arabs as terrorists, Africans as hut-dwelling aboriginals, Australians as Crocodile Dundee, Americans as rednecks and/or rich snobs, French as cowards, et cetera.
- I'd think the french as cowards is an American view; most others view them as arrogant. I blame de Gaulle.
- No, no. Not just American's, the English and I think most of the world think it too. Also, you forgot smelly.
- Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin for Australians. (though as for Irwin himself, well, RIP, he is still missed by many.)
- There's not a great deal of difference between those two.
- Dear God, just look at the sheer size of the Hollywood Atlas page...
- Oddly, a Real Life example in the town of Hay-on-Wye in Wales, a town that is essentially a huge bookshop.
- And Louvain-la-Neuve, in Belgium, is a town totally build around college studies. There are only universities, students, and all kinds of facilities for students. You move in when you enter university, you move away when you graduate.
- The college town phenomenon is also common in the United States.
- Not directly related to, but played with in atheist blogger Prof. P. Z. Myers' "Planet of the Hats" post.
- To an extent this is also present in many small towns the world over, where the town was founded for a particular industry (e.g. coal mining, gold mining, oil, etc) where virtually every one works, in one form or another, for the town's main industry.
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